Introduction

The period usually referred to as the Golden Age of the Broadway musical encompasses at least the 1940s and 1950s; for some writers it goes back to the premiere of Show Boat in 1927 and perhaps forward to Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. Whatever the terminal dates, surely most commentators would agree that it reached a particular peak from 1943 with the first Broadway collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the record-breaking ...

Genre and style peculiarities of “The Sound of Music” musical by R. Rodgers

The research subject is the musical by the composer Richard Rodgers and the book writer Oscar Hammerstein II “The Sound of Music” - one of the bright examples of classic Broadway musicals. The author describes the main genre and style and dramatic peculiarities of the musical and attempts to solve the following research tasks: to analyze the narrative and genre components of the piece, the intonation complexes of the main characters and the most significant groups of characters and vocal techniques, and to trace back the influence of Austrian national genres on the music fabric of the musical. The author uses the following methods: cultural-historical, comparative analysis, and the methods of music-style and music-history analysis. Despite the obvious significance of this piece of music and its thumping success, the musical “The Sound of Music” hasn’t been studied thoroughly enough in the scientific literature. The author arrives at the conclusion that the special dramatism, the bright plot, the developed music drama, and the multifaceted genre and style alligation are the peculiarity of the musical and form that unique quality that brought success in the past and still makes the musical successful.   

Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of the American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim’s musicals in two contexts: the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical play that flourished after World War II; and the postmodernism that by the 1960s influenced all the U.S. arts. Sondheim’s musicals are central to the transition from the musical play that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical, one that reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge, the fragmentation of identity, and the problematization of representation. Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, bridges the span between the musical play and the postmodern musical and, in his most recent work, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim’s musicals; examines their dialogue, lyrics, musical themes, and structures; and finds in them their critiques of the operations of power, their questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and their explorations of contemporary identity.

Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim

Although Stephen Sondheim has long been considered the leading writer for the American musical stage in his generation, and although many of his shows have become repertory fixtures, their original runs have tended to be relatively short, and his thematic engagements with conventional ideas of “America” have often been querulous. To understand better why “Sondheim” and “America” have thus often seemed not to map easily to each other, this chapter considers one of his famous flops,Anyone Can Whistle, in the context of his earlier collaborations with Arthur Laurents and as a show that set an agenda quite different from that of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II; this new agenda would sustain the remainder of his career to date.

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”

This chapter explores some of the influence Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II may have had on the composer. With close analysis of the ways in which lyric patterning guided the structure of the music in several Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, the chapter suggests that one of their primary contributions to musical theater was to structure the dramatic dynamic of a show into the score through a use of extended song-form. I note in particular the way this works inCarousel(1945),Allegro(1947), andSouth Pacific(1949). The chapter then speculates about how Sondheim has developed this technique through a modular montaging of scenes and through the creation of palindromic trajectories within a whole show inA Little Night Music(1973) andSunday in the Park with George(1984).