Little ink has been spared when it comes to cataloging the achievements of the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who, with the composer Richard Rodgers, wrote some of the most iconic shows in the American musical theater canon, including “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music” and “Oklahoma!”
The new book “The Hammersteins: A Musical Theater Family” (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2010) takes a slightly different biographical approach: it was written by Oscar Andrew Hammerstein, the grandson of Oscar Hammerstein II. The book explores the Hammerstein family tree from an insider’s perspective, beginning in 1864, when Oscar Hammerstein I emigrated to the United States and built a career as an opera impresario and theater developer, to the death of Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960, a year after “The Sound of Music” opened on Broadway.
“I saw a single, creative continuity in the same family, with three generations pushing the musical theater of their day forward,” Mr. Hammerstein said in a telephone interview. “They were all furthering the sung story.”
ArtsBeat asked Mr. Hammerstein, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, to choose some of his favorite photos from the book — many of which have never before been made public — and to explain how they tell the Hammerstein story. Below are his selections and excerpts from his commentary.
When Opera Met the Musical
Oscar Hammerstein, seated, with, from left, Jerome Kern, Louis A. Hirsch, A. Baldwin Sloane, Rudolph Friml, Alfred Robyn, Gustave Kerker, Hugo Felix, John Philip Sousa, Leslie Stuart, Raymond Hubbell, John Golden, Sylvio Hein and Irving Berlin.“These are the greater and lesser lights of the Viennese-slash-American operetta movement. This was the way station between opera and musicals as we know them. With opera it’s exclusive, and classicist and rich. These are the guys who were trying to make musical theater a commercial go.
“I grew up with this photo. It was in my room from the time I was three. It confused me. At an early age I had this curiosity for who the old man at the piano was. It was Oscar Hammerstein, the first.”
The ‘Show Boat’ Trio
“Oscar Hammerstein, Florenz Ziegfeld and Jerome Kern — this was the union that produced ‘Show Boat.’ It’s interesting to me because when Oscar got into the business in about 1919 he worked for his uncle, Arthur, who bankrolled every show that Oscar did. Most of them were flops but some were hits.
“Yet Oscar’s biggest hit was when he peeled away from his uncle to with work with Ziegfeld. It’s a sad picture, in the sense that Arthur’s not in the picture.
“Oscar was used to writing two to three shows a year. He had written 42 shows before he met Richard Rodgers. The idea of having a year to work on the show is why ‘Show Boat’ was of such high quality.”
Hammerstein in Hollywood
“Just as the ’20s were a career trajectory upward, the ’30s were Oscar’s trajectory downward. This was when composers jumped between New York and Hollywood. This is a picture of him around 1936, working for hire. It paid the bills, but he wasn’t good at it. In the ’30s, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Porter, really swung the decade. He was not a guy who swung.
“After the Depression, during the rise of the motion picture industry, were not good years for Oscar. His operatic skill sets were archaic, and he was losing his stature with every show. This is a picture of him in decline.”
On the Farm
“Dorothy was Oscar’s second wife, at their home in Bucks County, in Pennsylvania. They met across a crowded room. He was smitten. He was living in a loveless marriage at the time. He fell in love and they stayed married until his death in 1959.
“In shows like ‘Allegro’ and ‘State Fair’ there’s an undercurrent of country good, city bad. Things get complicated when they get busy and bright and urban. This quality ran through the majority of his shows. The farm for him was a place of solitude, and a place where he got to write the kind of characters he liked to write for. He never wrote for a guy who’s in therapy.”
A Boy Named Stephen
“Stephen Sondheim climbed over the fence, metaphorically, and into Oscar’s life. Sondheim was my father’s playmate, basically. Oscar became his father and for Oscar Sondheim became his student and his creative son. This was taken around 1945.
“That may have caused a lot of emotional damage in my family. I think Oscar preferred Sondheim to his own children. I don’t blame Sondheim. He was the catalyst, not the cause of disaffection between Oscar and his children. Sondheim said that if Oscar had been an electrician, he would have been an electrician.”
Julie Andrews
“This was about 1958 or 1959. I have always felt that Julie Andrews could have played every woman in the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalog: Julie Jordan, Laurie, Anna. They wrote shows a decade too early for the perfect woman for all their shows.
“There was something strong, straightforward and goodhearted about Julie Andrews. It just shines through.
“Oscar never knew she was in ‘The Sound of Music.’ He died way before the movie was even put together. He would have loved to see her in it.”
(All photos courtesy of Black Dog & Leventhal.)
Larry Stempel, the author of “Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater,” is an associate professor of music at Fordham University.