He Composed Dreams of Urban and Middle America

His music wasn’t jazzy, like George Gershwin’s, or sexually charged, like Cole Porter’s, or steeped in the blues, like Harold Arlen’s.

It didn’t rouse Americans to war, like George M. Cohan’s, or otherwise exult in the red, white and blue, like Irving Berlin’s.

Yet the music of Richard Rodgers, whose centennial will be celebrated around the world on June 28, said more about the yearnings of Middle America--or at least a mythic, pre-Vietnam War America--than tunes by most of his songwriting peers. For Rodgers, who gave the world the darkly urban musical “Pal Joey” (lyrics by Lorenz Hart) and the unabashedly sentimental “Oklahoma!” (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II), understood the rhythms of big-city life as well as the folklore of the wide-open West.

More than any other Broadway tunesmith, he captured both facets of Americana in song, his 1,000-plus tunes making him something of a national icon, albeit a flawed one. For during a career that stretched nearly 60 years, Rodgers reinvented himself more than once, evolving from sophisticated songwriter to mainstream hit maker to peddler of treacle.

For better or worse, Rodgers spent most of his career working with two very different lyricists and recast his art to suit each one. Indeed, the songs he wrote with Hart and, later, with Hammerstein, often sound as if they had been penned by two different men.

Unlike Gershwin or Arlen, whose fascination with black jazz and Yiddish folklore permeated their work, or Jerome Kern, whose grandly arched melodies instantly identified his tunes, Rodgers leaned toward no single style or influence. His musical interests were too far-reaching, too encyclopedic. Thus, “any attempt to reduce his style to a formula is doomed,” critic Winthrop Sergeant once succinctly observed.

Having come of age in New York at the dawn of the 20th century, Rodgers grew up amid a dizzying array of music. Viennese waltzes, Tchaikovsky concertos, Bizet operas, Kern musicals, ragtime piano players, street-corner vocal quartets--the whole glorious cacophony of fast-moving Manhattan played out before him.

But that was just the starting point, for Rodgers was blessed with a mother who was an accomplished pianist and a physician father who loved to sing. They made music integral to Rodgers’ life, learning early on that their precocious son had an uncommonly keen ear: He played piano at age 6, composed melodies at 9 and completed his first musical score at 15.

Not until he teamed with Hart, in 1919, however, did Rodgers begin writing quality songs, for Hart’s bittersweet, world-weary view of life inspired in Rodgers a sophisticated, jazz-tinged music. In tunes such as the Charleston-inspired “The Girlfriend” and the swing-time “Thou Swell,” Rodgers and Hart followed in the wake of Gershwin, who was among the first to link Broadway to the Jazz Age.

With these tunes, and hundreds yet to come, Rodgers announced himself as a sublime melodist on a par with Schubert or Chopin--although Rodgers’ tunes unfolded to a modern American beat.

His music may not have been as easily identified as Berlin’s or as idiosyncratic as Gershwin’s, but it was every bit as inspired. The melodic ingenuity of “Isn’t It Romantic,” the soaring climaxes of “With a Song in My Heart,” the inexorable crescendo of “Where or When,” the hard-swing rhythms of “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and the heady waltz of “Falling in Love With Love” came from the pen of a man whose ideas in the late 1920s and ‘30s seemed inexhaustible.

Not only was each of these tunes ingeniously constructed, but no two sounded remotely alike.

“He is always doing the unexpected,” wrote critic Sergeant, “and the variety of his melodic invention ... is probably greater than that of any other Broadway composer.”

Yet to Rodgers, this uninterrupted flow of melody--often colored by unorthodox harmony--was just another day’s work.

“What I do is not as fancy as some people may think,” Rodgers wrote. “It is simply using the medium to express emotion. If my medium happened to be colors, I would be trying to express what I feel in that medium.

“Mine happens to be notes. It’s a particularly potent medium, maybe because it’s the only purely abstract one.... This isn’t a question of sitting on the top of a hill and waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s work. People have said, ‘You’re a genius.’ I say, ‘No, it’s my job.’”

Yet only a few Broadway composers of Rodgers’ vintage--chiefly Gershwin, Arlen and Kern--showed a genius for melody comparable to his. Armed with talent, youth, money and ambition, Rodgers was poised to assume the mantle of the great Gershwin, who had died in 1937, at age 38.

By 1940, Rodgers and Hart had broken new ground with the musical “Pal Joey,” an openly cynical show about sex and love in the Chicago nightclub business. Songs such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book” attested anew to Rodgers’ gift for crafting intricate melodies that nevertheless sounded as natural and colloquial as speech.

But Hart, by then nearly drowning in alcoholism, had no interest in working on Rodgers’ next project, so the composer teamed with Hammerstein on “Oklahoma!” in 1943. With this show, Rodgers transformed himself into an utterly new composer, simplifying his art for mass appeal, attaining unprecedented popularity and, alas, leaving behind the searing work he had done with Hart.

Although theater scholars rightly argue that “Oklahoma!” advanced the art of the stage musical, in songwriting terms it represented a step backward for Rodgers. There’s no denying the exquisite melodic contours of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” the charmingly galloping rhythm of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” and the surging rush of the title song. But these tunes were more harmonically stripped down, rhythmically square and melodically predictable than anything from Rodgers’ collaborations with Hart. One could savor the tunefulness of this score while acknowledging that Rodgers--nimbly adjusting to Hammerstein’s middlebrow sensibility--was aiming for a simpler, more mainstream brand of musical entertainment.

Not surprisingly, “Oklahoma!” was the biggest hit of Rodgers’ career to date, and with the death of Hart the same year, Rodgers’ more accomplished songwriting was forever consigned to the past.

No doubt Rodgers justly took pride in the operatic flourishes he brought to “Carousel” (1945), particularly in its “Soliloquy,” which conveyed a breadth of emotion more commonly associated with European opera. Yet, ultimately, the songs from this musical--as well as the blockbusters “South Pacific” (1949) and “The King and I” (1951)--showed Rodgers writing melodies that were catchy and clever but also simplistic and superficial.

“While Rodgers continued to write great songs, and even to top himself, generally speaking I find missing that spark and daring flair which existed in the songs he wrote with Hart,” noted the great critic of American popular song Alec Wilder. They had been all but expunged from the music of Rodgers, who now avoided the offbeat chords, puckishly syncopated rhythms and eccentric voicings that once colored his music. Yet the simplicity of the new Rodgers and Hammerstein scores made them the most successful Broadway songwriters of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Surely the young Richard Rodgers who wrote “Where or When” would have been astonished to learn that by 1959 he would be publishing such innocuous pap as “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music.”

There weren’t many more indelible tunes to come, for as Rodgers struggled to woo a public that hungered for something new (and found it in the edgier music of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein), Rodgers increasingly was dwarfed by the stature of his earlier work.

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Howard Reich is arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.