Somewhere for me : a biography of Richard Rodgers / Meryle Secrest.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Secrest, Meryle.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rodgers, Richard, 1902-1979.

Rodgers, Richard.

Composers--United States--Biography.

Composers.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xv, 457 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2001.

Summary:

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers -- more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable -- Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood -- seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.

Now Meryle Secrest -- biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein -- brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

She writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operetta -- of Franz Lehar and Jerome Kern. She follows his close and wonderfully productive working relationship with Lorenz Hart -- a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hart's drinking. She evokes Rodgers's triumphant second collaboration, with the gifted -- and happily stable -- Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and more. She explores Rodgers's own problems with alcohol as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his forty-nine-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.

Somewhere for Me is both a lively portrait of American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody, and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.

Contents:

1 Blue Room 3

2 Only Make Believe 15

3 "My Funny Valentine" 30

4 "War Is War" 45

5 "We'll Have Manhattan" 59

6 "My Heart Stood Still" 76

7 "He's a Winner" 91

8 "With a Song in My Heart" 112

9 "Where's That Rainbow?" 136

10 "Little Girl Blue" 161

11 "The Night Boat to Albania" 181

12 "Nobody's Heart" 207

13 "Many a New Day" 235

14 "Allegro" 260

15 "So Far" 287

16 "The Man I Used to Be" 316

17 "The Sky Falls Down" 340

18 Looking Straight Ahead 362

19 The Key to the Curtain 382.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-436) and index.

ISBN:

0375401644

OCLC:

46908290