The House That George Built by Wilfrid Sheed

Author:Wilfrid Sheed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588367228
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Richard Rodgers: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Rodgers

RICHARD RODGERS

In drastic contrast to Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers generated practically no gossip and left behind no legend. Judging from his amazing output, maybe he was simply too busy writing music to have an outsize reputation, let alone invent one. Or maybe he was smart enough to let his music do the talking for him. But the fact is that his identity is quite hard to pin down in his music too. If personal style is what one falls back on when one runs out of new things to say, Rodgers had either no style or perhaps too many styles to count—a different one for every scene of every show, in fact. So although his music is, by some accounts, the most often played of any composer in history, such was its sheer variety, melodic inventiveness, and lack of musical ego that his work keeps disappearing into the crowd of great American songs, like a huge anonymous donation, taking himself with it.

So to learn that he actually wrote a memoir called Musical Stages is rather like discovering that the Sphinx kept a diary: One turns to it eagerly, if not skeptically. How much can you trust a sphinx? Well, maybe if you read between the lines, and wait for someone else’s book to compare it with…

His memoir immediately puts one on guard by lashing out at his family, telling us how impossible they were to live with—a charge that rings strangely down the years, because in an introduction to a later edition of this book, his daughter, Mary, levels exactly the same charge against him: not that he was a bad man exactly (he could be startlingly generous), just an impossible one. It seems the one gift this gifted family lacked through two generations was the smallest one: the kind of amiable in-house chitchat that happy families run on. The first sounds that young Dick’s sensitive ears picked up in the family’s city quarters were his grandmother’s sarcastic tirades and his grandfather’s defiant growls, broken only by his mother’s occasional wistful piano playing between bouts—which may have given Dick his first, fatal taste for comfort music. His father, Dr. William Rodgers, preferred to spend his family time in lofty, apparently disapproving, silence. Although allegedly Dr. Rodgers showed quite a bit of charm with his patients, he wasn’t wasting it on his family.

If words wounded, music healed. In no time at all, Dick Rodgers struck the piano himself, finding with almost the first chord that it could solve practically everything, bringing peace even to his grandmother. It also enormously enhanced his own status—if he could just get to the instrument before his envious brother, Mort, broke his fingers or set fire to the piano. In Musical Stages, Rodgers introduces the piano first. With time, it became his imaginary friend and alter ego, through which he could say everything he wanted and explore his own outer limits of tenderness and wit, while his impossible family looked on in admiring silence—or, at any rate, in silence.

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