Moschler, David - Compositional Style and Process in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel

Compositional Style and Process in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel By David Crews Möschler B.Mus. and B.A. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) 2005 THESIS Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in MUSIC in the OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS Approved: _____________________________________ D. Kern Holoman, chair _____________________________________ Beth Levy _____________________________________ Jon Rossini Committee in Charge 2010 i

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis was possible only with the generosity, advice, and assistance of many people I now need to thank both collectively and individually. My thanks go, first of all, to Beth Levy, whose never-ending patience with my writing, intelligent revisions and editing, and shared enthusiasm for American musical theater was indispensable. To the faculty and staff of the UC Davis Department of Music for their support during my time here. To Jon Rossini for his comments and insight into the field of performance studies. To Mark Eden Horowitz and the staff of the Music Division at the Library of Congress for locating and processing many of the materials from their collections. To Bruce Pomahac and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization for their generosity and encouragement. Bruce Pomahac never hesitated to respond to the most minute and mundane queries with a string of historical anecdotes that not only made the research possible, but always exhilarating. To Tim Carter for his thoughtful suggestions on pursuing a thesis on Rodgers and Hammerstein and Kim Kowalke for his thoughtprovoking conversations. To Kara Gardner and Peter Purin for sharing their writing and research on Trude Rittman and Don Walker, respectively. To Ben Krauss for his friendship and many late-night discussions over the years, when many of these ideas first took form. To director Tony Howarth for his passion, vision, and insight into our production of Carousel (College Light Opera Company, 2007), and to Robert and Ursula Haslun for scheduling our production conveniently during the summer of my visit to Library of Congress. Thanks of course to the cast, orchestra, and designers for my first

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production of Carousel, who helped bring this show to life and provided much inspiration. To David Weiller, with whom I worked as assistant conductor and played banjo for my first Rodgers and Hammerstein production, who instilled a deep-seated passion and respect for their work. To director and choreographer Mindy Cooper, for her insight into our production of Oklahoma! at the University of California, Davis, which served as the performance portion of my MA degree and revealed to me the timeless power of Rodgers and Hammerstein. To Brian McCune for his unwavering friendship and assistance in preparing the musical examples. To Emma Goldin, who provided inspiration and encouragement when it seemed like I could never get started. To my parents and siblings, who have always supported my pursuit of music. Most especially I would like to thank D. Kern Holoman, for his advising in all things musical and otherwise. This document is dedicated to him.

Music and lyrics reprinted by arrangement with The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

© 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

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CONTENTS

I

II

III

Acknowledgments

ii

Table of Contents

iv

Abstract

v

Songwriting in Carousel

1

1.1 The Engine of Broadway

3

1.2 The Sound World of Carousel

5

Early Drafts of Carousel

11

2.1 Prologue (“The Carousel Waltz”)

12

2.2 Julie and Carrie Sequence: “Mister Snow”

19

2.3 Scene Billy and Julie: “If I Loved You”

23

2.4 “Soliloquy”

31

The Legacy of Carousel

38

3.1 Carouselʼs Afterlife

38

3.2 Operetta or Broadway Musical

41

Appendix: An Interview with Bruce Pomahac

45

Bibliography

90

iv

ABSTRACT This thesis examines the score of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical, Carousel. Following on the heels of the authors’ first collaboration, Oklahoma!, Carousel continued the “Hammerstein model” of the serious musical play, while Rodgers greatly expanded the music to more operatic dimensions. Demanding vocal writing, extended musical sequences, and symphonic orchestration all contribute to its unique aesthetic. A comparison between Rodgers’s early drafts and the published versions illustrates the evolution of four musical numbers: “The Carousel Waltz,” “Mister Snow,” “If I Loved You,” and “Soliloquy.” Harmonic and structural analysis of the score proves that it is more than just a collection of songs that advance the plot forward. Carousel's music stands out from other Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, leaving an enduring legacy and transcending the conventions of genre.

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1 I SONGWRITING IN CAROUSEL On 19 April 1945 the musical Carousel opened on Broadway, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II found critical and commercial success in their second musical collaboration. Written on the heels of their first show, the groundbreaking Oklahoma!, Carousel served for a decade or more as the model Broadway musical: an integrated storyline with musical numbers, an extended and psychologically probing ballet by Agnes de Mille, and a gorgeous score that yielded several standards over the years. It was both traditional and innovative at the same time. A closer look at the compositional structure in the musical numbers of Carousel reveals many departures from the conventional 1940s musical. Not only was Carouselʼs score musically distinct from the works of their own contemporaries, it also remains markedly different from their own shows. By 1937 composer George Gershwin had died unexpectedly from a brain tumor, and in 1942 lyricist Lorenz Hart succumbed to his alcoholism, abruptly ending two of Broadwayʼs most formidable songwriting teams, George and Ira Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. But by the end of the 1940s several important voices burst forth on the scene. Table 1 is a brief survey of several Broadway musicals (and a few operas running in Broadway theaters) from the 1940s.

2 Table 1. A Selective List of Broadway Shows, 1940–491 Year

Show

1940 Higher and Higher Louisiana Purchase Hold on to Your Hats Cabin in the Sky Panama Hattie Pal Joey 1941 Lady in the Dark Best Foot Forward Letʼs Face It 1942 Porgy and Bess (revival) By Jupiter This Is the Army 1943 Something for the Boys Oklahoma! One Touch of Venus A Connecticut Yankee (rev.) Carmen Jones 1944 Mexican Hayride Follow the Girls Song of Norway Bloomer Girl The Seven Lively Arts On the Town 1945 Up in Central Park Carousel The Red Mill (revival) The Day Before Spring Billion Dollar Baby 1946 Show Boat (revival) St. Louis Woman Call Me Mister Annie Get Your Gun Around the World Beggarʼs Holiday 1947 Street Scene Finianʼs Rainbow Brigadoon The Telephone The Medium

Composer / Lyricist Richards Rodgers / Lorenz Hart Irving Berlin Burton Lane / E.Y. Harburg Vernon Duke / John LaTouche Cole Porter Richard Rodgers / Lorenz Hart Kurt Weill / Ira Gershwin Hugh Martin / Ralph Blane Cole Porter George Gershwin / Ira Gershwin Richard Rodgers / Lorenz Hart Irving Berlin Cole Porter Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II Kurt Weill / Ogden Nash Richard Rodgers / Lorenz Hart Georges Bizet / Oscar Hammerstein II Cole Porter Phil Charig / Dan Shapiro & Milton Pascal Edvard Grieg / Robert Wright & George Forrest Harold Arlen / E.Y. Harburg Porter (incl. Stravinskyʼs Scènes de Ballet) Bernstein / Betty Comden & Adolph Green Sigmund Romberg / Herbert & Dorothy Fields Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II Victor Herbert / Henry Blossom Frederick Loewe / Alan Jay Lerner Morton Gould / Betty Comden & Adolph Green Jerome Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer Harold Rome Irving Berlin Cole Porter Duke Ellington / John LaTouche Kurt Weill / Langston Hughes Burton Lane / E.Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy Frederick Loewe / Alan Jay Lerner Gian Carlo Menotti Gian Carlo Menotti

1. Adapted from Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 49–50.

3 High Button Shoes Allegro 1948 Look, Ma, Iʼm Dancinʼ Magdalena Love Life Whereʼs Charley? The Rape of Lucretia Kiss Me, Kate 1949 South Pacific Miss Liberty Lost in the Stars Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Jule Styne / Sammy Cahn Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II Hugh Martin H. Villa-Lobos / Robert Wright & George Forrest Kurt Weill / Alan Jay Lerner Frank Loesser Benjamin Britten / Ronald Duncan Cole Porter Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II Irving Berlin Kurt Weill / Maxwell Anderson Jule Styne / Leo Robin

Table 1 shows how innovating the 1940s were for Broadway. By the end of the decade Kurt Weill had firmly established himself as a new and exciting composer in America, collaborating with several influential playwrights, authors, lyricists, and poets. The great Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, both thought to be past their hey-days, went on to compose their most enduring scores, Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me, Kate, respectively. The most successful songwriting team, however, was Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indisputably

1.1 Songwriters and the Engine of Broadway The important difference between musical comedy and the musical play is that, in the former, characters arenʼt really “singing.” The musical itself is singing. In the musical play, the characters are singing. They have to―or the audience wonʼt know how they feel. —McMillin, The Musical as Drama

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II both were seasoned professionals in their own rights and had achieved multiple successes collaborating with other lyricists and composers. When they teamed up for Oklahoma! they pooled their creative talents and

4 their business sense. In an interview with the author, Bruce Pomahac―the Director of Music for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization―describes their partnership: What their contemporaries always said about them is that they went into a room, they made whatever decisions they had to make, and they came out perfectly unified. And this bond gave them great strength. No one ever saw these men disagree. They must have had things to disagree about. As collaborators they must have taken opposite sides over songs and scenes and the things that you need to get into, to take apart and put back together in order to write a musical, but no one ever witnessed them as anything but totally in sync with each other. Their decision from the get-go was to enter into a 50/50 partnership, one in which they would split the publishing, the billing, the royalties, everything, right down the middle. Then they created their own publishing company, Williamson (both of their fathers were named William), and from the beginning they were business equals.2 With Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hammerstein had created a show that many heralded (and even more emulated) as the standard for a new kind of Broadway musical: a show in which the songs were integrated with the scenes. The songs were knit tightly into the plot (for the most part) and developed out of charactersʼ need to express themselves. People referred to this as a “book musical” or “musical play” (Hammerstein preferred the latter term), rather than a “musical comedy.” But Rodgers and Hammerstein werenʼt the only writers who wanted to fuse the story and the songs into a single element.3 What made Oklahoma! and its authors special was that it achieved such record-breaking success. With an unprecedented Broadway run of 2,212 consecutive performances over five years, it established a record for longevity not surpassed until Lerner and Loeweʼs My Fair Lady in 1956. Oklahoma!ʼs success made it impossible for others to ignore its innovation, and suddenly everyone—even Irving Berlin—was moving in the direction of the book musical.

2. Bruce Pomahac, interview with the author, 26 July 2009, 51. 3. Show Boat and Music in the Air had already had achieved this prior to Oklahoma! (Pomahac, interview, 46).

5 Hammersteinʼs pivotal role in the development and success of the musical play was no accident. His early work on Show Boat and Very Warm for May displays a long-term determination to engineer musicals that were real stories, with songs driving the plot forward. Although Hammersteinʼs vision for a new musical theater is clear, it is important to note that he and Rodgers still considered themselves songwriters at heart. Even though the musical had a new trajectory after Oklahoma!, songwriters were still the “engine” behind—Broadway. Oklahoma!ʼs score was certainly integrated with the action, but it was still primarly a collection of songs. In this way the compositional aspect of Oklahoma! was not that different from lightheartedness of musical comedy songwriting of the previous three decades. For Carousel Rodgers and Hammerstein used the basic model of the musical play, but greatly expanded the score and its relationship with the libretto, reaching an unprecedented level of expression for a Broadway musical.

1.2

The Sound World of Carousel

The serious tone that is special to the music of Carousel, then, dominates the musical-dramatic techniques of melodrama and quasi-recitative, and pervades the “comic” subplot characters and the chorus. —Swain, The Broadway Musical

That Oklahoma!ʼs success cast a large shadow over Carousel is certain. But in fact the two shows have much in common. They shared, for one thing, the production team of director Rouben Mamoulian, choreographer Agnes de Mille, and producers Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn of The Theatre Guild. Liliom, the source-play for Carousel, also has several similarities with Green Grow the Lilacs, the source material for Oklahoma!. Both plays revolve around a love story in rural communities at the turn of

6 the nineteenth century. What makes Carousel so different is the musical score and the way it interacts with the libretto. The best way to describe Carouselʼs score is as collection of musical scenes. At the heart of each scene is a conventional song—harmonically tonal with a simple form and phrasing. Yet the musical material that leads in and out of the songs creates a richly detailed and complex number, blending into the surrounding scenes. Using melodrama, underscoring, and dramatically evocative orchestration, the composer and his collaborators created a unique sound world for Carousel—a world in which much of the action and characterization is revealed and advanced during the music. What fueled and inspired this new type of songwriting? The subject matter was a far cry from the feel-good tales most Americans preferred. Adapted from the play Liliom, written by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár in 1921, the story revolves around a misfit carousel barker (Billy Bigelow in Hammersteinʼs adaptation) and his ill-fated love affair with Julie Jordan. Julie is unable to escape the abusive relationship until halfway through the second act, when the protagonist escapes a failed burglary by killing himself, leaving his wife alone to raise their unborn child. While the tragic content of Liliom is not especially new to the world of opera, it was considerably daring for a Broadway musical in 1945. Several other composers— including Giacomo Puccini and Kurt Weill—had requested the rights to musicalize Molnárʼs masterpiece, and all were turned down. It wasnʼt until Molnár saw a production of Oklahoma! (presumably in October 1943) that he had a change of heart and acquiesced to a request from The Theatre Guild to let Rodgers and Hammerstein adapt his work.4

4. Tim Carter, Oklahoma! (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 7.

7 The tragic dimension of Liliom demanded a score that would stand apart from most Broadway musicals. Joseph Swain posits that this tragic story required an “equivalent complexity of musical expression, and Rodgers and Hammerstein respond to that demand with a number of musical resources. There is much more use of melodrama … [and] a large amount of sung music which has the freedom of organization, the absence of repetition, and the melodic and rhythmic flexibility of recitative, although the sense of meter never quite disappears. These techniques make transitions from spoken dialogue to song much more gradual and smooth. The musical play therefore seems more serious because one is much less aware of the seams of operatic convention.”5 While Oklahoma! has its share of dark moments, the score functions in an entirely different manner than Carousel’s. In Oklahoma!, dramatic action takes place between characters, and in Carousel the musical numbers illuminate the action taking place within them, the inner conflict being the all-important distinction. This kind of drama allowed for a new and more sophisticated type of musical setting than in Oklahoma! (the notable exception to this point being Laureyʼs progressive “Dream Ballet”).6 Carousel capitalizes on this kind of inner turmoil in nearly every scene, particularly with the protagonists Julie and Billy. Musical theater has always been a collaborative art, and many gifted collaborators worked alongside Rodgers and Hammerstein to help create this unique musical style of Carousel. After the success of Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein thought it would be wise to use many of the same production team members for their next project. Director

5. Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 115. 6. Ibid.

8 Rouben Mamoulian and choreographer Agnes de Mille were both hired again. Robert Russell Bennett was originally asked to do the orchestrations, but was busy with several other projects and had to back out after working on only the first two numbers, so Don Walker stepped in as principal orchestrator. Steven Suskinʼs compendium on Broadway orchestrators and their craft lists at least three separate orchestrators who worked under Don Walker on Carousel: Stephen Jones, Joe Glover, and Hans Spialek, in addition to Robert Russell Bennett.7 Trude Rittman was hired for dance arrangements, having worked closely as de Milleʼs assistant the past two years on One Touch Of Venus and Bloomer Girl.8 Musical director Joseph Littau was the only major member of the team who had not collaborated on a previous Rodgers and Hammerstein production, although he had been musical director for Carmen Jones, Hammersteinʼs English-language adaptation of Bizetʼs opera. Most of this teamʼs contributions to Carousel went uncredited for decades. In May 2000 the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization completed a restoration of Carousel, faithfully reproducing a libretto, score, and orchestral parts that reflect the show as it was on opening night in 1945 and bringing to light the individual contributions of the creative team.9 Some members of the music staff contributed their work after the show had already opened. Albert Sirmay, an editor at Chapell, helped create the piano-vocal scores for

7. Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 358–59. For a detailed outline of how each of them contributed to the creative process, see also Bruce Pomahac, “Restoration Notes” in Carousel full score (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 2008). 8. On Trude Rittman and Agnes de Milleʼs contributions to Carousel, see Kara Gardnerʼs forthcoming book currently titled Agnes de Mille on Broadway. 9. The appendix of the resultant Carousel orchestral score provides a detailed overview of many other source materials, including several versions of the orchestra pit parts.

9 every Rodgers and Hammerstein show (and many others of the 1940s and 1950s). Sirmayʼs published piano-vocal scores were arguably as critical as the cast album recordings in preserving the legacy of Carousel.10 Without a doubt, the entire staff contributed ideas all along the way, but the orchestration of Carousel plays a central role in establishing the aural spectrum of the world in which these characters lived. Rodgers, weary of the sound emerging from orchestra pits in the early 1940s, was interested in the issue of scoring early on, particularly with the overture. Rather than use a medley of tunes from the show, he decided to skip the overture and make the audience pay attention by opening with a pantomime scene accompanied by a stand-alone instrumental piece, “The Carousel Waltz.” This helped to establish the mood and sound he wanted.11 Rodgers was careful to insist on proper balance between sections of the orchestra. He got what he wanted, and the Carousel orchestra had an original string count of five stands of first violins, two stands of seconds violins, two stands of violas, two stands of cellos, and two double basses.12 While this was an unusually large string section for a Broadway theater, they were balanced out by proportionally large wind and brass sections. Scoring for saxophones in the 1940s was becoming more common in Broadway pit orchestras, and was a very quick way for the audience to know if it was listening to a musical comedy. Carousel did not use saxophones, employing instead a woodwind section of two flutes (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, and

10. For a detailed explanation of Sirmayʼs role in the editing of Rodgers and Hammerstein piano-vocal scores, see Pomahac, interview, 68. 11. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages (New York: Random House, 1975), 239. 12. Jon Conrad, Correspondence with Ted Chapin (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 2008), 622.

10 bassoon―a common setup for operetta and book musicals in the 1940s. The group was rounded out by percussion (one player), harp, and a compliment of nine brass players— three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and tuba.13 With a total of forty players, the Carousel orchestra came close to the timbrel capabilities of a symphony orchestra. The first few rows of seats of the St. James Theatre had to be removed in order to accommodate them. This many musicians in a Broadway show is almost unheard of today, yet Rodgers’s success gave him the clout to give the audiences the aural experience he wanted them to have, because in those days the “composer was king.”14 Don Walker, who until that point was known mostly as a jazz arranger, might have seemed a strange fit for so serious a musical play. But Walker was inspired by the story and by Rodgersʼs score, and thought it should have its own operatic “character and sound.”15 Robert Russell Bennett also praised Walkerʼs work on Carousel in his own memoir (p. 196), and Walker himself thought of it as the pinnacle of his long career as a Broadway orchestrator, and said as much in a 1955 letter to Rodgers.16 Yet as Walker says, his symphonic orchestration was inspired by Rodgersʼs music, and he was simply highlighting a rich score that already stood apart from other musicals of its time.

13. Every Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical after Carousel employs at least eight brass players, which is considerably larger than most brass sections of pit orchestras today. 14. Pomahac, interview, 48. 15. Conrad, Correspondence with Ted Chapin, 628–29. 16. Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music, 360.

11 II EARLY DRAFTS OF CAROUSEL Given the economic pressures and deadlines of pre-Broadway tryouts, it would be easy to assume that many of the musical numbers in Carousel were the result of hasty decisions made on the fly during a turbulent rehearsal period. Yet a close examination of Rodgersʼs manuscripts reveals a finely honed musical structure from the earliest known drafts, well before rehearsals started. The Richard Rodgers Collection, housed at the Library of Congress, contains holograph sketches, manuscripts, and rehearsal copies of each number. Full conductor scores were also available from the individual collections of Don Walker and Robert Russell Bennett. While many of Rodgersʼs earliest drafts and sketches had no date, the piano-vocal rehearsal copies (fashioned by anonymous employees) were dated with stamps around March and April 1945. Rodgers’s autobiography confirms that most of the early drafts of numbers were composed between November 1944 and February 1945.17 These next four sections examine the evolution of Carousel’s musical numbers at various stages of completion. A comparison of Rodgersʼs sketches, piano-vocal rehearsal copies, orchestral scores, Sirmayʼs published piano-vocal score, the newly restored score, and several recordings reveals several interesting details that document the compositional process. This section compares Rodgersʼs early drafts with the published versions of four numbers: “The Carousel Waltz,” Julie and Carrieʼs opening duet “Mister Snow,” Billy and Julieʼs duet “If I Loved You,” and Billyʼs “Soliloquy.” These four numbers portray

17. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 238.

12 Carousel at its most sophisticated, highlighting Rodgersʼs aesthetic approach and illuminating what made Carousel unique.

2.1. Prologue (“The Carousel Waltz”) One of Carouselʼs major numbers—the most major in terms of how much plot it covers—isnʼt sung at all. —Swain, The Broadway Musical

In 1944 Paul Whiteman convinced administrators of the NBC Symphony Orchestra to commission instrumental works from various composers in America. A concert was to be produced in Central Park that spring; composers would receive an advance on their commissions in exchange for performance rights by the NBC Symphony Orchestra for one year. Along with such notable composers as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók, Richard Rodgers was commissioned to write an instrumental piece. It seems that he accepted the commission but soon realized that the music was better suited for Carousel so he declined the Whiteman project, since the performance rights would have to be given up during any Broadway run.18 Although there are no drafts of the Whiteman commission, the composer left behind an early sketch, a draft, and an early piano-vocal copy of “The Carousel Waltz.” Don Walkerʼs full orchestral score still exists, but the only evidence of Robert Russell Bennettʼs original arrangement survives on the original cast recording, which cut twothirds of the original piece so that it could fit on two sides of a 78-rpm record.

18. Some themes from “The Carousel Waltz” show up as early as 1934 in Rodgersʼs film musicals. It was not uncommon for Rodgers to recycle his own material, especially from film to stage. See Pomahac, “Restoration Notes,” 592.

13 Rodgers proved that the “overture can be a number unto itself rather than a collection of the later tunes.”19 The first fifty measures can be thought of as a prelude, until the libretto instructs the on-stage pantomime to begin at mm. 51, when the main theme is played by the orchestra. The waltz accompanies the entire community bustling around on stage (which the libretto clearly distinguishes as pantomime and not choreography) as they enjoy the carnival atmosphere: jugglers, bear trainers, and a carnival barker.20 Eventually the pantomime shifts focus to Billy and Julieʼs brief interaction. Table 2 shows the complete structure of “The Carousel Waltz.” Table 2. Form and Harmonic Structure in “The Carousel Waltz”21 Measure

Section / Theme

Key

INTRODUCTION m. 1 m. 27

intro (slower version of main theme) transition to main theme (same as m.83)

D (major) G (over dominant pedal)

EXPOSITION (pantomime begins on stage) m. 51 m. 67 m. 83 m. 99 m. 113

main theme A main theme B main theme C main theme A transition to second theme

D major F major G (over dominant pedal) D major D major

SECOND THEME m. 121 m. 137 m. 153

second theme – A (with spirit) second theme – B second theme – A

G major G minor / major G major

19. Scott McMillin, The Musical As Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 128. 20. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel libretto, (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1975), 5. 21. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel piano-conductor score, ed. Richard E. Haggerty (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1978), 5–18.

14 m. 171

transition to variation 2

G minor

DEVELOPMENT m. 179 m. 195 m. 211 m. 227

variation 1 – A (Broadly) variation 1 – B variation 1 – A transition to variation 2

F major B-flat minor F major F major

m. 235 m. 251 m. 271 m. 291 m. 323

variation 2 – A (leggiero) variation 2 – (extended version) variation 2 – B variation 2 – A deceptive coda - transition to main theme

G major G major B minor G major A over D pedal

RECAPITULATION m. 353 m. 361 m. 377 m. 393 m. 409

main theme – A main theme – B second theme – A (with ritard) second theme – B second theme – A (transition to Coda)

D major F major D over dominant pedal A G minor D major

CODA m. 423 m. 447

true coda with variation 3 as fanfare stretto ending

D (lydian) D (lydian)

Although the listener might first think of theme-and-variations form, Table 2 makes the case for a traditional sonata-form structure, which is not used often in Rodgersʼs music. Rodgers gives it a Broadway flavor by having all of the melodic themes built on clear sixteen- and thirty-two-bar phrases. The juxtaposition and harmonic vocabulary give the piece a style that is entirely unique to Rodgers and certainly sets the mood for the rest of the show, which “sounds a lot like Budapest or Vienna and a little like a hurdy-gurdy at the same time.”22 Yet a comparison of Rodgersʼs early sketch, full draft, and the final published scores

22. McMillin, The Musical As Drama, 129.

15 reveals no changes in harmonic structure or form. It is not surprising that no transposition was needed, since it is purely instrumental music, whereas almost every vocal number in the show went through several iterations of different keys depending on singers. What is notable is that the musical form and phrasing did not mutate over time. Most instrumental music (underscoring, scene-change music, dance music, and even overtures) suffers cuts and alterations—some major, some insignificant. It would be highly unusual for a sevenminute piece set to stage-pantomime not to have one measure cut from early drafts all the way through to the Broadway closing. The fact that Rodgers penciled in “Intro Liliom” above his first sketch (indicating a date before the title Carousel was chosen) confirms that the waltz came very early in the creative process, making it plausible that the majority of it had indeed been intended for the Whiteman commission, and that he refused to have any of it end up cut or altered. One of the most interesting inconsistencies lies in the opening eighteen measures. All of Rodgersʼs early manuscripts have a single melodic line harmonized by tonic and dominant chords alternating every two measures underneath. Yet in Sirmayʼs published piano-vocal score the opening melody is coupled with the same melodic figure transposed a minor sixth below. This coupling is then coupled again eight measures later when the phrase repeats, this time transposed down a major thirteenth. For 1945 this was a bold stroke indeed. The first coupling is played by the flute in D major and piccolo in F-sharp major. Together they use a set of five pitches at a time—D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, and A-sharp in mm. 3–10. The bassoons and horn join in mm. 11–17, using the same set of pitches. This pitch-class set represents a whole-tone scale—creating augmented harmonies, which is a very distinct and eerie sound after two D major chords. This eerie harmony instantly evokes tension and drama, setting the stage for the opening pantomime

16 scene and for the show in general. The audience knows right away that this will not be the traditional lighthearted musical comedy. The original melody is beautiful in its simplicity, yet the augmented harmonies provide a lack of resolution, perfectly foreshadowing Billy and Julieʼs own tragic narrative.

Example 1. Rodgers, “Carousel Waltz,” from Carousel piano-conductor score, mm. 1–18.23

This not-insignificant addition made it into the original cast album and the 1945 published piano-vocal score, which we can assume to have been closely supervised and approved by the composer. But when did the change take place, and who suggested it?

23. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

17 The history is complicated further by the fact that Littauʼs conductor score had the original melody printed with the couplings penciled in, but a perfect fifth above the original melody!24 This implies two possible scenarios for how the augmented harmonization arose. It could have simply been suggested in rehearsal by a member of the music staff. But given the detail of Rodgers’s early sketches, as we see from the musical examples below, it seems uncharacteristic for so significant a change to have been added so late in rehearsals. The more likely scenario is that the couplings were consciously added late in rehearsals to mimic the sound of an out-of-tune merry-go-around. The markings in Littauʼs conductor score confirm that they had experimented with different harmonization, and although the augmented couplings can be heard in Bennett's orchestration on the original cast recording, we don’t know how or when they made into Sirmay’s piano-vocal score or the pit parts. Pomahac makes the important point that “original pit [orchestra] parts … actually reflect the closing night of the show, and not the opening night.”25 While the current documents make it impossible to pinpoint the moment of genesis of the melodic couplings, it seems certain that Rodgers himself regarded them as a signature discovery. Rodgersʼs earliest sketches also reveal two different versions of the main theme. The first variation of the main theme occurs at mm. 67–82, when the tonal center briefly shifts to F major. In Rodgersʼs first complete draft there are clear dotted-eighth-and-sixteenths at the beginning of mm. 69, 71, and 72. When this figure is recapitulated in mm. 363, 365, and 366, the music is identical to the first iteration, yet the early draft uses two

24. Pomahac. “Restoration Notes,” 592. 25. Pomahac, interview, 70.

18 eighth notes instead of a dotted-eighth-andsixteenth. Was this deliberate on Rodgersʼs part, or a hasty oversight then replicated by copyists and arrangers? Example 2. Rodgers, “The Carousel Waltz” of Carousel, mm. 67–81, melody.26 a. Early draft, mm. 67–81.

b. Published version, mm. 67–81.

In the earliest sketch, Rodgers uses the rhythmic figure in ex. 3b in mm. 67–81, but does not write out the recapitulation, leaving in its place instructions for repeating the same material from m. 51. Then in his first complete draft, he writes out the recapitulation completely, where the rhythms in the recapitulation are clearly different from the first iteration. The inconsistency is further complicated in a rehearsal copy that has the rhythms as two eighth notes played in the exposition and recapitulation, which

26. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

19 ultimately ended up in Walkerʼs full score and Sirmayʼs published piano-vocal score. But a close examination of the rehearsal copy will reveal a faint “dot” on the eighth notes in mm. 69–72, with what appears to be an even fainter second beam on the following eighth note, making it the dotted-eighth-and-sixteenth rhythm from the first complete draft. There is no such dot or beam in the recapitulation of this figure, leading us to believe that Sirmay and Walker got it wrong, and Rodgers intended the different rhythms. But the question of motivation remains. Was he being deliberate? One possible solution is to assume that Rodgers wanted the tempo faster for the recapitulation. An increase in tempo would make the dotted-eighth-and-sixteenth rhythm barely distinguishable from two eighth notes, and therefore unnecessary.27 This would certainly be appropriate from a musical perspective, and fitting for the dramatic action onstage, which at that point is reaching a climax with Billy and Julieʼs first encounter. Even if Rodgers does not indicate this tempo change explicitly in the score, it would imply that his discrepancy in rhythm is not so much an error as it is a clue to the overall arc of the piece.

2.2. Julie and Carrie Sequence: “Mister Snow”

One might expect, for so operatic an opening as the fantastic music with pantomime, that a true song would follow in short order. Yet what follows is a lengthy and nonmusical dialogue that re-introduces Julie, Carrie, and Billy, as well as Mrs. Mullin, Mr. Bascombe, and two policemen. Once the male characters have left, Carrie poses a series

27. Pomahac, interview, 76.

20 of questions to Julie that flows right into song. At first their dialogue is spoken in rhythm over orchestral accompaniment, but when Julie declines to answer any specifics, Carrie starts singing with a verse of “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan.” After more underscored dialogue, we hear Carrie sing about her own relationship in “His Name Is Mister Snow.” Yet this is merely an introduction to another song,“When I Marry Mister Snow.” Table 3 clarifies this structure. Table 3. Form and Harmonic Structure in “Julie and Carrie Sequence”28 Measure

Section / Theme

Key:

Draft

Pub. scores

Part 1: “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan” m. 1

intro (Carrie speaking with music”)

A

G

m. 11

“Youʼre A Queer One” 1st verse

D

G

m. 26

“weaving” theme

D

G

m. 50

“Youʼre A Queer One” 2nd verse

D

G

m. 58

underscoring (Youʼre a Queer One)

(did not exist yet)

G

Part 2: “His Name Is Mister Snow” m. 66

“His name is Mister Snow” (1st verse)

D

G

m. 75

“An almost perfect beau”

D

G

m. 88

“The fust time he kissed me” (bridge)

D

G

m. 93

“Last night he spoke quite low”

D

G

m. 105

“Next moment we were promised!”

D

G

m. 113

“When I Marry Mister Snow” (refrain)

D

G

m. 125

“Then itʼs off work to weʼll go” 2nd verse

D

G

28. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel piano-conductor score, 21–32.

21 m. 137

“Heʼll carry me ʼcross the threshold

D

G

m. 145

“Then Iʼll kiss him so heʼll know”

D

G

Here two main songs are woven into one large musical sequence. By the end of the number the audience does not feel that itʼs been sitting through two songs, each with multiple verses, refrains, and bridges: the effect is one of effortlessness. One of the reasons the three sections of the song flow together so smoothly is the ease with which Rodgers navigates us in harmony and rhythm. The entire sequence does not stray far from its tonal center, and there is virtually no change in tempo or metrical modulation (except for the “mill weaving” section in m. 26). This lack of metric or harmonic variation, while pleasing to some, serves to establish a lack of dramatic tension with the character of Carrie and the fiancé she is dreamily describing. According to McMillin, singing “forty-some measures about ʻHis name is Mr. Snowʼ has been the verse to a chorus that this loquacious Carrie has been leading up to, Carrie and the orchestra. When it finally arrives, the ‘Mr. Snowʼ song has great piquancy. The way is prepared for something solemn and grand, which is how Carrie thinks her marriage will be, and yet the tune itself is slightly beautiful and utterly conventional―what the marriage will actually be, at best. Finally she has the AABA structure under control. The drama is about finding that structure as much as it is about these young people falling in love.”29 Besides the rehearsal-copy versions, Rodgers left behind one early draft that was sketched out in the key of D major, a perfect fourth lower than the key of G major, which was eventually decided on for the final published vocal score. For vocalists, this is a

29. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 137.

22 significant change in key. This most likely was changed once the role of Carrie had been cast—a common practice in musical theater. Carrie had originally been envisioned as a mezzo-soprano, as was the custom for most comic side roles in musicals. Although Carrie and Enoch Snow provide the bulk of comic relief in Carousel, their relationship functions primarily as a contrast to Billy and Julie’s relationship, rather than just lighthearted comic relief. Jean Darling—the original Carrie—was more a soprano than a mezzo soprano, and one possibility is that the authors wanted this contrast between Julie and Carrie to be more subtle, and by casting them with a similar vocal type, the difference is more subtextual. Although seemingly genuine in spirit, Carrieʼs music does not carry the jolt that Julieʼs—and Billyʼs— does. Their numbers are much more sophisticated, matching the complexity of their own inner turmoil and train of thought. Aside from the original key signature, the early draft is virtually identical to the published vocal score, with two minors exceptions. The first difference is that he did not include the underscoring in mm. 58–65, but left specific instructions for “dialogue to be inserted.” The other difference is that the final verse of Carrieʼs “When I Marry Mister Snow” contains a first and second ending in Rodgersʼs early draft. Although this implies a second verse for Carrie, there were no additional lyrics written underneath the accompaniment to the first time through. Early drafts of Hammersteinʼs libretto also lacked a second verse, so one possibility is that the authors felt the number was long enough already (even with conservative tempos, the number clocks in at almost six minutes). While this is relatively long for an opening musical number, itʼs barely half as long as the next scene.

23 2.3 Scene Billy and Julie: “If I Loved You” Probably the singular most important moment in the revolution of contemporary musicals. —Stephen Sondheim30

Referred to by many as simply “the Bench Scene,” Rodgersʼs earliest known draft of this is simply named “SCENE: BILLY AND JULIE – IF I LOVED YOU,” which lets us know that he was thinking of these as musical scenes early on. Yet within each section the lyrical verses and phrases are structured so neatly that we canʼt help but feel weʼre listening to an old-fashioned, traditional thirty-two-bar Broadway song. Here is a chart of the overall structure of the scene.

Table 4. Form and Harmonic Structure in “Bench Scene” from Carousel31 Measure

Section / Theme

Key:

draft

pub. scores

Part 1: Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan (reprise) m. 1

orchestral intro (“Youʼre a queer one”)

F-sharp

G

m. 9

Billyʼs 1st verse (“Youʼre a queer one”)

G

A-flat

m. 16 Julieʼs 1st verse (“You couldnʼt take”)

G

A-flat

m. 26 Billyʼs 2nd verse (“Youʼre a queer one”)

E-flat

A

Billyʼs 3rd verse (“Do you love me?”)

D

(cut)

m. 45 Julieʼs 2nd verse (“Iʼm never gonna marry”)

G

A-flat

(did not exist yet)

D-flat

N/A

m. 53 underscoring (“Youʼre a queer one”)

30. Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 255. 31 . Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel piano-conductor score, 33–51.

24 m. 61 Julieʼs 3rd Verse (“When I worked in the”)

D

G

Julieʼs Verse (“If I Loved You”)

C

D-flat

m. 37 underscoring (“If I Loved You”)

C

D-flat

m. 49 Billyʼs 1st verse (“You canʼt hear a sound”)

C

C

m. 81 Billyʼs 2nd verse (“Thereʼs a hell of a lot”)

C

C

m. 105 Julieʼs interlude (“Thereʼs a feathery cloud”)

C (w/ lyrics) C (underscore)

m. 118 Billyʼs 3rd verse (“Kinda scrawny and pale”)

D

E-flat

m. 146 Billyʼs verse (“If I Loved You”)

C

D-flat

(did not exist yet)

D-flat

Part 2: If I Loved You m. 1

m. 182 orchestral coda (“If I Loved You”)

The scene has two large-scale divisions: the first half being a reprise (with variations) of “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan” (this time sung by Billy instead of Carrie) which ultimately leads into “If I Loved You.” Rodgers even designates in his early draft when we have reached the song proper, and his designation is faithfully copied into the published scores. Underneath this large two-part structure lie many different verses and smaller divisions, each of which is perfectly constructed and balanced in its own right. The first half of the song functions much like “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan” earlier in the act. Instead of launching into his own monologue, Billy keeps cajoling Julie with the same tune for more information about her romantic history. Once she perplexes him enough with her quixotic views on life, she finally sings her conditional love-song “If I Loved You” (strikingly similar in poetic conceit to “People Will Say Weʼre In Love” from Oklahoma!). In the same way that “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan” served as a

25 prelude for “His Name Is Mister Snow,” here it serves as a preamble to “If I Loved You,” the centerpiece of the Bench Scene. After Julie has bared her soul with “If Loved If You,” Billy finally opens up with his own innermost thoughts at m. 49, reflecting on nature and manʼs insignificant role in the universe. The paean he sings here “is the first insight into the complexity of Billyʼs character and the course that this relationship will take.”32 This section eventually and inevitably develops into his own verse of “If I Loved You.” When Billy finishes singing, the orchestra continues underscoring the remainder of the scene, until he and Julie kiss. The final few moments are not what one expects: instead of a reprise of the tune with the two singers in climactic vocal harmony ending on a dominant-to-tonic chord progression, Rodgers finishes with an orchestral climax on an exciting Neapolitan cadence—a fitting finale to an epic scene that lets the audience know the fate of these two lovers is now sealed. One way Rodgers deftly takes us through this long musical sequence is with modulation. Each time he changes keys, he grabs the audienceʼs attention, suggesting a shift in content, narrative voice, or mood. Rodgers deals with this so elegantly that we realize only in retrospect that a new song is underway. Joseph Swain points out that the “harmonization of this song is not the only agent of its expression” and that the “subtlety of melodic phrasing … shows yet another advance from Oklahoma!, whose tunes are built on clear four-bar phrases through and through.”33 There is no major difference in overall harmonic and formal structure between Rodgersʼs undated early draft and the final published scores, but a number of changes

32. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 130. 33. Ibid., 123.

26 took place before opening night. When the copyist created piano-vocal scores of this number for the rehearsal pianist, most of the sections were eventually transposed up a half step. The strings begin in the key of G instead of F-sharp, and from there on maintain a similar key outline for most of the scene, save for a few interesting exceptions. At mm. 26, Billyʼs second verse was transposed up a tritone from E-flat to A. This creates a modulation from Julieʼs verse, now in A-flat, to A for Billyʼs verse, which gives a playful and jeering quality between the two characters, and has a feeling that the stakes are being raised throughout the scene. Several sections of music and lyrics were cut and replaced. One of the differences between the draft and published score is that Billy originally had a third verse of “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan.” The lyrics were originally as follows: BILLY: (singing) JULIE: (spoken) BILLY: (sings) JULIE: (sings)

Do you love me? Julie Jordan. No. Then explain just what youʼre doinʼ here with me. Whyʼd you stay here in the first place? I like to watch [fermata] the moon upon [fermata] the sea.34

These lyrics and accompaniment were cut entirely before the Broadway opening, and the scene went straight into Julieʼs third verse “Iʼm never gonna marry.” However, after Julieʼs verse, a short stretch of spoken dialogue was inserted with another eight bars of “Youʼre A Queer One” for underscoring. Without Billyʼs third verse, we transition right into Julieʼs third verse at m. 61. Table 4 shows that this section was originally in the key of D major, and transposed up a perfect fourth to the key of G major. The equivalent

34 . © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

27 section in “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan” employed an identical transposition. This is not surprising, as the higher key is more naturally suited for the ingenue role of Julie. Both verses of “If I Loved You” were transposed up a half-step from C to D-flat, yet Billyʼs other verses at mm. 49 and 81 were kept in C. Although the key was not changed, when Billy sings “On a night like this I start to wonder / what life is all about” in m. 71 the vocal melody was altered and the accompaniment stayed the same—a rare occurrence for Rodgers. The original melody rather plaintively stays in his lower register, ending on a B below the treble clef. The melody in the final version dramatically leaps up a minorseventh interval, and ends on a B in the treble clef. This final version certainly has a more dramatic arc, which seems to fit the epic nature of Billyʼs reflections. Perhaps the most interesting alterations occur in m. 105, right after Billyʼs ode to nature. Julie answers his second verse with a verse of her own, closely mimicking Billyʼs melody.

28 Example 4. Rodgers, “If I Loved You,” draft, 11–12, Richard Rodgers Collection.35

35. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

29 The original section exists in Walkerʼs full score, but presumably never made it to the New York opening. Rodgers also left behind a very rough sketch that was included with the early draft of the number. Written on a separate manuscript paper he maps out twenty-seven measures of a melody with Roman numerals for chord progression beneath, titled “2 Little People.” Above the melodic sketch are six measures of what appears to be an even earlier version of Billyʼs verse at m. 49, but with a different accompaniment. Example 5. Rodgers, “Two Little People,” sketch included with “If I Loved You,” Richard Rodgers Collection.36

None of Hammerstein’s records allude to any lyrics titled “Two Little People,” so it is difficult to ascertain whether Rodgers was intending to set the pre-existing lyrics to this new melody, or to expand the music to this scene even further. One final difference between Rodgersʼs draft and the published scores is a variation

36. Rodgers was often inconsistent in sketches with his designation of upper- and lowercase Roman numerals. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

30 on the lyrics that Billy sings as a lead-in to his verse of “If I Loved You.” Originally he sang “But I knew I would be / like you said youʼd be with me,” later changed to “Yet somehow I can see / just exactly how Iʼd be.” This is a subtle yet important change. The original lyric has Billy directly referencing how his conditional state of love would be exactly the same as Julieʼs. The final lyric simply repeats exactly what Julie sings before her own verse of “If I Loved You.” The difference is minuscule, yet the effect is noticeable. Not only is Billy about to sing the same love song back to Julie, but the new lyric makes it ambiguous as to whether he is consciously deciding to repeat Julieʼs own song back to her, or if this song was just an expression of his views on love in general. This ambiguity lend a charming innocence to Billyʼs character, as well as to his song, and it ends up transforming the tentative beginnings into a full, unconditional love scene—a perfect example of Hammersteinʼs lyrical and dramatic brilliance at work. After this moment, Rodgers draft simply instructs the copyist to take the refrain from “If I Loved You.” The orchestral underscoring and climax that concluded the scene must have been added in rehearsals. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is this most famous of duets never has even a moment of vocal harmony. (In fact, thereʼs almost no duet harmonizing anywhere in the show.) For a musical with such operatic ambitions it is intriguing that Rodgers and Hammerstein seemed so disinterested in small-ensemble work. Being able to have two or more characters express thoughts at the same time is something unique to music. Carouselʼs principal characters never express their thoughts at the same time—they only alternate. Only the chorus is given the opportunity to sing together (and almost always in unison). This aspect seems fitting for these people, who live a simple lifestyle in a small New England coastal town.

31 2.4

“Soliloquy”

This musical scene has long been renowned for its elaborate form, changing textures, and its ability to reflect a number of emotional changes. While this is true of any of the extended scenes in Carousel, “Soliloquy” is exceptional only in that it is for a single character. —Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical One of the functions of the Bench Scene is to build the action and music up to Billyʼs grand “Soliloquy.” This number is a prime example of the way Carouselʼs score so eloquently interjects itself into the action. In the “Rodgersʼs and Hammerstein tradition,” a character “had an emotion and sang about it … although the ʻSoliloquyʼ in Carousel is a study in ambivalence. It allows for dramatic contrast.”37 Rodgersʼs first known draft of this number is titled “Soliloquy” and consists of mostly melodic sketches, with occasional harmonies written in. He also left a more complete draft with lyrics and accompaniment fully realized. Table 5 chronicles the evolution of the various drafts of “Soliloquy.”

Table 5. Form and Harmonic Structure in “Soliloquy”38 Measure

Section / Theme

Key:

Sketch

2nd Draft

N/A

N/A

Pub. Scores

Part 1: “My Boy Bill” (insert)

orchestral intro39

F-sharp

37. Secrest, Sondheim, 256. 38. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel piano-conductor score, 104–18. 39. This introduction (which was lost at some point) is the first five measures of “Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan,” arranged for string quartet. See Pomahac, “Restoration Notes,” 599.

32 m. 1

“I wonder what heʼll think” A minor

A minor

B minor

m. 21

allegretto “Iʼll teach him”

A minor

A minor

B minor

m. 37

“My Boy Bill” 1st verse

G major

G major

G major

m. 73

con moto (6/8)

G major

G major

G major

m. 109

“My Boy Bill” 2nd verse

G major

G major

G major

m. 147

Piu mosso “Iʼll be damned” A minor

A minor

A minor

m. 162

“I can see him when heʼs 17”F (mixolydian)F (mix.)

F (mix.)

Part 2: “My Little Girl” m. 185

reprise of 1st verse (dialogue) A minor

A minor

B minor

(insert)

“When I have a daughter

N/A

F major

F major

m. 205

“My Little Girl”

F major

F major

F-major

m. 228

Coda “I gotta get ready”

C major

C major

B-flat major

Like the Bench Scene and Julie and Carrieʼs Sequence, “Soliloquy” is constructed on two passages that could be detached as separate songs. One is about the possibility of his “boy Bill” and the other about his “little girl.”40 We have seen now this two-part structure in more than half the musical numbers in Carousel. It is present in Julie and Carrieʼs Sequence, the Bench Scene, “June Is Bustinʼ Out All Over,” “When The Children Are Asleep,” “This Was A Real Nice Clambake,” and the sequence leading up to “Whatʼs The Use Of Wondʼrinʼ.” The exceptions are Jiggerʼs ode to the sailorʼs life, “Blow High, Blow Low,” Billyʼs solo in the afterlife, “Highest Judge Of All,” and Nettie Fowlerʼs anthem, “Youʼll Never Walk Alone,” which all fit snugly within the traditional thirtytwo-bar structure.

40. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 131.

33 One of the main differences between the early and later versions of the number is a short verse between mm. 204 and 205 that was inserted and then removed from Rodgers’s second draft.41 After Billy comes to the realization that his chances of having a daughter are equally probable, he sees himself as boasting about his girl to his drinking buddies. Only twelve measures long, this insert serves as connective tissue between the two main sections of Part 2: the reprise of first verse and “My Little Girl” proper. Although the vocal line does not have the same melodic lilt as the rest of the number and the accompaniment is harmonically and rhythmically static, on a larger scale it adds more weight to the second half of the number, creating a better of balance.

41. The section, sung by John Raitt in the original Broadway production, is included as optional in the restored version of the show.

34 Example 6. Rodgers, excerpt from “Soliloquy,” insert included with sketch, Richard Rodgers Collection.42

This material is completely absent from the sketch, the second draft, and the pianovocal rehearsal score. Rodgers included a separate insert into the second draft with

42. It is unknown when the harmony on the fourth beat of m. 3 was changed from Aminor to a G-minor. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

35 instructions to the arranger and copyist to “leave space for 24 new bars.” Walker does not recall ever seeing the middle section of the “Soliloquy,” and it is not clear exactly when it was added or removed in the pre-Broadway try-out period.43 However, it was included in the original cast recording, and consistently used by John Raitt (who created the role of Billy Bigelow) in later productions. Raitt recalls “that neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein gave him a reason for inserting or removing it.”44 “Soliloquy” is the only vocal number in Carousel to make frequent use of minor modes.45 Rodgers originally wrote the introduction in A minor and had it transposed up a whole step to B minor for Raitt. This transposition resulted in an interesting harmonic relationship, because the end of the first two verses now arrives at a D-major cadence at mm. 35, which acts as a dominant to the upcoming verse of “My Boy Bill” in G major. This would not have happened had the introduction remained in A minor. This was surely intentional on the composerʼs part. Rodgers possessed an uncanny ability to change keys deftly in the middle of a number and not have it feel forced. For the remainder of the number, the three versions of “Soliloquy” do not differ in key structure until the coda, which was lowered from C major to B-flat major for tryouts. The driving bass line and unusual harmonic progression starting in mm. 228 of the coda bears a marked resemblance to the end of Jud Fryʼs song “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma!. The similarities are not just musical: both characters sing a determined and hair-raising coda after soliloquizing about their dreams and desires. Although Jud Fry is a misanthropic villain and Billy Bigelow an anti-hero, the manner in which Rodgers sets

43. Conrad, Correspondence with Ted Chapin, 629. 44. Pomahac, “Restoration Notes” from Carousel full score, 599. 45. The purely instrumental “Carousel Waltz” has many themes that frequently modulate in and out of minor modes. See pp. 13–14 for more detail.

36 their problems to music is similar. As Jud becomes even more determined to win Laurey’s hand, the music climaxes to a B-minor chord with a C-sharp suspension (realized with chilling orchestration by Bennett). Billy has a more heroic, yet desperate, resolution to provide for his unborn child, and his song ends with a brass fanfare in B-flat major. Both characters meet their fate by self-inflicted knife wounds—Jud accidentally and Billy intentionally.

Example 7. A comparison between endings of “Soliloquy” and “Lonely Room.”46 a. Rodgers, “Soliloquy” from Carousel, mm. 228–30.

b. Rodgers, “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma!, mm. 44–47.

46. © 2010 by Imagem, C.V. Material contained herein, in a different form. ©1945 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

37 "Lonely Room" is the only number in Oklahoma! to begin in a minor key; likewise, “Soliloquy” is the only one in Carousel to begin in minor. Both of these numbers immediately distinguish themselves from other songs by using a clashing minor-second interval in the opening vamp. This lack of harmonic stability lends uncertainty as to where each song might venture, and the many different scenarios Billy psychologically projects have an equivalent musical landscape, wandering through many different keys, meters, and styles. Ultimately, though, Hammerstein deserves equal credit for the dramatic scenario he provided for Billy, which Rodgers’s music perfectly reflects. By the end of the song he is not an inherently different person than when he started, but the journey he takes in just 253 measures is electrifying.

38 III THE LEGACY OF CAROUSEL

While the evolution of Rodgers’s score is interesting from a compositional perspective, it also highlights the problems of preservation and authorial intent. There is no exact moment when the details of Carousel were “set in stone,” and like most Broadway musicals, many elements changed not just before opening night, but also during the run of 890 performances. Well after the closing of the first Broadway production, the show remains in a fluid state of change, and performers and audiences are as important as the original authors in the process of preserving Carousel’s history .

3.1 Carouselʼs Afterlife

Writer and director Jonathan Miller describes a phase for a work of art once it has “outlived [its] original creation and performance.”47 He calls this the “afterlife.” In his book Subsequent Performances he applies this concept mostly to plays—particularly Shakespeare—but also suggests that it applies to any art. Once the people who saw an original performance have passed away—authors, performers, audiences—the work enters its afterlife. No living witnesses can describe the context in which the piece was

47. Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances. (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books / Viking, 1986), 23.

39 created and existed. Written notation cannot preserve the precise contextual meaning and intention behind certain aspects of a piece. Miller focuses on plays because they traditionally rely on texts not always intended for publication or later performance. Broadway musicals are particularly interesting examples of this concept because they include multiple notations: music, dialogue, dance. This results in a collection of artifacts that rarely agree, and yet are the sources future generations must contend with. Regardless of their inconsistencies these texts and their living counterparts help us understand the context of a piece and the setting within which it was created and performed. The concept is particularly appropriate for Carousel, just now beginning to enter its afterlife. But a Broadway show leaves the all-important original cast recording. Here story, characters, and ambiance can all be preserved in a single entity, and the recording gives the listener a rare glimpse into something that is not easily notated on page: style. In many ways a recording is all thatʼs left of a show after it closes. The unparalleled success of Oklahoma!ʼs original cast recording brought Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs songs into the living rooms of millions of Americans, setting a precedent for many other musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein continued this trend with Carousel. The recording (although subject to cuts) did much to capture the most unique moments of Carouselʼs score. Table 6 lists the numbers included on the original record.

40 Table 6: Musical Numbers included on Carousel: Original Broadway Cast recording48 No.

Title

Length

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Waltz Suite: Carousel Youʼre A Queer One, Julie Jordan / Mister Snow If I Loved You June Is Bustinʼ Out All Over When The Children Are Asleep Blow High, Blow Low Soliloquy A Real Nice Clambake Thereʼs Nothinʼ So Bad For A Woman / Whatʼs Use Of Wondʼrinʼ Highest Judge of All / Youʼll Never Walk Alone

4:25 4:27 4:23 3:50 4:16 1:28 7:30 2:27 4:24 4:32

In 1945 the original cast album was first preserved on 78-rpm records, limiting the amount of music to 7:30 per disc (3:45 per side), thereby necessitating several cuts of entire numbers and significant cuts within numbers. The dance music was omitted. The first half of the Bench Scene (everything before “If I Loved You”) was cut. “Geraniums In The Winder” was cut as an introduction to the stone cutter sequence.49 The “Carousel Waltz” had significant cuts as well, and almost every number recorded employed small cuts here and there. The notable exception is Billyʼs “Soliloquy,” which is recorded without any cuts, clocking in at 7:30, exactly enough for two sides of a 78-record. It even reinstated the “When I have a daughter” verse that was ultimately cut from the production. This decision allowed the recording to feature Raitt as Billy Bigelow—easily the strongest voice of the cast—while simultaneously highlighting the number that sums up Carousel. Despite using cuts in many other numbers, the album featured a large portion of the

48 . Carousel Featuring Members of the Original Cast (John Raitt / Jan Clayton / Joseph Littau), MCA CD reissue MCAD-10799 (1945). 49. This sequence is titled “Thereʼs Nothinʼ So Bad For A Woman” on the record.

41 score. Although it was not as lucrative as Oklahoma!’s cast album, Carousel set the high standard for Broadway recordings to come. Published scripts and scores present us with the authorsʼ basic instructions. But cast recordings provide a very different experience: interpretation. This adds a layer of nuance to a showʼs afterlife, and has the capacity to create expectations with an audience or performer. Audiences familiar with a cast album come into a live performance expecting the show to sound a certain way. This is certainly true of Carousel, which has generated over twenty cast recordings in the past six decades (including a film). The cast recording can provide a window on the original performersʼ interpretations of Carousel, but it cannot provide us with the motivations behind those interpretations.

3.2. Operetta or Broadway musical Carousel is a Big Sing, the piece that truly tells us what a Rodgers and Hammerstein show was: operetta by other means, those gala voices put to serious use. —Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Morninʼ

The beauty and craft of Carousel are apparent. But does the show transcend the conventions of the genre? Although genre might seem irrelevant, it can signify many things—it tells us who performs the piece, who listens to the piece, and what values those people are assigning to a piece. Carouselʼs original Broadway run ended 24 May 1947, and it wasn’t long until opera and light opera companies began producing the work. Since the 1950s there have multiple stage productions by major opera companies in the United States, including New

42 York City Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Chicago Lyric, Houston Grand Opera, and many others. It is also “notable that Carousel was the first musical to the get the ʻcrossoverʼ treatment in a recording by opera singers (on Victor in 1955).”50 Yet there have also been over a dozen revival productions on Broadway and Londonʼs West End. Was Carousel another Porgy and Bess? Though lacking a completely through-sung score, the similarity is striking—a team of experienced Broadway songwriters tackling serious operatic drama but with eight shows a week in a Broadway theater. Certainly some numbers, such as Billyʼs “Soliloquy,” have “the sheer length and vocal demand [to] put them in the ranks of opera arias.”51 Another traditional distinction between opera and Broadway musical is the use of music to accompany the bows, and it is interesting to note that Carousel is the only Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical that does not have specific bow music.52 Yet writer Scott McMillin argues against the idea of Carouselʼs operatic ambitions: When song emerges from these lyrical introductions, one gains the impression that the action could be conducted entirely in music. Yet no one supposes that the musical is striving to become an opera in these long stretches. The segments of the lyrical introductions are cut from the pop song lengths and remain tied to the strophic arrangement of the numbers that they do not quite attain.53 Perhaps operetta is a better term to describe Carousel. Hammerstein had certainly found his stride as a writer with operetta, most famously with Show Boat in 1929. The original cast of Carousel was made up mostly of operetta and opera stars, and Rodgers

50. Ethan Mordden. Beautiful Morninʼ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 85. 51. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 85. 52. Carousel—nor any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (except Flower Drum Song)—does not include any number labeled as “curtain call” or “bow” music, only exit music—an orchestral arrangement of the main verse from “If I Loved You.” 53. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 43.

43 employs much wider vocal ranges in all of the principal roles54. Yet while Carousel displays many similarities to operetta, Hammerstein was specifically not writing operettas at this point in his career. In fact, the majority of audiences in the 1940s hadnʼt seen an operetta since the 1920s. Rodgers and Hammerstein billed their works as musical plays: “something using operettaʼs musical intensity and musical comedyʼs vitality, yet avoiding operettaʼs starchy grandeur and musical comedyʼs lack of consistency and rationality.”55 Although Show Boat is commonly distinguished as the first serious book musical of the twentieth century, the show is closer to an operetta and employed many elements of spectacle and vaudeville common to its genre.56 Hammerstein would have to wait another fourteen years before he could continue fulfilling his grand vision of the American musical theater. Genre aside, within the context of Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs other musicals, Carousel stands out. Their other shows—from Oklahoma! to The Sound of Music—all follow the “Hammerstein model” of the musical play, yet did not call for or use the same level of musicalization as Carousel. While Oklahoma! created a shift in the way audiences thought of musical theater, it was Carousel that really began to push the musical boundaries of how a score could be put to use in a Broadway musical and still achieving long-lasting success. Carousel took the Hammerstein model for the musical play even further, and Rodgers met his partnerʼs dramatic innovation with an equally

54. Carter, Oklahoma!, 112. 55. Mordden, Beautiful Morninʼ, 83. 56. It is argued that many of the elements of spectacle in Show Boat are attributed to its producer, Florenz Ziegfield, Jr. See Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

44 brilliant score. In retrospect Rodgers and Hammerstein were forging a new a new type of show for Broadway audiences, drawing on many different genres and styles. Authors are not always conscious of the norms they are breaking, and certainly Carousel pushed the musical envelope more than their other shows. Some of Carouselʼs numbers sound like arias and some like musical comedy numbers, with moments of vaudeville and many other variations in between. McMillin reminds us that the musical in 1940s was “an eclectic form, with revue and vaudeville hints still circulating in the most solidly book shows, and there is no reason not to make a slot for Wagner here and there.”57 Despite the stylistic variety of the score, Rodgers maintains a consistent musical framework and structure within which Hammersteinʼs lyrics operate. Its genius lies in the way that Rodgers never loses touch with the American vernacular yet, which was real innovation.58 In the end, Carousel remains a lasting and influential work of music-theater. Its score is flexibly constructed such that it can considered an opera when performed by an opera house, and a Broadway musical when playing at a Broadway theater. It both embraces and defies the usual labels of other shows from the 1940s, and is a perfect example of the way Rodgers and Hammerstein fused music and words together in a manner both traditional and innovative.

57. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 43. 58. Ibid.

45 APPENDIX An Interview with Bruce Pomahac Director of Music, The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization 28 July 2009, Empire Hotel, New York City, New York. Interview conducted and transcribed by David Möschler. PART ONE (forty minutes) DM:

My thesis is mainly concerned with published texts and also primarily cast recordings, and so I thought Oklahoma! was a great case study for that, because, well thereʼs this myth that itʼs the first cast recording, but Iʼve read some material that says there were previous examples. Rather it was the most successful one that was recorded.

BP:

There were a few earlier recordings. Porgy and Bess was recorded. In England Flora Dora recorded at the turn of the century. But Oklahoma! was the first cast album that made a difference, that the public noticed, because Oklahoma! itself was such a phenomenal success. Also, when Oklahoma! opened, and instantly became the success that it was, and got the great reviews that it did, and everyone was singing the music (and in those days the big singers would be under contract to the record companies) if a song came out the record company might assign to several different people it had under contract. Tommy Dorseyʼs band might record it, and Bing Crosby might record the same song; and thatʼs been going on in the recording industry for years. It doesnʼt really happen that much anymore because there arenʼt as many singers under record contracts. In the days when the engine of Broadway was the composer, the composers

46 wrote scores that people wanted to hear. People wanted to buy the sheet music, buy the recordings. And the Broadway writers came (most of them, anyway) came to the theatre as songwriters, not as dramatists. Even though we think of American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess when we think of Gershwin, he was first (and arguably, foremost) a songwriter, a tune smith, a TinPan-Alley guy. Rodgers and Hammerstein changed the theater because what they wrote was so successful you couldnʼt ignore what they were doing. They werenʼt the only writers who wanted to fuse the story and the songs into a single element. (Show Boat and Music in the Air already done a pretty good job of that.) But Oklahoma! integrated its elements so well and was such a phenomenal hit that suddenly the book musical was the direction in which everyone wanted to move. Well, they may not have wanted to, but they did. Even Irving Berlin. Now what happened is that in 1942 there was a musicianʼs strike in the recording industry. Local 802 (the New York Musicianʼs Union) president, James Petrillo, wasnʼt allowing any recordings to be released when Oklahoma! opened. So Oklahoma! went into the studio to be recorded, but the recording couldnʼt be released. There actually records released during that period with vocal backups instead of instrumental backups. Union musicians couldnʼt play on recordings while the strike lasted. So when Oklahoma! did hit the record stores, everybody in the country (and eventually, the world) was waiting for this record. So thatʼs the impact that the recording of Oklahoma!… DM:

That contributed to its success?

BP:

Well it already was a huge success and the recording made it an even bigger one. Imagine a show in which youʼre in love with the songs, but you canʼt buy a

47 recording. You wait for months and months, and in the meantime you hear the music being played on the radio, in band and orchestra concerts, in dance halls— everywhere you go. But you canʼt buy a recording of it. Finally, the recording is released. When that happened to the recording of Oklahoma! it was like a gold rush. Everybody bought that record album. And when I say everybody I donʼt mean just the the Broadway afficionados. I mean people all over the country—our parents, our grandparents. Thatʼs when the Broadway show kind of became a part of the mainstream American culture, because the album of Oklahoma! allowed everyone to experience what, until that time, only the people who could get to New York could experience. The original Broadway cast recording is not my particular favorite recording of Oklahoma!. Itʼs historical, but itʼs truncated. They actually recorded the cast album, and then, a few months later, recorded some additional songs that had not been included in the first recording session. (I believe that now, when you buy the CD of the original Broadway cast of Oklahoma! of the originally recorded and additionally recorded tracks are included.) Because, in those days, every track had to fit on the side of a 78, no track could be longer than three minutes. Today we may think of musicals as dramas operas. More and more we are getting recordings of shows from beginning to end. In the 1940ʼs however, the days of 78s, there was no thought of recording a whole show. It was the songs that mattered. Especially the hit songs. It took a lot of clout to get Decca (the recording company) to record a song like “Pore Jud is Daid,” but Oklahoma!ʼs success gave it that clout. Tommy Dorsey wasnʼt going to play that song, and no one was going to dance to it or sing it. But Oklahoma! was such a phenomenon they got to record

48 the character numbers, most unusual in an era when most musicals were driven by their hit tunes. When Anything Goes was recorded, back in 1930, they recorded only the big hit songs (“Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.”) They didnʼt think about recording the character numbers or the comedy numbers. Oklahoma! changed that. And then, it changed the theater. Because up until that point, people knew only the hits they heard on the radio. In those days, thatʼs how you heard music—you listened to the radio. And there were dance bands everywhere. Every hotel and even many restaurants had live orchestras, and dancing was big, and there were dance arrangements of all of these hit songs. And thatʼs really what plugged music all over, especially show music. And the people who wrote the shows wanted those song hits, even Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although Hammerstein was determined from the get-go (I mean heʼs the guy who wrote Show Boat) to engineer musicals that were not just collections of songs, but were real stories, and the songs drove the story forward. Even though Rodgers and Hammerstein accomplished this, you have to keep in mind that they were still, at heart, songwriters. Today, I donʼt know which, if any, of the new writers have taken the place of the writers in the Rodgers & Hammerstein era. Theyʼre all wonderful composers and lyricists – Michael John LaChiusa, Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon. Maybe in their hearts they would love to have a hit songs, but they are not sitting down to write a score for the sake of producing a batch of hit tunes. Even when Rodgers and Hammerstein were writing their most serious shows, they came from a songwriting world, and they lived in a publishing world. In other words, music drove the shows. Thatʼs why in those days, the composer

49 was king. And there were big orchestras in the theatre orchestra pits, what the composer wanted, he got. The composer and his batch of hit tunes were the reason everybody was tuned into Broadway. Each new show was expected (yes, expected!) to deliver hit songs, and when it did everybody involved shared in the success and the financial rewards of that show. Today, theatrical composers donʼt really rule the roost that way. Maybe Andrew Lloyd Weber does, but he has earned his success. DM:

And I think heʼs had success with writing hit tunes.

BP:

Yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber has had wonderful success writing hit tunes. And this success puts him in a position of power. Last spring the entire sound system for Phantom of the Opera (at the Majestic Theater) was removed and replaced by a new one. Because Webber felt the old one was no longer loud enough (if itʼs possible to believe the sound system for Phantom of The Opera wasnʼt loud enough!). He understood that the audience wanted to have a rock concert experience in the theater, and he wanted to give it to them. Thatʼs what the clout of success can do. As a producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, could give the audience the theater experience he wanted them to have. Itʼs why the original production of Carousel had a forty-piece orchestra and Phantom now has a new sound system.

DM:

This is great, thank you. Do you mind if I start back at the beginning?

BP:

No. Go back to your questions! Keep pulling me back on track.

DM:

First of all, could you tell me a little bit about your work with Rodgers and Hammerstein, both the men and the organization.

BP:

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein began working together in 1943 on

50 Oklahoma!. Up to that point both of them had had very successful careers with other collaborators—Hammerstein with operetta writers, like Sigmund Romberg, who wrote The New Moon and Jerome Kern, who not only wrote operettas, but was really kind of the father of modern musical theater. Certainly the person Richard Rodgers was listening to when he was young was Jerome Kern. With Show Boat, Kern really blossomed into American writers of something that was no longer operetta, it was a new totally American kind of musical theater. In 1943, Rodgers had been working with Lorenz Hart for his entire career. Hart, a wonderful lyric writer, had his demons. He was an alcoholic, he was a homosexual, he was five feet tall. He was an unhappy man. Itʼs too bad, because everyone loved him. When you go back and talk (well itʼs harder and harder to do this) to the people who knew him, they will tell you how much they loved him. He was always said to have been an adorable man. Itʼs too bad, because this adorable man destroyed himself, and Rodgers got to the point where he couldnʼt work with him anymore. When it got to the point that Rodgers couldnʼt talk Hart into writing Oklahoma! Rodgers knew he was in serious trouble. Theatre Guild had offered him Green Grow the Lilacs, and he wanted to turn it into a musical. But Lorenz Hart was adamant. He told Rodgers he didnʼt want to do it. So Rodgers went to Oscar Hammerstein, and Hammerstein (after expressing his concern about not wanting to take Hartʼs place unless it became absolutely necessary) agreed to write the show with him. Hammerstein had had great success in the 1920s, but the 1930s were a bit of a dry spell for him. He wrote several lovely shows that, for one reason or another, didnʼt take off. Some of them were wonderful: for example, Music in the Air and Very Warm for May. Music in the

51 Air was a success with a couple of hit songs (“The Song is You” and “Iʼve Told Every Little Star”). Very Warm for May was a flop that had one absolutely great song, “All the Things You Are,” one of the finest of both Kernʼs and Hammersteinʼs careers. But by 1943 Hammerstein wasnʼt really at the top of his game, still highly respected, but no longer enjoying the success in which Rodgers was basking. Still, Hammerstein was a towering figure. Whatever he had not published in the previous fifteen years, he had Show Boat. And itʼs hard not that suspect that Show Boat, or something akin to its Americanism and its emotional power was what Rodgers wanted, where he wanted to go. So Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to go to work together. Normally, the job of writing a musical is a collaboration of three people: the composer, the lyricist, and the book writer (the librettist). However, for Oklahoma! R & H agreed that Hammerstein (as he had done for Show Boat) would write the lyrics and the libretto—librettist and the lyricist. That collaboration might have made for a two thirds / one third split for the new team, but for whatever reason, and itʼs hard to know because we donʼt how R & H made the decision, they opted for a fifty/fifty split. What their contemporaries always said about them is that they went into a room, they made whatever decisions they had to make, they came out perfectly unified. And this bond gave them great strength. No one ever saw these men disagree. They must have had things to disagree about. As collaborators they must have taken opposite sides over songs and scenes and the things that you need to get into, to take a part and put back together in order to write a musical, but no one ever witnessed them as anything but totally in synch with each other. Their decision from the get-go was to enter

52 into a fifty/fifty partnership, one in which they would split the publishing, their billing, their royalties, everything, right down the middle. Then they created their own publishing company, Williamson (both of their fathers were named William), and from the beginning they were business equals. Even though Hammerstein was doing double duty as lyricist and librettist. And it is my personal belief that Hammerstein entered into this agreement without too many qualms. In every musical theater collaboration I can think of has usually been one alpha partner, or at least one alpha personality. To work together successfully the other partner/personality has to acknowledge this and learn to deal with it. In Lerner and Loeweʼs case, it was Lerner who sat at the steering wheel, even though both he and Loewe were controlling the vehicle. With E. Y. Harburg, it didnʼt matter who he worked with. Harburg was always the alpha guy. So was Richard Rodgers. This is why I feel Harburg and Rodgers never could have worked together and why, even though they tried, Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner had to walk away from each other. As Josh Logan once said to me, “There is always only one presidential suite in any hotel. Rodgers always got it. Dorothy (Hammersteinʼs wife) may not have liked it, but Hammerstein kept quiet. He knew what he had with Rodgers, and he wasnʼt about to rock the boat.” The Theatre Guild produced the first three shows Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote: Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro. Oklahoma! was giant and Carousel majestic. Allegro came up short. However, the Theatre Guild was counting on it to be the same kind of financial success as Oklahoma! and Carousel had been. They needed it to be. Oklahoma! and Carousel become cash cows The Theatre Guild. These two hits paid for many of the Theatre Guild productions that lost

53 money. According to Dania Krupska, who was Agnes de Milleʼs assistant on Allegro, when they got to the Boston tryout and everybody realized the show was in trouble, Hammerstein believed he had finally figured out how to fix it. De Mille had come to him, she was both the director and choreographer of Allegro, and asked “Whatʼs the play about?” Hammerstein explained what he thought the play was about, and de Mille responded, “Well you havenʼt written that. What you just said to me, thatʼs not what I see here.” Hammerstein thought it over, figured out what he had to do, and asked Lawrence Langer, who ran the Theatre Guild, for another week in Boston to make the necessary changes. Langer agreed to the extra week and Hammerstein and Rodgers went in front of the company in Boston and said “Mr. Langer and the Theatre Guild have been good enough to give us more time here and weʼre going to fix this play. We know what we have to do.” Now whatever happened, two days later, Langer reneged and the Allegro company was told “youʼre going to New York Sunday night.” He just couldnʼt hold off the New York opening any longer. The Theatre Guild in the 1920s and ʼ30s and ʼ40s produced Shakespeare all over the country, things like that. It cost them a fortune. They hardly ever made money, they were always poor. But with Oklahoma! and Carousel they had all this money coming in, and they were looking at Allegro to be the third cash cow. Langer just chickened out. According to Dania, he realized “I cannot delay this play opening in New York. Iʼve got all my big shot friends and clients waiting to go to opening night next week. We gotta come in.” Langer and the Theatre Guild forced the issue, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were furious. There was nothing they could do. The show opened in New York on schedule, and was not a success. Allegro was the last time anybody

54 else ever produced anything that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote. Josh Logan, who directed and co-wrote South Pacific (the next show R&H wrote after Allegro), said he knew when he went into South Pacific it was going to be a hit, because Rodgers & Hammerstein were so angry about Allegro. He said “I knew theyʼd do whatever they had to do to make South Pacific the biggest hit they had ever had.” And up to that time it was. Although, Oklahoma!ʼs run would turn out to be 313 performances longer than South Pacificʼs. So anyway, here they are, Rodgers and Hammerstein, at the top of their game —a 50/50 partnership with no other producers involved to get in their way. There would eventually be other billed producers on R & H shows—Joseph Fields on Flower Drum Song and Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday on The Sound of Music—but Rodgers & Hammerstein were in complete control. They called the shots. And they owned everything, lock stock and barrel. They wouldnʼt even make a deal with Logan as you probably know that story. In the early nineteen fifties, their lawyer, Howard Reinheimer, who had been Hammersteinʼs lawyer all the way back to his Show Boat days, said to them, “Youʼve got to buy back Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro from the Theatre Guild.” (As producers of these three shows the Theater Guild still owned a percentage of them. Reinheimer was encouraging R & H to buy the Theatre Guildʼs share and become the complete owners of these three shows. At first R & H didnʼt understand why. In those days the value of a show was in its Broadway run, its national tour, and its sale to the movies. Once you got that money, that was it. Basically the money faucet turned off. Stock and amateur revenue wasnʼt like it is today. And there werenʼt any video sales back then, or ring tones or the

55 kinds of synch rights that rule the music publishing world today. Once the Broadway run was over, the national tour and the movie were history there was no longer much perceived income for a musical. Still, R & H paid over $800,000 in early 1950s to buy back Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro from the Theatre Guild! And from that point on, they owned everything they wrote. This is not as usual as it might sound. In those days most songwriters on Broadway had deals with publishers, had deals with producers, had deals with movie companies in which they only shared a portion of what was to be realized. This sometimes still true today. Rodgers & Hammerstein owned their own publishing company, they owned all the auxiliary rights to their shows. Yes, they had some underlying rights that were shared with others. There were deals with Margaret Langdon, who wrote the book for The King and I and with John Steinbeck who wrote, Sweet Thursday, the novel on which Pipe Dream was based. Otherwise, they were the sole owners. hey even owned the negatives of some of the movies which were made of their shows. This is incredible! I mean, nobody, even Irving Berlin, who had great power in Hollywood, owned the negatives of the films of the shows they wrote. And the only way R& H could do this is because they had these juggernaut hits. And also, because when they got together on Oklahoma! there werenʼt just newcomers starting out in the business. They were experienced in the businesses of Broadway and music publishing. So they began their collaboration with a clout that most new collaborations canʼt even dream of having. DM:

They werenʼt green.

BP:

They were established, but not as a team. Then the first thing they wrote was a mega-hit. Then the second thing they wrote was another huge artistic and

56 commercial success. Not as big as the first, put powerful enough to continue the juggernaut. Allegro didnʼt matter. After all, how much of a failure did it turn out to be? Even Stephen Sondheim credits it as a seminal influence. Then came South Pacific (wow!) The King and I (again, wow!) total R & H had five of these landmark successes. When someone asks “Whatʼs the big deal with Rodgers and Hammerstein?” five is the magic number. Lerner and Loewe wrote five shows together, but the two youʼve seen are Brigadoon and My Fair Lady. Camelot has a gorgeous score, but it is not often performed. Paint your Wagon disappeared. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote five of the greatest musicals ever produced, and the big deal is that three generations of Americans have seen . They know the songs. They recognize the characters. In addition to these shows they wrote the script (but not the screenplay) and lyrics and music for State Fair, which was a great success in its era. The 1960 remake wasnʼt so hot. But even the remake continued to generate box office because, by that time Rodgers & Hammerstein were American icons. This is due not only to their success, but because they made a point of using PR to brand their work. “Rodgers and Hammerstein present” was as important as the title. Because of this the organization, their company, after they were gone, was able to continue. The executor for Hammerstein was Dorothy Hammerstein, his wife, and the executor for Rodgers was Dorothy Rodgers, Rodgersʼs wife. These women didnʼt change the business their husbands had created. They didnʼt have to. The success of the shows and the songs, the iconic names above the title and the company kept growing. There was a joke that went around the R & H office in those days. People would ask, “How do you make money here?” and the answer

57 would be, “We open our mail.” It was light humor and it was the truth. Because the 1960s continued the era in which everybody in the country (and more and more, the world) was attending performances of big five shows, on stage and in the movie theaters. And not only the “big five,” but also Cinderella, which was a huge hit on television. To this day, I donʼt think there is a show, maybe the academy awards, maybe the Super Bowl or the Olympics, that had as many people watching it as the original March 31, 1957, broadcast of Rodgers & Hammersteinʼs Cinderella. Over one hundred million people tuned into CBS that night to watch the new Rodgers & Hammerstein musical on TV. To get a hundred million people to watch a TV show today, well, that just doesnʼt happen anymore. In those days I Love Lucy would get ratings in the forties Today Two and a Half Men pull in ratings around five, and thatʼs considered huge. So what Rodgers & Hammerstein had was an audience. And they had them everywhere. They had them in the theaters, they had them in the movies, and they had them on television. After Cinderella came Flower Drum Song. That was in 1958. It isnʼt well remembered today, but it was a huge hit in its time. When I was a kid, Flower Drum Song was the big, hot, “happening” Rodgers & Hammerstein show. And it was a “modern” show. It wasnʼt bucolic; it didnʼt take place on a farm in turn of the century Indian Territory. It didnʼt take place in Siam, a hundred years ago. It took place in San Francisco, today. The score was jazzy. Rodgers usually called on Trude Rittman for dance, choral and incidental music arrangements. Whether he acknowledged it or not, Rittmann had been important to Rodgers from Carousel on. But for Flower Drum Song he engaged Luther Henderson, who was

58 a young, black arranger, helped influence many of the jazzier segments of the Flower Drum Song score, and even arranged the ballet (Taʼs Dream) that opens the second act. Robert Russell Bennett still orchestrated, but “Grant Avenue” went through four different orchestral versions (two by Henderson) until Rodgers approved the version that remains in the show. After Flower Drum Song came The Sound of Music and then, in 1960, the death of Hammerstein. Rodgers continued writing, but he had already achieved his greatest successes with Hammerstein. The R & H Organization was able to keep going because it was fueled by the R & H hits. All the rights to these shows were in one place, and to this day, Rodgers & Hammerstein remains a one-stop shopping location. The rights to the Lerner & Loewe shows, for example, are spread all over. Lerner was married several times and with each divorce went a piece of his royalties. Then he had tax problems. To try to track down specific rights for a Lerner show can be difficult, because the stage rights are one place, the movie rights are another, and the publishing rights still another. Itʼs complicated. I know this because I am a great fan and admirer of Lerner and his collaborator, Frederick Loewe. In fact they are the only collaboration I can think of that could be invoked as an equal of R & H. A lot of authors are in the same situation where the rights to their shows are concerned. But Rodgers & Hammerstein owned all their rights and kept their rights. Their huge hits, one after the other, allowed them to do that. Itʼs why there is a Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization today. The publishing, the theatrical rights, the movie rights, the TV rights, the synch rights—theyʼre all under one roof. Iʼm the organizationʼs Director of Music, and that includes a multitude of duties. We

59 supervise the new productions. Weʼre involved in an ongoing process of restoring the original music and script materials for theater and concert licensing. Every day there are details that require our attention. DM:

You were involved with the recording of Allegro very closely.

BP:

Ted Chapin, who is the President of Rodgers & Hammerstein always felt that Allegro wasnʼt getting its due because of the cast album. The original cast recording was not only overly truncated, it wasnʼt particularly listener friendly. People were always fascinated with Allegro. I donʼt know if you know it or not. Itʼs a show that didnʼt work. But itʼs such an interesting idea and everyone in musical theater at some point becomes fascinated with “How can I fix Allegro?” Even Hammerstein tried to fix it.

DM:

He was working on a TV version?

BP:

Yes. You know, Ted found that TV version several years ago, legal yellow pad pages of Hammersteinʼs notes. Itʼs hard to assess because one of the things Hammerstein wanted to do was fix the split that occurs between the leading character and his not-so-devoted wife. But, if you take that away, it would seem to diminish the end of the play.

DM:

Thatʼs such a core part of the story.

BP:

Thatʼs the problem! He wanted to figure out a way to get them back together. Now he said this, but in his notes he never got far enough to see how he was going to do it. So itʼs hard to know how he might have fixed the show. In the final analysis, he never did. Cameron Macintosh is quoted as having said, “I wish I could figure out the second half of Allegro.”

DM:

I wanted to hear about when and how you got involved with the Rodgers and

60 Hammerstein Organization. BP:

Ted Chapin and I have been good friends for years. We met through Jerry Isaacs, a mutual friend who Ted spent a couple of college semesters with in Appleton, Wisconsin. I suspect the three of us might have been among the first Stephen Sondheim fans in our generation. (At least, it seemed that way then.) And Tedʼs parents, Schuyler and Betty Chapin, were friends of Sondheimʼs. It was an exciting time to be focused on the musical theater, and Sondheim was our catalyst. Because nobody by the end of the 1960s knew where musical theater was headed. Gershwin was dead, Hammerstein was dead, Kern was dead. Lerner & Loewe had split. Berlin wasnʼt writing anymore, and Rodgers was already in his decline. Only Stephen Sondheim seemed to be pointing in the direction of promise. After Rodgers died, in 1979, the R & H families were looking for someone to run the R & H Organization. And they found Ted. And Ted said to me “Iʼd like you to come on board to run the music department.” In the 1980s I was involved in all kinds of other work. I was arranging, I was conducting, I was traveling around the country, and I was concerned that, if I took a full time job, Iʼd never get called again to do other work, that people would think, “Heʼs with Rodgers & Hammerstein. Heʼs not available anymore.” Itʼs the kind of thing you worry about in this industry. By the end of the 1980s I had just conducted the Broadway production of Meet Me in St. Louis and had become a bit uneasy about what the job of a musical director in NY was going to have in store for me. I wanted to keep my options open, but I didnʼt know how exactly to do that and to focus on what looked like it was going to be the rest of my career. I had a great friend in

61 California, Danny Jacobson, and at that point I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, he called and asked “Why donʼt you come out to L.A. and score a TV series for me?” He was producing and writing Roseanne at that point. He was getting ready to do a new sitcom for Shelley Long (who had just come off Cheers) and offered me the job of writing the score for the series. It was an offer that was too good to turn down. I had never lived in California, and it was the middle winter in New York, and the thought of sunshine and swimming pools in January was irresistible. I moved to Los Angeles and loved everything about it. Except the actual work I was doing. I found out that music for an entire season of a sitcom can be written and recorded in a week or two. So I would complete the work, and the checks would come, but for the next three months I would have nothing to do. I really wasnʼt pursuing a career out there. I was having trouble trying … DM:

To establish a career?

BP:

To establish a career. Also, it was hard on my ego, because, as I said, in the theater, when youʼre in the music department, youʼre “in the room,” youʼre with the guys at the table making the decisions. In Hollywood, at least in my experience in television, they buy music like wallpaper. “We want three seconds of this, and five seconds of this, and 26 seconds of this.” There are composers who, given that challenge, respond beautifully. I didnʼt. Ted called one day from New York and said, “Weʼre creating a new stage production of State Fair.” People had tried to put this movie on stage as early as the 1960s and it hadnʼt worked. Rodgers himself was never sure it should be a stage show because he didnʼt feel the stakes of the story were high enough to

62 make it a Broadway show. But in the early 1990s the decision was made to create another stage version of State Fair. Tom Briggs and Louis Mattiolli had written a good book. Producers stepped up to the plate. They were ready to go. Ted continued, “I need somebody to help with the musical arrangements and the orchestrations.” They already had a great musical director and vocal arranger on board, John McDaniel. I jumped. I mean I think I was back in New York the next day. I must have really wanted to be working on a Broadway show again. After I completed the orchestrations for State Fair I returned to L.A. for a while, but every so often Ted would call and say, “You know we donʼt have a music department here. We really need somebody to head the music department.” I waffled until the day Ted called to say, “Iʼve got to get somebody in here to run our music department. If itʼs not you, the family is going to ask me to find somebody else.” That went on until the day I realized that I didnʼt want to remain in L.A. and that there was nothing I wanted more than to go to work for Ted and R & H. But now things had gotten complicated. I took the job feeling I needed R & H a lot more than they needed me. I wanted to reverse that, but I still couldnʼt see how I could make this job a career for myself. So I came on board as a parttime employee, thinking that within six months Iʼd be finished with everything Ted needed me to do, and Iʼd once again be looking for a job. Well, the joke was on me. Iʼm still here, and there is no end in sight to the projects awaiting us. Back in 1989 the first thing I went to work on was the restoration of The Sound of Music, which, as a stock and amateur property had already overtaken Oklahoma! as R & Hʼs most popular title. Oklahoma! had been in the number one spot for years, but once the movie of The Sound of Music came out, that show went global.

63 It became and it remains their biggest hit. After The Sound of Music one project led to another. Itʼs funny, because when I began at R & H I thought that in my lifetime at R&H I would eventually to every Rodgers score. I expected to all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein titles and then all of the Rodgers and Hart titles. But it turns out that each one of these restorations can take years of work. Today I realize Iʼll be lucky if I get through restoring just the major Rodgers and Hammerstein titles with the time I have left. Ted was right, and I was wrong. Thereʼs a tremendous amount of work to be done here. And Iʼm having a great time doing it. So many people come to us and want to do Oklahoma! and want to do The King and I, and want to do South Pacific, but, unfortunately, they want to do their own versions of these show. The big problem is, the best directors and the best designers working in the theater today donʼt have the opportunity to work on great new musicals. There just arenʼt as many being written or certainly as many being produced. So these directors and designers end up wanting to flex their creative muscles on the old shows. And thatʼs all right. You canʼt really say no to genuinely creative artists. You donʼt want Rodgers & Hammerstein turning into Gilbert and Sullivan, where the productions become so sacrosanct, that the entire canon loses its appeal to a newer generation. On the other hand youʼve got to make sure the baby doesnʼt get thrown out with the bath water. Those of us who work here (alongside Mary Rodgers, who has the keenest ear I know, and Alice Hammerstein, who can spot an incorrectly typed lyric a mile away) have a long history with these shows. Weʼve seen countless productions of them. And what we try to do is to caution todayʼs creative artists not to throw something away

64 without at least trying to understand why Rodgers and Hammerstein did it the way they did it in the first place. Because Rodgers & Hammerstein and their collaborators took the time to develop their ideas. They planned for years, they rehearsed for months and they went out of town for weeks of previews. And it goes without saying that they were all savvy ladies and gentlemen of their individual and combined crafts. So our job here at the office is not so much to hold the line and tell someone they canʼt change anything as it is to have a dialogue with the artists who are producing these shows and explore their ideas. Itʼs difficult because sometimes these artists are indeed heavyweights. When Trevor Nunn shows up and says he wants to do Oklahoma! and eliminate all the original dance music and do new dances, thatʼs a big gulp for us. But if the artist inspires you, you take the leap. And sometimes it works. Nunnʼs Oklahoma! was a wonderful production. I mean with Hugh Jackman the audience was on board from the first moment of the show. Sometimes a reworking of a show doesnʼt work as well. Flower Drum Song, the revival, was a noble experiment. Did you see it when it played in LA? DM:

I didnʼt see it. That was before I had moved out to California. I have heard about it and read reviews and everything.

BP:

So anyway, we do that kind of supervision work. We believe education is among the most important things we have to offer. In the music department we also keep up the music for all of the shows and scores. We have a brilliant fellow named Wayne Blood who heads our Music Prep department. We have people all over the country who do computer inputting for us, but Wayne has the final pass. I wouldnʼt want to edit a single measure without him at my side. Wayne and I do

65 every restoration project together. Music in the Air, Face the Music, Oklahoma!, Too Many Girls, Once Upon A Mattress, Allegro, etc., etc. Itʼs the part of my job I like the best because restoration is like solving a mystery. Itʼs sleuthing. Before I get to restoration, I want to make sure we finished up this question about the R & H Organization. DM:

Yes. It wasnʼt so much a question as wanting to see how you started out there, and fit in there with their goals and everything. I also wanted to …

BP:

Can I give you one example, just for you, to clarify the kind of we deal with at the R & H Org? The Sound of Music is a particular problem as far as not wanting people to throw the baby out with the bath water. The problem is that the film was not only hugely successful, it was very good, and in some ways may have solved some of the problems that the show had on the stage. But it is not a stage production. It is a film production. In 1959 Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, the original librettists of The Sound of Music, beautifully crafted their script for the stage. Later, in 1965, Ernest Lehmann, who wrote the screenplay for The Sound of Music, solved the story for the screen. Because the movie was such a hit, because it made such an indelible impression on everyone who saw it and because it came after Broadway show, many directors who do The Sound of Music want to recreate the the movie version on stage. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the songs. They did not write the script. Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, the team who wrote some of the greatest American plays of the twentieth century (they were as big as Rodgers and Hammerstein) wrote the script. They were included in the film as far as the profits went, but they took a back seat as authors because Ernie Lehman wrote a new screenplay and got all the glory. So Lindsay

66 and Crouse were never really happy about having The Sound of Music taken away from them and felt there were certain things in the movie did that could not work on a stage. Putting the children in the bed to sing “My Favorite Things” is a great joy as it is presented in the film. But it is not a good idea for the stage. The bed always has to be upstage. It crams the Trapp children together. You canʼt really enjoy them as individuals. Putting the children in bed on stage is just not the same wonderful moment it is when they do it on the screen. So we discourage this. But people know it as an iconic moment the film and come to the theater expecting it. Itʼs a real conundrum. And the Lindsay and Crouse estates object to its inclusion. They have the right and the reason to do this. However, weʼre able to allow the interpolation of both “I Have Confidence” and “Something Good,” two songs Rodgers wrote for the film (Hammerstein was already dead), because these interpolations donʼt affect Lindsay & Crouseʼs stage version of the show. You can insert “I Have Confidence” the end of the second scene where, in the original Broadway script, there had been a reprise of “My Favorite Things,” you can insert “Something Good” the end of the first scene of the second act (where “An Ordinary Couple” would come) without changing any dialogue. So we can allow those interpolations to be made. But we donʼt allow any other changes, to the score or to the script. The conundrum is that you can understand why the audiences who know The Sound of Music as a movie could be (and are) disappointed by the stage version of the show, even with the new movie songs in place. They love the movie to the point that they have memorized much of it. Then they come and see it on stage, and all of a sudden there are songs in different scenes and other songs

67 they have never heard and songs being sung by different characters in different locations. We get letters from people saying “I went to see The Sound of Music on stage last night, and they put in songs that werenʼt by Rodgers and Hammerstein.” You eventually find out theyʼre talking about “No Way to Stop It” and “How Can Love Survive,” which were always in the stage version. The problem similar to going to see the movie The Wizard of Oz and finding out they cut “Over the Rainbow” all of a sudden, something you have been looking forward to, is not there. And for the rest of the movie youʼre sitting there thinking “What happened?” You would be bothered by it. People who go to see The Sound of Music on stage who donʼt see what they remember from the movie are often bothered by it. So what do you do? DM: Well that actually ties into what Iʼm interested in about cast recordings, and how sometimes they match up with published and rental texts that are available, and how sometimes they donʼt. So Iʼm wondering in your work as a music director and orchestrator and record producer—this is kind of a general question right now —what role do you think recordings of Broadway musicals play in the context of the show, meaning historical preservation versus marketing the show to a wider audience? BP:

I think in so many cases the recording is the historical preservation of the show. I mean how many of us only know shows from the experience of sitting in our room and listening to the cast album? There are many shows that I love (and Iʼve been around for a long time) that I donʼt know anything about except for the cast album. And it is tough when we finally see the show and realize it is different from the recording, because we are so used to the cast album. This happens

68 because often songs are rearranged or juxtapositions specifically for the recording. Perhaps this is no longer as much of a problem as it was. Todayʼs musical recordings are treated almost like opera. The recording industry and the artists to record the shows exactly as completely as they are performed on stage.

PART TWO (thirty minutes)

BP:

We try to eliminate every mistake. But we make them and we miss finding them. In our restoration of the vocal score of Carousel there are both musical mistakes and lyric mistakes. We try to correct these with each new printing.

DM:

I had one question about: A lot of the old piano-conductor scores from the nonrestored shows are edited by Richard A. Haggerty.

BP:

Well those are the two-piano parts. You must have been playing the two-piano versions.

DM:

Well actually this is what was sent, when we did, it was sent with the rest of the materials. We had the published scores, but there are also the rental versions of these scores.

BP:

The published vocal scores were edited by Dr. Albert Sirmay. He was a Viennese composer who came to America and went to work for Chappell as an editor. He created the published piano-vocal scores for all of the Rodgers shows until sometime in the ’40s and ’50s. He did them for Lerner & Loewe, too. In fact he did them for just about everyone in that era. The problem was that in those days, his primary job was to create “playable” piano parts. So often the piano

69 accompaniments had little to do with what the orchestra was actually playing. DM:

It was made to sound good on piano. piano parts …

BP:

At the same time, a fellow named Richard A. Haggerty was hired to create twopiano versions of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein scores. The problem with these two piano versions is that he created them using an un-cued piano-vocal score as his guide, so he didnʼt have any of the orchestration available for incorporation into his two piano version.

DM:

Really? Because the versions that I have of Carousel Oklahoma!—there is the published version and then Iʼve got piano-conductor score …

BP:

Into which the orchestra cues have been placed.

DM:

Yes. Itʼs a piano-conductor score.

BP:

For Oklahoma!, yes.

DM:

And also for Carousel.

BP:

You must have the old (the cream-colored cover) version of the piano-conductor score. It has been replace by the new (dark blue-colored cover) version, which has the orchestra cues set in type.

DM:

They didnʼt, but I had found an old friend who had a copy.

BP:

Besides making the two-piano arrangements Haggerty was hired to take the piano-vocal score and cue in orchestration.

DM:

Coming from an orchestral conducting standpoint, I always prefer the partitur for orchestral rehearsals. But in the end, depending on how quickly youʼve had to do the show, sometimes itʼs easier to use the piano-conductor score.

BP:

Oh absolutely. The new published piano-vocal score for Carousel is not as easy or as much fun to play as the earlier version, and perhaps it isnʼt as “pianistic” as is

70 Dr. Sirmayʼs piano reduction. But it mirrors exactly whatʼs going on in the orchestral accompaniment. Itʼs easy to conduct from, because what is in the piano part perfectly reflects the orchestration. In Dr. Sirmayʼs piano vocal scores he would always put the melody in the right hand, if the cellos were the only instruments playing it. He would sometimes change the voicings of the chords (but not the harmonies). Many pianists prefer playing Sirmayʼs scores because they are so satisfying from a pianistic standpoint. For our restorations, however, Wayne Blood, the guy who creates the piano reductions for our restorations, insisted from the beginning that the piano-vocal scores (and piano conductor scores) reflect the actual orchestration and not just provide pretty piano accompaniments. I have to say I agree with him. Still, I hope the old versions of the piano-vocal scores continue to circulate. So far the old version of Carousel is the only one we have taken out of print. And I think we may have been a little premature about doing that. The originally published (cream-colored cover) vocal score of Carousel doesnʼt have much to do with what is actually going on in the orchestration, but itʼs fun to play. DM:

Right.

BP:

When you create a restoration of a musical you want to go back and, as much as possible, restore the score to what it was on its opening night. But there are pieces of information that will always elude you. The orchestratorsʼ manuscript full scores will tell you what was played at the first orchestra reading of the score, but usually not what happened after that first rehearsal. Changes are made almost immediately. To know what they ended up with by opening night you need the original pit parts. These parts, when they are available, provide a missing link.

71 Trouble is, they donʼt always exist. In fact, most of the time they are missing. And you have to take into account that the original pit parts will actually be reflecting the closing night of the show, and not the opening night. Itʼs very interesting that for South Pacific, we had the Broadway pit parts, which were conducted by Salvatore DellʼIsola (an Italian conductor), as well as the touring parts, conducted by Franz Allers (a German conductor). Both sets of parts reflect the same interpretations of the same score. But Salvatore (from the Italian School) and Allers (from the German School), while working toward the same effect, got there with different dynamics, different articulations, different bowings, etc. They each had their own way of getting the same result. When Ted Sperling (conductor of the 2008 Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific) got our restoration, which was our best take on how the score was originally played, he also asked for the original pit parts. In Tedʼs early orchestra rehearsals, the concertmistress (Belinda Whitney) had the newly restored violin part on her music stand and the original violin part (which had been marked by Robert Stanley, the original Broadway concertmaster) on the floor between her feet. She used both versions to help her get the string section to the particular place Ted Sperling needed them to be in order to create his own interpretation of the original playing of the score. Ted is a marvelous musical director. And we appropriated some of his nuances into the final playing version of the show, the one which we now license. Ted was able to look back sixty years and then bring his interpretation of what the original artists were doing forward to today. The big problem with determining what actually happened in an orchestra pit forty or fifty or sixty years ago is that there may be layers of different articulations, dynamics

72 and bowings that were made and changed as the show ran. DM:

Well for instance Iʼve found bowings in a number of older printed parts, and theyʼre printed and copied in.

BP:

And itʼs hard to authenticate what the final result was. While working on our restoration of The King and I we realized the bowings for the string parts from the Overture of the original production were both sensible and consistent. We included these bowings in order to give the strings and the conductor a precise idea of how the string parts were played in the Overture of the original production. But we decided not to include the bowings for the rest of the score, because after the Overture the bowings became very inconsistent. This brings up a good point. I learned from Kevin Farrell, a terrific Rodgers conductor, when he was conducting The King And I at the St. Louis MUNY several years ago, that if you take your time with the orchestra on the Overture they will maneuver much more nimbly through the rest of the score because you have laid the groundwork for them. Kevin once spent the first two hours carefully going over the Overture of The King And I with the orchestra and then played through the entire rest of the score in the two hours of rehearsal he had left. It was amazing! Once the orchestra was clear about how he was going to interpret the Overture they had no trouble bring this information forward into the rest of the score. One point I want to make about our restorations is that from the get-go Ted Chapin, President and CEO of the R & H Organization, wanted us to document any changes we were making. So at the back of the Carousel score you will find many notes about the conundrums we encountered and how we solved them. For

73 example, in the orchestral introduction to “Mr. Snow” there is an E in the second violin part in measure six that all of our information tells us should be a D. (Everywhere else in Don Walkerʼs orchestration of this theme has the note as a D and not an E.) We made the decision to correct the note. I believe Walker simply made a mistake. But in our notes we spell this out and we give anyone who is interested in changing the D we corrected back into an E the opportunity to do so. We state that we made a decision based on the information available to us but that you may interpret that information differently and may make a different decision. DM:

If an E makes sense to you.

BP:

Itʼs very hard, when working on a restoration to keep yourself out of it. You donʼt want to speak for the composer or the orchestrator or any of the other artists involved because you are not those people. And you donʼt want to make decisions based on your own personal preferences, to decide in your own mind that you know better than the original composer or orchestrator or arranger or player. You just want to communicate their intentions to the best of your ability. Sometimes those intentions are hard to decipher, and you have to make your own call. But this is when you need to come clean and to point out that you have indeed made call, and it might not be, given the same information, the call someone else might make. You want to be constantly reiterating the point that, “We made this call because of this information. Go back and examine the information, and see if you agree. Because maybe you wonʼt agree.” Our index of the Carousel is full of these points for future musicians to ponder. One of the interesting conundrums regarding “The Carousel Waltz” the rhythm in measures 69, 71, 72, 77, 79 and 80 and later in measures 363, 365, 366, 371,

74 373 and 374. In Rodgers original pencil manuscript he uses dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note on the first beat of measures 69, 71, 72, 77, 79 and 80 but he uses straight eighth notes for the same figure in measures 363, 365, 366, 371, 373 and 374. Walker simply copied what Rodgers wrote. Should both of these sections of the music be the same rhythmically? Did Rodgers intend this variation or did he simply forget how head had written it the first time? DM:

How can we ever know, unless there is some documentation?

BP:

My first thought was that Rodgers had made a mistake. So the restoration shows both sections with the dotted eighth note to sixteenth note rhythm. But later on I began to wonder if the tempo was intended to be faster the second time around, be the reason for straightening out the rhythm in the second section. Anyway, I hadnʼt thought of that when I wrote the restoration.

DM: Thatʼs similar to a story of my own. One of my advisers at UC Davis is a Berlioz expert, D. Kern Holoman, and he cataloged the works of Berlioz. We were doing Symphonie Fantastique, and in the “March to the Scaffold” [hums a few bars of melody], and whenever we got there to that section he always sped it up a whole lot, and I always said “Itʼs not in the score. It doesnʼt do that.” And he told me that Berlioz, who went around conducting this everywhere, wrote down in his manuscript the exact time it takes for each movement. And he never includes that in his scores. If you time it out with half-note equals 72, it doesnʼt add up with what he wrote, so we think he sped up here. Because thatʼs just something you would have done.” Itʼs one of those things that, even if you could write that down, you still canʼt get it across in every format. Itʼs going to somehow get lost. BP: If you do it by the numbers, itʼs going to feel awkward anyways. Somehow

75 everyoneʼs got to feel it. DM:

And thatʼs part of the job of the music director.

BP:

Whoʼs directing Carousel for you?

DM:

Heʼs a playwright / director named Tony Howarth.

BP:

And whoʼs choreographing?

DM:

A younger girl, Heidi Kloes.

BP:

Even if she doesnʼt use the original choreography, make sure that she sees the DVD (or video cassette) of The Dances of Carousel that we license. It shows Agnes de Mille going through all of her original choreography for Carousel. And you should watch it, too. Everyone who is interested in Carousel should see it. It helps you understand what all that music is there. And de Mille is not telling you that you must use her steps. In fact she says that the choreography isnʼt about the steps. The dances and the choreography are about the emotion. Agnes de Mille was very specific about the “June Dance.” Everyone likes to do the “June Dance” it is choreographed in the movie of Carousel, with the men and the women dancing together. But de Mille wanted to introduce the feminine point of view. She explains in the video why she wanted the women to be dancing. She had done the same thing in Oklahoma! with “Many A New Day.”

DM:

Just the girls, to contrast “Blow High, Blow Low,” where itʼs just the men.

BP:

Exactly. And then the men and the women dance with each other, later on. But itʼs really helpful to see that video. And if you can, watch it with your choreographer.

DM:

Iʼd love that.

BP:

Yes.

DM:

I learned that in the Library of Congress, for a week to look at the Rouben

76 Mamoulian Papers for Oklahoma! look at the different drafts. You know Tim Carter? Heʼs a musicologist and just wrote a book on Oklahoma!. BP:

Yes.

DM:

I studied with him when I was an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill, and I went back and I said “Weʼre doing Oklahoma! and Iʼm writing about it in my thesis. There are a lot of things I could talk about, but what should I focus on?” He talked about his book where he has all of the drafts of the show, but I didnʼt have time to get one particular draft, which is considered a missing-link between early versions and the final published version. Which I think is between what he calls “draft 2” and what ended up getting published. He said “Mamoulian wasnʼt a pushover. There were a lot of things that he wanted to change, and who knows who is credited for those things.”

BP:

Luckily, for our restoration of Oklahoma! Gemze de Lappe is helping us put back some of the original Mamoulian staging which has gone missing over the years. Gemze says that what Mamoulian was brilliant at was the ensembles. Until Mamoulian the chorus basically just stood there and sang. Maybe theyʼd raise their arms or all go down on one knee together on a given beat, but what they were doing was choreography and not character. Gemze said Mamoulian made everyone on stage a character, even if they were just standing in the background. The comic bits especially are going to be more carefully laid out in the restored script. This is all thanks to Gemze and her memory and understanding of Mamoulianʼs original work. We restored the score of Carousel, but there are still a couple of lyric inconsistencies. I know there are two in “When I Marry Mister Snow.” There are

77 a couple of wrong notes in “Youʼll Never Walk Alone” as well. DM:

Well you know in the script they leave out the opening section of “When The Children Are Asleep” (“I own a little boat,” etc.) thatʼs not the restored script. Iʼm thinking of an older one which the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization sent to us when we got our show materials. The script left out the opening section of “I own a little boat.”

BP:

Yes.

DM:

When Carrie sings that verse itʼs left out in the script, but this is the older version.

BP:

Itʼs possible. You mean in the verse in which she sings “When children are awake, a romping through the rooms, and plodding down the stairs?”

DM:

Also, in the “Highest Judge of All” Billy sings “Reckon my sins are good big sins” in the old published piano-vocal he just repeats … well, I donʼt remember exactly the words he repeats, but he doesnʼt sing “Reckon my sins are good big sins,” which to me is the heart of the song.

BP:

This lyric (“good big sins”) might have been incorrect in the original vocal score. But “good big sins” is the lyric Hammerstein intended. It is published in the Random House version of the libretto. And I believe we have corrected this mistake in our new edition of Carousel. However, there are mistakes—both printed mistakes and recording mistakes—on cast albums that we learn to live with. In the movie of The Sound of Music there is a lyric mistake in the song “The Sound of Music.” [He sings:] “To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way.” The correct lyric is “stones in its way.” This mistake can be traced all the way back to the original rehearsal material for the Broadway production. It was caught and corrected there. Mary Martin sings “in its way.”

78 But it wasnʼt corrected in the published sheet music and vocal score. So when they made the film they repeated the mistake. DM:

I remember “on its way.”

BP:

Everybody does. Itʼs wrong. It was an early copying error. It stands corrected today, but for years we all heard and read “on its way” and we got used to it.

DM:

Now thatʼs how everyone knows it.

BP:

We uncovered this error while talking to Peter Howard, a Broadway conductor who died a couple of years ago. He was the rehearsal pianist for the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music. He recalled, “I remember this. Hammerstein walked over to the piano and crossed out ʻonʼ on the score from which we were rehearsing and wrote ʻinʼ in its place.” Later we looked in our files, and there it was—Peterʼs rehearsal score was marked just that way. When you think about it “on its way” doesnʼt make sense, unless youʼre saying something like “over stones, on its way to the sea.” But thatʼs not what Hammerstein wrote. The other lyric mistake that is regularly made happens in “Hello Young Lovers” (from The King and I) lyric “I know how it feels to have wings on your heels and to fly down . . .” Now, is it “a street” or “the street?” If you guessed “a street” you are correct. But on the movie soundtrack recording, Debbie Kerr (or Marni Nixon) sings “THE street.” Itʼs wrong. It could have been a copying error. Who knows? These things happen. Recordings are permanent records of mistakes that no one caught at the time.

DM:

And these mistakes accumulate over time.

BP:

And sometimes you donʼt know the answer to the question, “Which version is

79 correct?” you have to sleuth for it. Most of these errors are small points. But sometimes they are a little bit bigger. I donʼt know how involved youʼre going to be in the staging of your upcoming production of Carousel, but thereʼs something they did in the original production that was very effective. Iʼm not even sure if this got into the original script. Itʼs a bit of staging that comes at the end of the play. Everybody is seated on stage is seated for the graduation ceremony, except for Billy, the Doctor, and the Heavenly Friend. When the Ensemble begins to sing “When you walk through a storm” the girls in Louiseʼs graduation class stand up, all except for … DM:

Louise.

BP:

Yes, Louise remains sitting on her bench. And on the other bench the adults have also stood up—all except for Julie. So everyone on stage is standing except for Louise and Julie. Then, when Billy says to Louise, “Believe him, darling! Believe.” Louise stands up. Now Julie is the only person on stage who is still sitting. When Billy says to her “know that I loved you” Julie stands. Itʼs a terrific musical theater moment. Not only do we see that Billy is able to do something good for his wife and daughter, and thereby get himself out of purgatory, we see both of these women join the community. They are now a part of something Billy himself was never able to be a part of. He has given these two women the courage to belong.

DM: That issue of community is something that a lot of other authors have written about recently, in terms of the conflict in a lot of musicals. All the way back through, well a lot of dramas in general, but especially starting with Rodgers and Hammerstein, this issue of the outsider versus the community. Itʼs been written a

80 lot about Oklahoma! with Jud, and how thereʼs this primal sort of conflict in like 95% of most musicals where you have somebody that is an outsider, and they either get assimilated or they leave or die. Jud is an example of that, Carousel happens with that, somebody like Billy, and eventually Julie and Louise, and South Pacific. Itʼs so much about community which I think is such a powerful universal concept, and everyone can relate to it. BP:

Yes. And it was important to Hammerstein. He believed that the best way to live is as a part of a community. Even when you have to stand against your community, youʼre still in it. The people we share the planet with are our neighbors. We need to learn to love them, or at least, how to live with them. “Getting To Know You” may be the most political song Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote. But his cure for what ails us as neighbors is so simple we tend to overlook it.

DM: I remember reading the liner notes in the new Allegro recording, and I think it was Ted Chapin was writing about his take on Hammersteinʼs thoughts about Allegro, and the concept of how people are used in communities, and how sometimes they end up having to go back to it. BP: Allegro is the only one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that makes me cry at the end, and all of them have powerful, emotional endings which are beautifully written and staged. The King and I is another R & H show that at its conclusion makes a grand statement. But it is easy to miss. The last shot of the movie of The King and I of the stars: Deborah Kerr takes Yule Brynnerʼs hand and the camera closes in on this. But it tends to focus the audience on the tragic ending love story, and thatʼs not really whatʼs going on. What is happening is that,

81 with the death of the King, the world is changing. The prince (Chulalongkorn), when asked by his dying father what he will do when he is King, first answers that he will have boat races, because he likes races. Itʼs a silly little joke of a line, but it tells us that the boy is grasping the power he will have to make his world what he wants it to be. And then he makes a profound decision. He doesnʼt want the men to bow to him like toads. He wants them only to bow from the waist up, and he shows them how to do it (just as he has been taught to bow (in “Getting To Know You” by Mrs. Anna). Chulalongkorn then says that the ladies will curtsey. But he doesnʼt know how to do this, and he calls for help from his mother (Lady Thiang). And Lady Thiang comes forward, toward her husband, the dead King, and the audience thinks she is going to bow to him. But at the last moment she turns and curtseys to her son, the new King. The entire court of women now curtsey, as Hammerstein says, “a gesture of obedience to the old King, a gesture of allegiance to the new one.” It is a stunning moment. Chulalongkorn is able to take the step his father was not able to take. And in asking for his motherʼs help (in front of the entire court) the new King has given women a new place in their world. The King has publicly asked a woman for help. What inexpressible pride Thiang must feel as she steps forward in that last moment of the play. And what satisfaction for the audience to see Anna and the King both get what they were working for. Yes, the King dies, but his dream lives in his children. Now, back to the Allegro: Joe Taylor, Jr. (the leading character in the story) is given a second chance. He gets his life back. Up to the end of the story he has fallen off track, but hearing one simple word—ornament—somehow opens a door for him, and he sees his way back to the life he was meant to live. The problem

82 with Allegro is people think itʼs about going home, and I think itʼs only metaphorically about going home. Itʼs really about going back to what makes you “you.” It doesnʼt have to be going back to the Midwest or getting out of the city. Itʼs getting back to what you were born to be, what you know youʼre about, which is a powerful thing—powerful enough to choke me up every time I read or hear or see it. DM:

I agree.

BP:

When are you doing Carousel?

DM:

I start rehearsals in a week. We rehearse for a week, and we put it on for a week, and then itʼs over.

BP:

Youʼre not here tomorrow, are you?

DM:

No.

BP:

Youʼve got to make sure you email me tomorrow and give me an address, cause Iʼll overnight the score to you so you have it,

DM:

That would be fantastic. I did Brigadoon earlier in the season, a few weeks ago, and Tams-Witmark actually had a full score to it—it was really good manuscript.

BP:

Dale Kugel created that full score for Brigadoon many years ago. It was one of the first available for a Broadway musical.

DM:

It was neat—it had all of the script, and it had stuff that was not in the script. Talk about a complete document! It didnʼt have all the dialog, but it solved the inconsistencies. Have you heard about Steve Suskinʼs new book (The Sound of Broadway Music)?

BP:

Oh yes.

DM:

Thatʼs just a dream come true for me.

83 BP:

Have you read it?

DM:

I just got a copy and Iʼm making my way through it.

BP:

Well itʼs a wonderful book, although Iʼve been made aware of a few mistakes in it. Steve Suskin is a terrific writer, but it bothers me when I am misquoted. In this book Steve makes the statement that no Broadway composer ever wrote his own overtures. And the truth is that Frederick Loewe did write the Overture to My Fair Lady. Thereʼs a manuscript in his hand—the whole introduction all the way to “On The Street Where You Live.” Loewe instructs, “One chorus of ʻStreet Where You Liveʼ in C.” Then Loewe writes the transition to “I Could Have Danced All Night” and instructs, “One chorus of ʻI Could Have Danced All Nightʼ in E-flat.” He laid out the complete My Fair Lady Overture, and he did this for Camelot, as well. Well, he forgot about it. And now itʼs in print that Broadway composers did not write their own overtures. Frederick Loewe did. But Iʼm not coming down on Steve Suskin. Iʼm grateful for every book heʼs written. And heʼs saved me from more than one of my own mistakes. The point Iʼm making here is how careful you have to be when youʼre documenting anything. And in The Sound of Broadway Music documents the orchestration of Broadway shows brilliantly.

DM:

Itʼs nice because itʼs written in a very accessible way to people that are interested. It explains concepts like “ghosting,” something that I wasnʼt very keen on. Being someone whoʼs been in academia for a while, Iʼve been doing semi-professional productions out in California, I rely so much on documents that are published. Thereʼs a foreword introduction to the script of A Little Night Music, where Jonathan Tunick writes, and he talks about his involvement with the show, and

84 how songs came about, and different keys, and clarinet books. There are so few things about that on orchestration, which is why I was so excited to get a chance to talk with you about not just orchestration, but the whole process. BP:

When you come through New York again, you must come to our office, because there are so many things there I know youʼd have a great time perusing.

DM:

Iʼd love to. Iʼm sorry I was so restricted to this one day, because really I have to go down to the Library of Congress right away.

BP:

Who do you talk to down there? Mark Horowitz?

DM:

Mark Eden Horowitz.

BP:

Heʼs a wonderful and a knowledgeable guy. Do you know his book about Sondheim?

DM:

Yes. And Iʼve read his stuff. Everybodyʼs been really helpful. That being said, I really appreciate your time, and I think I need to go now.

BP:

Only if youʼre finished.

DM:

I might have a few follow-up questions, too, if itʼs okay.

BP:

Yes, just let me know. By the way, how did you find me?

DM:

Through my friend, Tim Matson. He and I did Hair together, and I was his music director. He was a performance guy, and then he moved to New York and got a job with R & H. Now I think heʼs doing music direction elsewhere.

BP:

He was a bright fellow. I suspected we might not have him for long. We will miss him.

DM:

He said “You need to talk to Bruce.” So Iʼm glad he put me in touch with you.

BP:

So what do you do now? Go back to California?

DM:

I go and do Carousel. Auditions, then a week of rehearsals. Iʼm sorry I just had

85 auditions. A week of rehearsals and a week of performance. So I just cast it, then Iʼm down to D.C. When I get back to California, Iʼm finishing up writing my thesis. Iʼm done with classes and everything to get my masters. Iʼm working on a production of The Threepenny Opera, and itʼs nice because one of our conductors … BP:

Which version are you doing? The one we license or another version?

DM:

Weʼre doing the other one with the Jeremy Sams translation, because my director really likes it. You guys have the Blitzstein translation?

BP:

Yes.

DM:

So Iʼm doing that and itʼs nice because one of the other conductors up at the summer stock company is Kim Kowalke of the Kurt Weill Foundation. Heʼs doing Titanic this week, right now. So I said “let me pick your brain about Kurt Weill and Brecht.” So Iʼm going back to do The Threepenny Opera. Then Iʼm going to do a production of Trial by Jury.

BP:

Oh good. So you do Gilbert & Sullivan, too?

DM:

Yes, and I got started with that up in the summer stock company. I actually just got into Rodgers and Hammerstein. I had been a huge Sondheim fan, and I spent my whole time doing rock musicals and Sondheim, and some older Andrew Lloyd Weber stuff, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. At UC Davis they said “Itʼs the 100th anniversary of the school and we want to do a big show that everyone knows. We want to do one thatʼs about our agricultural schoolʼs background. So letʼs do Oklahoma!.” And I said “Okay, Oklahoma!ʼs great” and I had done it before. Then I got into it, and now I get to do Carousel, and I really want to do Allegro next. I just want to go through all of them because theyʼre so

86 important. I think people in my generation think itʼs hard to get excited by Rodgers and Hammerstein. In a way itʼs kind of like Mozart symphonies. Sure Brahms and Beethoven have all this great stuff, but youʼve got stuff that was really, really good right before then, that they … BP:

They built on it.

DM:

They built on it! Thatʼs what they had to go off.

BP:

It turned them on and got them excited.

DM:

And so many people in my generation, like this theater company, itʼs all young people, and maybe three of them have done Oklahoma! or Carousel. I told them “Youʼve got to do this first.” Youʼve got to understand where the art form is today, where it came from.

BP:

I suspect that today, R & H is harder to get into, especially if youʼre coming to it via the movies. Except for The Sound of Music and The King and I itʼs hard to get a full grasp of what these shows accomplished and still accomplish on stage.

DM:

The staging and orchestrations and everything.

BP:

Iʼm just running through Carousel right now in my mind, number by number, and I donʼt think thereʼs anything I havenʼt told you. Regarding “Soliloquy,” youʼll see that new middle section and decide whether you want to do it or not. Although the challenge of producing Carousel is not so much what you may want to add as to what you may have to cut.

DM:

Yeah, especially in a summer stock company. If I had a couple of months to rehearse it like I do back west.

BP:

Do you have many dancers?

DM:

No. It was really tough to find a Louise, cause she has that whole ballet. Itʼs

87 tough, but at the same time, you know sometimes Iʼve been involved playing in the pit for a production, where they completely restructured the ballet, like the dream ballet, and when I did Oklahoma! back west, I did the whole “Dream Ballet.” I knew it was going to be a beast, and some of itʼs maybe not going to make sense, but we did it. And it was just so incredibly powerful. To think that so many people when they approach this show they think “Weʼve got to cut, weʼve got to cut, weʼve got to rewrite it.” Thereʼs something to be said for looking at something the way it was written and see if that works before you change it. BP:

If you can. The other thing about the ballet, is you get to see the contribution of Trude Rittman to Rodgers work. She always gave him the credit for the success of their collaboration, but I think she was being modest. She was a wonderful composer, as well as an arranger.

DM:

Do you know a gentlemen named Peter Purrin? Heʼs a graduate student like me, but heʼs at the University of Kentucky. Heʼs doing a lot of research about Don Walker right now. Thereʼs also Kara Gardner, at University of San Francisco. Sheʼs getting ready to write a book or an article called Agnes de Mille, I think? Itʼs a lot about Trude Rittman, and Agnes De Mille, and Don Walker, and their role in that process. Fascinating stuff.

BP:

Trude sometimes composed the connective tissue for her dance arrangements in Rodgers shows, but essentially she was arranging the music Rodgers composed. (This is not entirely the case with “The Small House Of Uncle Thomas” in The King And I.) The reason people often think Trude composed some of the dance music is that she was such a clever arranger, she could make the Rodgers

88 melodies she used sound like new ones. For example, the pas de deux in Louiseʼs ballet in Carousel. DM:

The six-eight section …

BP:

Exactly. I was told by Ted Chapin that Dorothy Rodgers didnʼt like that Pas de Deux music because she thought Trude Rittman had written it. But Trude didnʼt write it. She based it on Rodgers music. You know which music that is?

DM:

No.

BP:

[Singing] “I wonder what heʼll think of me? I guess heʼll call me the old man.”

DM:

Cause it has all of those thirds—A major to F, to C …

BP:

Itʼs her improvisation on the “Soliloquy.” But she only uses only the few notes Rodgers wrote for those words. And then she makes them something else entirely. Only a good composer is capable of coming up with that kind of a variation.

DM:

Wow!

BP:

When you go hear it again, this section of the Ballet youʼll see how one might wonder if it was composed by Rodgers or by Trude Rittmann.

DM:

Thatʼs what I had been trying to think, and I figured it was Trude Rittman.

BP and DM: [both sing the rest of the six-eight section together.] DM:

I just realized, and this is probably a little obvious, but that the opening Waltz them [sings a bit of “The Carousel Waltz”] is the same as the main melody.

BP:

Yes.

DM:

So many things to dig into.

BP:

Youʼll have fun.

DM:

Thank you so much.

BP:

Youʼre welcome. I hope that we get to meet each other again some day.

89 DM:

Iʼm certainly moving to New York in the next couple of years.

BP:

Okay. Youʼll come to the office. Iʼll send you the score right away. I want you to have it.

DM:

Thank you. Iʼll follow up with an email when I get there.

BP:

Keep my posted on how your production goes.

DM:

Definitely.

90 BIBLIOGRAPHY Books, Articles and Interviews Banfield, Stephen. Jerome Kern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). ———. Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Bennett, Robert Russell. Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills, 1975). ———. “The Broadway Sound”: The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett, ed. George J. Ferencz (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999). Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Comedy: From Adonis to Dreamgirls (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Carter, Tim. Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Chapin, Ted. Interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, Washington D.C., 17 February 2009. Citron, Stephen. The Wordsmiths: Oscar Hammerstein 2nd and Alan Jay Lerner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Conrad, Jon. Correspondence with Ted Chapin, in appendix of Carousel full score, ed. Bruce Pomahac (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 2008), 611–30. Engel, Lehman. Words with Music: Creating the Broadway Musical Libretto, updated and revised by Howard Kissel (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2006). Fordin, Hugh. Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II (New York: Random House, 1977). Hammerstein II, Oscar. “Preface: A Kind of Grandfather,” in Sheean The Amazing Oscar Hammerstein: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario (London: Lowe and Brydone, 1956), xv–xx. Hirsch, Foster. Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre, revised and expanded edn. (Cambridge, 2005).

91 Hischak, Thomas. Boy Loses Girl: Broadwayʼs Librettists (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002). ———. Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical when it Went to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004). Hyland, William G. Richard Rodgers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Jones, John Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003). Kirle, Bruce. Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). ———. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Langner, Lawrence. “The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma! and Carousel,” in The Richard Rodgers Reader, ed. Geoffrey Block (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112–24. McMillin, Scott. The Musical as Drama (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). Miller, Derek. “ ʻUnderneath the Groundʼ: Jud and the Community in Oklahoma!,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2, no. 2 (2008): 163–74. Miller, Jonathan. Subsequent Performances (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books / Viking, 1986). Mordden, Ethan. Beautiful Morninʼ: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). ———. “The Work That Changed the Form,” in The Richard Rodgers Reader, ed. Geoffrey Block (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 105–12. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Nolan, Frederick. The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers & Hammerstein (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2002). Patinkin, Sheldon. “No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance”: A History of the Americal Musical

92 Theater Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008). Pomahac, Bruce. Interview with David Möschler, New York City, NY, 26 July 2009. ———. “Restoration Notes” in Carousel full score, ed. Bruce Pomahac (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 2008), 585–610. Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975). Rosenberg, Bernard and Ernest Harburg. The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: New York University Press, 1993). Sears, Ann. “The Coming of the Musical Play: Rodgers and Hammerstein” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A. Everett and Paul Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Secrest, Meryle. Stephen Sondheim: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). ———. Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). Sheean, Vincent. The Amazing Oscar Hammerstein: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario (London: Lowe and Brydone, 1956). Suskin, Steven. The Sound of Broadway Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) Swain, Joseph. The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002). Swayne, Steve. How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Wilk, Max. OK! The Story of Oklahoma! : A Celebration of Americaʼs Most Beloved Musical (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2002). Woodruff, Paul. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Scores and Scripts Molnár, Ferenc. Liliom. Translated and edited by Benjamin F. Glazer (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921). Riggs, Lynn. Green Grow the Lilacs: A Play (Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1931).

93 ———. “Green Grow the Lilacs: A Play,” in Nine Modern American Plays, ed. Barrett H. Clark and William H. Davenport (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1951), 88–185. Rodgers, Richard, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Carousel libretto, ed. Richard E. Haggerty (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1975). ———. Carousel vocal score, ed. Albert Sirmay (New York: Williamson Music Co., 1945). ———. Carousel piano-conductor score, ed. Richard E. Haggerty (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1978). ———. Carousel full score, ed. Bruce Pomahac (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 2008) ———. “Oklahoma!,” in 6 Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Random House, 1955), 1–84. ———. Oklahoma! libretto, ed. Richard E. Haggerty (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1975). ———. Oklahoma! vocal score, ed. Albert Sirmay (New York: Williamson Music Co., 1943). ———. Oklahoma! piano-conductor score, ed. Richard E. Haggerty (New York: Williamson Music, Inc., 1978). Manuscripts and Collections Carousel and By Jupiter piano vocal sheets and sketches, Folders 16–27, Box 3, Richard Rodgers Collection, processed by Mark Eden Horowitz (Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Carousel full scores, boxes 22, 26, 27, 28 from Don Walker Collection (Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Oscar Hammerstein II Collection, partially processed (Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Rouben Mamoulian Productions and Projects, cart of unprocessed materials prepared by Laura Kells (Rare Manuscripts, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Audio and Video Oklahoma!: Featuring members of the New York production (Alfred Drake / Joan

94 Roberts / Jay Blackton), MCA CD reissue 10798 (1943). Carousel Featuring Members of the Original Cast (John Raitt / Jan Clayton / Joseph Littau), MCA CD reissue MCAD-10799 (1945). Rodgers & Hammersteinʼs Oklahoma!, dir. Fred Zinneman (Gordon McCrae / Shirley Jones), Twentieth Century Fox Films DVD Reissue (1955). From the Soundtrack of the Motion Picture: Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs Oklahoma! (Gordon McCrae / Shirley Jones / Jay Blackton), Angel CD reissue 64651 (1955). Rodgers & Hammersteinʼs Carousel, dir. Henry King (Gordon McCrae / Shirly Jones), Twentieth Century Fox Films DVD Reissue (1956). From the Soundtrack of the Motion Picture: Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs Carousel (Gordon McCrae / Shirley Jones / Alfred Newman), Angel CD Reissue 764692 (1956). Broadway Cast Album: Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs Oklahoma! (Laurence Guittard / Christine Andreas / Jay Blackton), RCA CD RCD1-3572 (1980). Carousel 1987 Studio Recording (Barbara Cook / Samuel Ramey / Paul Gemignani), MCA CD MCAD 6209 (1987). Carousel 1994 Broadway Cast Recording (Michael Hayden / Sally Murphy / Audra McDonald), Angel CD CDQ 5 55199 2 4 (1994). Royal National Theatre Production: Rodgers and Hammersteinʼs Oklahoma! (Hugh Jackman / Josefina Gabrielle / John Owen Edwards), First Night Cast CD 69 (1998). Rodgers & Hammersteinʼs Oklahoma! dir. Trevor Nunn (Hugh Jackman / Maureen Lipman), Universal Pictures, UK DVD (2004).