Richard Rodgers, Slaughter on 10th Avenue

August 19, 2024

Date of Composition: 1936
Duration: 10 minutes

Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) is perhaps best known as one half of the songwriting duo (with Oscar Hammerstein II) that created such memorable and beloved Broadway musicals as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Yet Hammerstein was not Rodgers’s first collaborator. Son of Russian-Jewish émigrés to New York City, Rodgers grew up in a household where his father sang Broadway tunes while his mother played the piano. It seems fated that in 1918 he would meet Lorenz Hart, who came from a similar German-Jewish-American background. Rodgers’s autobiography claims that on that day he “acquired . . . a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.” Over the next twenty-four years, the Rodgers-Hart team wrote songs for twenty-six Broadway shows and nine films, including Babes in Arms, Pal Joey, and The Boys from Syracuse. Rodgers composed the music, Hart the words. Their 1936 On Your Toes musically depicts the story of a professor who coerces a Russian ballet impresario to stage a jazz ballet titled Slaughter on 10th Avenue. When adapted for film in 1939, the Broadway songs were heard only as background music, but the Slaughter ballet, with choreography by George Balanchine, was performed fully. Not long after, Hart was overcome by an ongoing struggle with alcoholism. Rodgers teamed up with lyricist Hammerstein, continuing an individual Broadway legacy that remains unsurpassed.

© 2024, Dr. K. Dawn Grapes