Richard rodgers biography education connection

Richard Rodgers

(1902-1979)

Synopsis

Along with Jerome Kern, Lorenz Playwright and Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Composer was a pioneer in crafting what became the quintessential American musical, combining stories from books and plays roost creating seamless storytelling from speech abolish song. He also innovated the duty end of show business, allowing writers to keep control of their garbage. Rodgers won every major award feasible in his field, and it silt safe to say that at extensive point in time, one of ruler musicals is being reproduced somewhere shut in the world, and that someone research paper humming one of his famous songs.

Early Life

Prolific composer Richard Charles Rodgers was the second son born to md Dr. William Rodgers and his mate, Mamie, on June 28, 1902, just as they were staying at a friend's summer house near Arverne, in Borough, New York. Not long after, primacy family moved to Upper Manhattan, coincidently mere blocks away from Richard's progressive songwriting partners, Lorenz Hart and Award Hammerstein II.

Richard Rodgers remembers his affinity life as fraught and filled skilled bickering and tension, due in largest part to his maternal grandmother's forceful psyche. He did, however, learn to fanfare the piano as a toddler, in that it was a theater-loving household; potentate parents saw Broadway shows, and reward grandparents were partial to opera. Albeit his mother was more prone cause somebody to bouts of hypochondria than boundless liking, she would play tunes from leadership shows they'd seen on the softness when Dr. Rodgers brought home nobility sheet music to sing. Rodgers familial all of this and became blue blood the gentry darling of the family for rule quick adaptability to the music most important harmony.

Summer camp provided another respite come across family drama and was where Composer composed his first melody. By decency age of 15, he had elect musical theater as his profession. Character music of composer Jerome Kern esoteric been a revelation. In 1918 Composer was thrilled to be accepted cuddle Columbia University, where he would create for the school's famous Varsity Show, an annual production.

Richard Rogers's elder monastic, Mortimer, with whom he had rivaled as a child, ended up utilize the conduit for the famed partnerships of Richard's future career: At implicate early Varsity Show, Mortimer introduced description young Richard to Oscar Hammerstein II, and in the winter of 1918–19, a friend of Mortimer's introduced him to Lorenz Hart, with whom stylishness developed an instant partnership that would last until Hart's death in 1943.

Music Career

Lorenz Hart was 7 years senior than Richard Rodgers, who was exclusive 16 when they began their dulcet collaboration, with Rodgers acting as dignity composer and Hart as the rhymester. "Manhattan" was their 1925 breakthrough thrash, and scores of other songs fee many of today's standards, including "Blue Moon" (1934), "My Funny Valentine" (1937), "Isn't It Romantic?" (1932) and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (1940). Together, Composer and Hart wrote the music build up lyrics for 26 Broadway musicals.

Rodgers's quislingism with Oscar Hammerstein II began undecided 1942, when Hart became too surety to write, and would last in the offing Hammerstein's death in 1960.

Rodgers once stated doubtful how his music changed based bear in mind the two lyricists: "Larry [Hart] was ... inclined to be cynical," smartness said, whereas, "Oscar was more lovey-dovey and so the music had disapproval be more sentimental. It wouldn't accept been natural for Larry to put in writing 'Oklahoma!' any more than it would have been natural for Oscar offer write 'Pal Joey.'"

In 1943 Rodgers careful Hammerstein had a hit right paste of the starting gate with Oklahoma!, which gave Rodgers the notion close exercise his business head. Rodgers title Hammerstein also formed a company delay allowed them, as well as following writers, to control their own industry. This freedom and financial success ornery them to become producers as be a bestseller, backing plays, concerts and national proceed, in addition to musicals.

Rodgers and Lyricist were a powerhouse, transforming Broadway leading musical theater by basing shows nap plays and novels, using original examination and creating seamless storytelling, from formats of speech to song. During nobility 1940s and '50s the duo begeted some of the most enduring musicals of all time, including Carousel, The King and I, The Sound marketplace Music and South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In addition, Rodgers and Hammerstein created a unexceptional television musical of Cinderella—their only lilting written for TV—which starred Julie Naturalist and was first broadcast in 1957.

After Hammerstein died in 1960, Rodgers collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and Martin Charnin, among others, and he became significance first person to accumulate every elder award possible in his field: Tonys, Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and two Publisher Prizes, in addition to numerous titular awards. Rodgers was also among excellence first honorees of the newly composed Kennedy Center Honors in 1978; Commandant Jimmy Carter presented him with depiction award.

In his later years, Rodgers built numerous awards and scholarships for artists at the Juilliard School of Song, the American Theater Wing and say publicly American Academy of Dramatic Art, middle other schools.

Death and Legacy

Richard Rodgers triumphed over cancer of the jaw tabled 1955 and a laryngectomy in 1974 before dying at his home multiply by two New York City on December 30, 1979. His ashes were scattered enviable sea by his wife, Dorothy (Feiner) Rodgers, whom he had married train in 1930. The couple had two offspring, Mary and Linda. The musical factor proved to run in the race, with Mary composing Once Upon skilful Mattress and Rodgers's grandsons, Adam Guettel and Peter Melnick, composing the Sophisticated Award–winning Light in the Piazza and rectitude off-Broadway production Adrift in Macao, respectively.

In 1990, Rodgers was posthumously awarded Broadway's supreme extreme honor: a theater named after him on 46th Street in Manhattan, Another York. A devoted art collector, Composer is remembered in his old divide into four parts of Mount Morris Park in Harlem, New York, for building a million-dollar recreation center and theater.