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More than a few Broadway musical buffs eagerly awaited The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein, which takes its place alongside Knopf's previously published lyric collections of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. For my part, I wasn't counting the days. There, I said it.
In popular perception, musicals tend to be considered corny—never mind that so many classic ones are not. Kiss Me, Kate, Sweet Charity, and A Little Night Music are not saccharine stories. It is the titanic success of Hammerstein's shows with Richard Rodgers that have played a large part in branding musicals as apple-cheeked experiences: think of corn as high as an elephant's eye, or South Pacific's Nellie Forbush, a winsome hick from Arkansas, singing about a "bright canary yellow" sky. Hammerstein was born and bred as an affluent New Yorker, but his spiritual home base was the rural and the sentimental.
Asked why he didn't write the "sophisticated" kind of musical that the other golden age composers specialized in, Hammerstein answered, "You mean one that takes place in a New York penthouse? Mostly because it doesn't interest me." It really didn't: he was known to tear up at his lyric for "The Surrey with the Fringe On Top," the one about chicks and geese scurrying and a lark waking up in the meadow.
To be sure, Hammerstein was top-notch in terms of technique. Imagine being handed the melody for "Ol' Man River" and asked to compose a lyric that 1) is plausible from an unlettered black laborer; 2) thematically sums up Show Boat's protean story about the passage of time, thwarted ambition, and ill-starred love; and nevertheless 3) does not sound forced. Hammerstein came up with a lyric so true that many mistake the song for a genuine black spiritual.
The content is the rub. "Ol' Man River" was of a subsidiary civil rights vein in Hammerstein's work (also exemplified by South Pacific's "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught"). The heart of his output had the wide-eyed take on life of the "My Favorite Things" lyric—"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens / Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens"—and it meant that overall his work engaged a smaller slice of what life is than we would prefer of someone with such central stature in musical theater history. (Scholar Ethan Mordden has suggested, in all seriousness, that the chorus of jolly shmoe workers in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Pipe Dream, a musicalization of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, be played by Muppets.)
Hammerstein could be taken as channeling an Americanness that would soon become extinct: the 1930 census was the first to record more Americans living in cities than in the country. Until then, The City was the debauched setting depicted in tragic novels by Theodore Dreiser. The Country was the real America, such that if Sherwood Anderson wrote about the underbelly of small-town America in Winesburg, Ohio, it was news. Today, the notion of the city as unhealthy for one's morals is antique. We pity urban residents dealt a bad hand but hardly suppose that they would be best off relocating to Winesburg—we assume that The City should be made a better place for them.
Hammerstein never internalized this change in sensibility, and the irony is that despite the rearguard ethos of his lyrics, he was the prime driver of the development of the American musical in terms of its narrative structure. His career had three phases, of which the partnership with Rodgers was the final one, the only one comprehensively accessible now because the original cast recording was invented just as it dawned. For most of the Twenties, Hammerstein wrote frothy confections, sharing lyric and script chores with Otto Harbach. But even then, he was already straining to make songs drive plot rather than decorate it.
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