7/6/2023 0 Comments Oklahoma by richard rodgers![]() ![]() Of all the great makers of the American song, none has undergone so drastic a change in educated-O.K., call it “élite”-opinion in the past twenty years as Hammerstein. (He was always the second, named after his grandfather, who, like most of his family, was a major figure in theatre, very much the family trade.) I refer to the lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein, the author of “South Pacific” and “The King and I” and so many other musicals, who is now the subject of a just published, and fascinating, collection of letters, “ The Letters Of Oscar Hammerstein II,” edited by Mark Eden Horowitz, from Oxford University Press. Having fit, or tried to, just about the whole history of English rhyme into a recent essay, I nonetheless left out a section about perhaps the most influential of all American rhymesters-who, ironically, had no particular gift or even interest in sound or in language for its own shimmering sake, and who basically hid his rhyme away. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |