After his first year of law school, the young Hammerstein convinced his uncle, Arthur, to hire him as an assistant stage manager on one of his upcoming shows. His uncle's one condition was that Oscar "not write one line" during this theater apprenticeship. Hammerstein complied, working his way up from scenery to production stage manager for all of Arthur's shows in In this position Hammerstein was able to do some writing and rewriting on scripts in development.
Eventually he was writing musical comedies of his own. His first success as a librettist came in with Wildflower, written with Otto Harbach. A more major success in , Rose Marie, led to his collaboration with composer Jerome Kern. Kern and Hammerstein had both been concerned with the "integrated musical," a musical in which the book, lyrics, and score all grow from a central idea and all contribute to the story line.
Hammerstein and Kern developed what was later called musical plays. The musical play was distinguished from the libretto or musical comedy in its more natural, less poetic language. Their first example was an adaptation of Edna Ferber's sprawling novel about life on a Mississippi River boat. This became the landmark musical Showboat, with Kern composing the score and Hammerstein writing the book and lyrics. Showboat firmly established Hammerstein's success and reputation as a writer and lyricist.
The next decade turned out to be a happy one for Hammerstein personally, but unhappy professionally. He spent much of his time in Hollywood, working on contract to various studios. He discovered that he did not work well under the rigorous time demands of the movie industry, having achieved his greatest success with Showboat's one year writing period.
In he returned to New York with Dorothy and began leisurely work on an adaptation of Bizet's Carmen. Hammerstein adapted the lyrics and story to create the Americanized, all-black Carmen Jones. The opera received great acclaim. When he had finished the libretto for Carmen Jones, Hammerstein was contacted by an old Columbia acquaintance, Richard Rodgers, whose partnership with Lorenz Hart had recently dissolved.
Hammerstein had also read the play, and the two began work on the musical, tentatively titled Away We Go. Rodgers and Hammerstein worked toward the concept of the integrated musical, with Hammerstein writing most of the lyrics before Rodgers wrote the score, the reverse of the normal process. When the musical, retitled Oklahoma, opened on Broadway on March 31, , it was an enormous success, both critically and popularly.
Oklahoma ran for 2, performances in its initial Broadway engagement, and in it received a special Pulitzer Prize. His uncle Arthur was a Broadway producer. And his father William was the manager of a vaudeville theater, the Victoria, in Manhattan. He went on to get a law degree from the Columbia Law School, but soon after graduation he abandoned law for the theater, where he started his career as an assistant stage manager for his producer uncle Arthur Hammerstein.
He quickly became known as a writer of books and lyrics for musicals, mostly at first in the operetta style. His first big success, collaborating with co-writer Otto Harbach , who was some twenty years Hammerstein's senior, and composers Herberrt Stothart and Vincent Youmans , was Wildflower In , now working without Harbach, Hammerstein teamed up again with Jerome Kern and wrote the book and lyrics of one of the very greatest of all musicals, Show Boat.
There was quite simply no precedent in the American musical comedy for the complexity and seriousness of purpose of the book, or for the richness and sheer size of the score of this show, which introduced such classic songs as "Make Believe", "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "You Are Love", and "Bill" Hammerstein's revision of an earlier lyric by P.
Oscar Hammerstein II was an influential lyricist and librettist in the American Theater who settled down and lived in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for the later portion of his life. Read more here. Residing in New York New York, his father and uncle, Willie and Arthur Hammerstein, were successful theater managers, and his grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein I, was a famous opera impresario.
His father was not supportive of his son's desire to participate in the arts, even though it was the business most of his family was involved in. Because of his father's decision, Oscar Hammerstein studied at Columbia University, focusing on pre-law. It was not until his father's death during his second year at school that Hammerstein began writing lyrics. From here, he began writing and performing in many of their varsity shows. He enjoyed this so much that he dropped out of Columbia University to pursue a career in theater as an assistant stage manager with his Uncle Arthur.
In , Hammerstein married a woman named Mary Flynn, with whom he had two children: William and Alice. Not long after the wedding, Hammerstein wrote his first play, The Light. It ran in , but it was stopped after four performances. Hammerstein analyzed what went wrong with his production, and he continued to write plays, lyrics, and librettos to slowly step into the spotlight.
His first successful musical was entitled Wildflower ; Hammerstein and Otto Harbach wrote the libretto and lyrics and Vincent Youmans composed the music. Beginning in , this simple musical ran over a year because "simple-minded story," according to Stanley Green. Wildflower was an instant success due to the amazing singing, Italian setting, and unique inclusion of operetta..
Through collaborations with these composers Hammerstein won fame and popularity for shows like Rose-Marie , Desert Song , and New Moon. Hammerstein and Kern paired up and wrote several successful musicals over the next decade; the most famous was Show Boat. The dramatic content was strong, and the music gave it a deeper meaning.
Hammerstein was ecstatic. Click here to hear a radio essay about Show Boat , part of National Public Radio's series on the most important musical works of the twentieth century. The file requires Real Player to run.
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