Composer Richard Rodgers Interview with Arnold Michaelis (March 4, 1961)
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- Опубликовано: 20 ноя 2022
- Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 - December 30, 1979) was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
Rodgers is known for his songwriting partnerships, first with lyricist Lorenz Hart and then with Oscar Hammerstein II. With Hart he wrote musicals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including Pal Joey, A Connecticut Yankee, On Your Toes and Babes in Arms. With Hammerstein he wrote musicals through the 1940s and 1950s, such as Oklahoma!, Flower Drum Song, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. His collaborations with Hammerstein, in particular, are celebrated for bringing the Broadway musical to a new maturity by telling stories that were focused on characters and drama rather than the earlier light-hearted entertainment of the genre.
Rodgers was the first person to win all four of the top American entertainment awards in theater, film, recording, and television - a Tony, an Oscar, a Grammy, and an Emmy - now known collectively as an EGOT.[1] In addition, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of only two people to receive all five awards (Marvin Hamlisch is the other).[2] In 1978, Rodgers was in the inaugural group of Kennedy Center Honorees for lifetime achievement in the arts.[3]
🎹 Wow! Thank you a zillion times for this incredible interview. I've never seen it before.
🙂 Genius composer.
Wonderful insightful interview. Thanks for posting.
He was a genius, but like many a complicated one.
Sondheim vowed not only to never work with Rodgers again but never to work with any drunk again. All nicey-nicey on camera, Rodgers was a *MONSTER* when drunk.
yeah but he wrote better music than you could ever even THINK of writing; do you think that comes without a price?
and i'm sure sondheim/laurents were both big pains in the asses and rodgers must have felt their contempt (being a sensitive artist himself) and responded accordingly.
what is it with this deification of sondheim? he shit and pissed like everybody else. and he also wrote great songs.
Rodgers explains something of his own perspective on his collaberation with Sondheim and Laurents in his autobiography, *Musical Stages.*
First of all, he is not nicey-nicey in this interview. He is pained, honest and completely unadorned. Second, Sondheim was also a drunk and also brilliant.
When you make that harsh judgment -- "monster" all in caps -- please remember that alcoholism is a disease. So is depression. Richard Rodgers (who was my grandfather) suffered severely from both. According to my mother, when her father drank he was quiet and withdrawn, not a monster, so perhaps something else was going on in the room where DO I HEAR A WALTZ happened. Certainly Sondheim brought his own baggage to the party -- for instance, he badly wanted to compose his own scores, and agreed only grudgingly to partner with Rodgers. My grandfather experienced Sondheim and Arthur Laurents as treating him viciously, and I think it's fair to say it was a toxic collaboration, both ways. It's not surprising that Sondheim said harsh things about my grandfather at the time, but sad that even in later years, he never found the generosity of spirit to acknowledge a fuller truth about the relationship. Both men were complicated, both lived with pain. Both were extraordinary. But very few people in history have brought as much pleasure to the world as Richard Rodgers did through his music.