Arts and Letters

During Richard Rodgers’s lifetime every conceivable honor and reward came his way. For a period of some fifty years, the American music theater's principal nourishment came from the pen of Rodgers. Dick couldn't help but know that he was a living legend, but neither that fact nor the unbelievable popularity his music had long enjoyed affected the creative urge, the zest for life, and the addiction to hard work. The scope of his output is astonishing, ranging from one of his earliest efforts, the 1920 Columbia Varsity Show, Fly With Me (revived by the University in the spring of 1980), to his last work, the musical version of I Remember Mama, produced in 1979, the year of his death.

There is no need here to repeat the well-documented and extremely well-publicized titles of the extraordinary succession of musical plays between the beginning and the end, or even to mention the titles of the most famous of the songs. In short, there is nothing now that can be said that has not been repeated time and again. Yet there is something more, and it relates directly to us as a body of artists.

It is clear that this institution meant a great deal to Richard Rodgers; that he derived enormous satisfaction from membership in this body and confidence in its future was attested to in a most imaginative and practical manner. Through his generous endowment of the Richard Rodgers Production Award, this organization now has the means to recognize and encourage promising new composers, librettists, and lyricists of the music theater by giving their works the inestimable exposure of a professional-level production. This splendid program is a departure clearly not in the mainstream of the organization's more usual focus.

Since it was founded in 1898 this institution has elected only two composers whose entire effort was devoted to the music theater. The first of these was Jerome Kern (Richard Rodgers' favorite), and the second, Richard Rodgers himself. One can, of course, immediately wonder at the omission of such an obvious name as George Gershwin. But it is reasonable to assume that, had he not died at such an early age, he would have become a member, and some might question the absence of other famous composers of the American theater. If the thesis is true that election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is the highest honor that can come to an American creative artist, the primary reason lies in selection by one's peers.

It is not easy to rationalize the election to this prestigious body of so few popular composers. Its so-called "serious composers" include not only the most performed and famous, but also other highly honored colleagues whose music is of a more recondite nature, barely known even to the specialized music public. What informs this selection process?

What possible rationale can there be for the overwhelming preponderance of symphonists, to use the term generically to include the diverse forms of art music? It is not possible to know all the criteria any single member of this august body considers germane. It is my surmise, however, whether one states the proposition overtly or harbors it privately, that prospective candidates are deemed to have produced work of lasting value rather than evanescent contemporaneity. This, I believe, is an ever present kernel of the thought process which pervades the selection procedure.

Do we regard with the same degree of admiration those whose aim is to please immediately or do we not somehow regard as nobler and worthier of our highest esteem those who cannot possibly succeed except by the judgment of history? I pose a question which for the most part can be answered only in the individual minds engaged in the selection process, a process centered wholly and exclusively in those who do the judging.

The giving of honors in a democratic society may be one of its more arcane procedural confusions, but there are subtle assumptions. We do assign importance to categories of endeavor per se despite disclaimers to the contrary. Are we not suspicious of any endeavor whose principal goal must, by its very nature, be to succeed in the market place and to succeed immediately? In short, do we not as a matter of custom tend to reserve our highest artistic honors for those composers who write our symphonies, our chamber music, our choral works, and our operas? We do indeed and with good reason, for the popular artist who meets the exacting standards of our members is truly rare. And this, not prejudice, accounts for their small representation here.

The distinguished members of this body chose Richard Rodgers because it honors extraordinary artistic integrity and achievement in whatever the genre. That his music is among the most popular ever known in the history of the art is a fact that in itself really had no place in the judgmental process. One measure of quality in the critical faculty lies in the ability to disregard such extrinsic factors. The probing critical mind has the prescience to penetrate the outer shell, to find the humanity in the forbiddingly complex and the art in the easily accessible.

Dick Rodgers was a close friend for more than thirty years. But through his music I knew him intimately long before we met, for from my early boyhood I knew and loved his wonderful songs. Rodgers is a vibrant part of my musical inheritance. To express my personal gratitude for the joy he gave me is merely to be saying what millions of others could say. Yet, for me, I must insist that it is special, so directly personal, that it is hard for me to imagine his music meaning precisely the same to anyone else. When, as a musician, I think of the enormous riches of the music of the past that I have studied and admired, I find it wholly natural to include Rodgers as part of my musician's heritage. Although it sounds pretentious, and worse, condescending to say so, I have always taken Rodgers' music seriously. In my own mind I never had to compare his particular compositional style with that of other masters from wholly different worlds and with vastly different artistic goals.

Rodgers was a writer of glorious songs, but he was more than a songwriter; he was a composer whose milieu was total theater. He was a dramatist who used music to illuminate characters and subject matter of astonishing variety and complexity. Yet his art was ever direct and unambiguous. He is the embodiment of the American music theater, which in range of expressivity he expanded and enhanced in ways not previously even imagined.

The best insight into Rodgers, the man, was written, not surprisingly, by his wife, Dorothy, for a gathering of remembrance at the Library of Congress in the spring of 1980, and I quote the last paragraph of her statement:

Dick was a very private and complex man, deeply emotional, sensitive, at once both tough and gentle, thoughtful rather than impulsive, and enormously generous. He was often praised as a modest man and, indeed, he was modest but he had a true sense of his own worth and he derived tremendous pleasure from his achievements. He loved having people—strangers as well as friends—write to him or stop him on the street to tell him of the great joy his work brought to them. He always used to say how good it was to be able to smell the flowers; he was grateful for all the years of his life, and I think he knew he had accomplished what he was put on this earth to do.

No one knows the future course of artistic recognition. We cannot know which of our composers will be performed in generations to come. We may think we know, but we do not. What we do know is what we have had. But by any measure, be it the known or the unknown, what we have had is the privilege of having Richard Rodgers—this extraordinary artist of the American theater—as our friend and colleague.