Product details
- ISBN 9780300217605
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 2015
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A lively book that examines—for the first time—the full range of music by one of America’s most celebrated composers
Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals. Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.
Geoffrey Block is editor of the Richard Rodgers Reader and author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim. Professor of music at the University of Puget Sound, he is also coeditor of Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition, published by Yale University Press.
