Getting to Know Him

It's a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That "if you become a teacher,
by your pupils you'll be taught."
As a teacher I've been learning
(You'll forgive me if I boast)
And I've now become an expert,
On the subject I like most:
Getting to know you....

From The King and I (1951)
By Richard Rodgers
and Oscar Hammerstein

Dorothy Hammerstein, the wife of Oscar Hammerstein II, once overheard Jerome Kern’s wife Eva being introduced with, “her husband wrote “Ol’ Man River!” A curt correction came from Mrs. Hammerstein: “Excuse me, my husband wrote ‘Ol Man River’—her husband only wrote ‘dum, dum DEE-dah, duh dum-dum DEE-dah,’” intoning the famous melody.  

A lyricist’s craft is mysterious and thankless, often thought to arise from flashes of inspiration, when in actuality great lyrics are crafted over time with a jeweler’s precision. When it comes to the few dozen classic American musicals, it is the composers who are more often remembered, and this is even more true of classic operas. Only scholars know who wrote the words to various Puccini or Verdi operas, and even the famous literary collaborator of Mozart’s, Lorenzo Da Ponte, is still more symbol than human. Music ignites the memory of words.  

Creativity is a solitary task, so immortalized writing teams are few: Gilbert and Sullivan, Comden and Green, Lerner and Loewe, and the mid-20th century’s ultimate duo, the symbols of excellence and innovation, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, known in their 18 years together simply as R&H. They ruled not only the American theater, but also had enormous influence on how post-WWII America defined itself, from their first collaboration of Oklahoma!, which culturally was to the 1940s what Hamilton was to the 2010s, to Carousel, State Fair, South Pacific, Cinderella, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music.  

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) was one of the most important figures in the development of what has become a uniquely American art, the musical, which is a cousin of opera that shares many of its attributes and all of its challenges. Hammerstein’s influence over the form extended through his surrogate child and artistic son, the prodigiously gifted composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), who grew up near the Hammerstein farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and who learned his craft, and how, from Hammerstein.  

Unknowingly, Hammerstein also played a major role in the development of American opera, which has hit several recent zeniths. Indeed, there is hardly an operatic libretto written in the last 60 years that doesn’t bear a Hammerstein-ian imprint, starting with Carlisle Floyd’s earliest operas, which were contemporary with the Rodgers and Hammerstein glory years. Hammerstein was an admirer of Floyd’s 1955 opera, Susannah, which he saw at the New York City Opera, and Floyd’s libretti often emulated Hammerstein’s gentle but direct philosophies.  

Hammerstein’s roughly 40 years of innovations to the musical play, as he called the form, have become so baked into the way we tell American theatrical stories that we no longer view them as innovative. But before him they barely existed. His ideas of constructing a scene so that there was room for music to carry it have never been supplanted by a better idea. For Hammerstein, music needed to feel like a scene’s logical outcome, an outpouring of emotional overflow, solely in support of telling a story.   

Hammerstein had a great gift for sculpting the moments an audience most needs. Adapting Ferenc Molnár’s Hungarian play Liliom into what became the personal favorite work of both Hammerstein and Rodgers, their 1945 Carousel, he knew he had to give the play a redemptive ending, with WWII ending and so many lives cut prematurely short. Molnár’s play ends with Billy Bigelow consigned to hell, Don Giovanni-style. The great hymnlike “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was Hammerstein’s redemptive idea, a moment movingly echoed by Sondheim years later in the finale for his Into the Woods, “No One is Alone.” Whatever retroactive morality we now apply to Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ending still has a soaring emotional punch.  

Hammerstein’s foray into opera was his Americanized adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen into the musical Carmen Jones, famous in its day for blurring the boundaries of both opera and the musical. Hammerstein expressed the theater world’s typical disdain for grand opera, largely because of his family background. His grandfather after whom he was named, Oscar Hammerstein I, was an enormously influential operatic impresario in the United States, but his relationship to opera was, in today’s parlance, complicated. In the preface to the printed edition of Carmen Jones, his grandson Oscar II writes: 

"When I was a small boy, ‘opera’ was a bad word in our home. Opera was a way people lost money, especially Grandpa… He was a publisher, an inventor, a builder of theaters, and a theatrical producer. Whenever he was engaged in any of these pursuits our family was rich. As soon as he would get enough money together, he would put it all into opera and the family would become poor again." 

Hammerstein I’s history is something out of a bad operetta: escaping an oppressive Prussian father as a teenager, buying passage to Liverpool and then New York with the sale of his own violin, making a fortune on cigars (there’s a bit of Carmen in everyone…), building theaters all over New York’s Longacre, which became Times Square, and most famously: forming a rival opera company just a few blocks from the Metropolitan that was so successful, it caused the Met’s board to pay Hammerstein a tidy fortune to leave town and not produce opera again in New York.  

So, theater and the idea of risk was in young Oscar’s genes. His writing talents surfaced early, when he was a law student at Columbia during WWI. Hammerstein II wrote his first professional musical, Always You, in 1920 with composer Otto Harbach, who along with Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg became his most influential early collaborators. Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 hybrid opera/musical Show Boat was easily the most consequential piece of American theater of its time. Within it, to this day, one can see and hear the seeds of every major game-changer that followed: the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, The Cradle Will Rock, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Gypsy, Hello Dolly!, Floyd’s Susannah and (especially) Willie Stark, Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, A Chorus Line, Dead Man Walking, Silent Night, and so many others, right up to Hamilton. If these associations seem far-fetched, look at the structural make-up of scenes in these musical plays or operas—not their content—and you find the Hammerstein effect. He knew what he was doing.  

And what was that, exactly? How did Hammerstein work? Here in opera-land we are usually more focused on music than words, but nearly all great music in our medium began as words. Hammerstein’s famous musical partner, Richard Rodgers, was a uniquely gifted tunesmith, but he needed a situation for which to compose, and needed the inspiration of words.  

Hammerstein famously labored for weeks over the lyrics of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific, and Rodgers then tossed off the tune in five minutes on a cocktail napkin. Lyric-writing isn’t pure poetry, and it also isn’t pure drama—it is an art in-between. Hammerstein himself talked eloquently about this in his preface to a collected edition of his lyrics.  

"The job of the poet is to find the right word in the right place, the word with the exact meaning and the highest quality of beauty or power. The lyric writer must find this word too, but it must be also a word that is clear when sung and not too difficult for the singer to sing on that note which he hits when he sings it." 

Look at this early Hammerstein draft of Maria’s famous title song of The Sound of Music:  

The hills give me strength  
When my heart is lonely  
And lost in the fog  
Of a thousand fears.  
The hills fill my heart  
With the sound of music,  
And my heart wants to sing,  
My heart wants to sing,  
My heart wants to sing,  
Every song it hears.  

Perfectly respectable, perhaps a little wordy, but also kind of foggy in terms of character. “Thousand fears” is fine, but cumbersome to pronounce and sing. The three repetitions near the end might have been musically nice, but he eventually cut them down to one and moved it earlier in the song, lightening its poetic weight. Here is Hammerstein’s final lyric for this passage, the one sent to Rodgers for setting to music:  

I go to the hills  
When my heart is lonely  
I know I will hear  
What I’ve heard before –  
My heart will be blessed  
With the sound of music,  
And I’ll sing once more.  

Of course, we all know the song now, so we hear music when we read it, but the warmth of that great Rodgers tune was born in Hammerstein’s meticulous syllables, cut down to 37 from over 50 in his first draft.  

The Sound of Music was always a triumph of audiences over critics, most of whom loathed or dismissed it, then as now. Music critics have mostly pretended it didn’t exist at all, or if it did, regard it as a relic from a world far from theirs. Several have grudgingly acknowledged the extraordinary skill and beauty of Robert Wise’s famous film starring the singularly-voiced Julie Andrews, and how could they not? Has any movie ever opened more thrillingly than The Sound of Music’s introductory journey through the Austrian Alps?  

Whatever The Sound of Music was or wasn’t to critics, audiences never much cared. It has enjoyed a popularity across the world for decades that can’t and shouldn’t be dismissed. The musical was beloved from the moment people heard it. Indeed, the morning after The Sound of Music opened on Broadway on November 16, 1959, Rodgers heard children in a Manhattan playground singing one of musical’s songs, “Do-Re-Mi,” as though it had been around a long time. That feeling attached itself to much in The Sound of Music, which in Salzburg now vies with Mozart for a tourist’s primary attention. Even the song “Edelweiss,” the last that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together, was once described in print as an Austrian folk song, and the lore held for a long time. But it isn’t a folk song—it is just pure R&H.  

The whole score of The Sound of Music is about as perfect as one can find in an American musical—virtually every song is a gem. Fine, but does it belong in an opera house? To perform it as R&H envisioned it, yes, as evidenced by the hefty number of opera singers who appeared in the first production. Okay, but is The Sound of Music an opera? Sondheim pretty handily answered this tedious question when asked about his own magnum opus, Sweeney Todd: “When it is performed on Broadway, it is a musical—when opera houses do it, it’s an opera. The venue decides what it is." End of story, as far as I’m concerned. 

A little quatrain that appears memorably in stage performances of The Sound of Music is absent from the film. It is sung in the second act by Maria to the maturing eldest daughter Liesl. During the pre-Broadway run of the show, Hammerstein quietly handed these four lines to the original star, Mary Martin, who naturally considered the lines a personal gift—and Rodgers set the text to music within days. The real Maria von Trapp, who was born in Vienna in 1905 and died in Vermont in 1987, always expressed that these words were her favorite of Hammerstein’s 850 song lyrics. The words capture his enduring appeal perhaps because they describe a world that can be universalized. Hammerstein’s art always pined for community, for giving, and was always a plea for us just to be nicer to each other, a message no less important for being simple:   

A bell is no bell till you ring it.  
A song is no song till you sing it.  
And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay.  
Love isn’t love till you give it away.