As normal as blueberry pie: Oscar Hammerstein II, through his letters

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. There are those that laugh at the city smarts of the words Larry Hart wrote with Richard Rodgers. And there are those that weep at Oscar Hammerstein’s home-on-the-range cornpone lyrics. But there is nobody that loves them both. Over to the pros then: while the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett have all given us their takes on Rodgers and Hart, nobody but Bryn Terfel has seen fit to make a Rodgers and Hammerstein CD.

Not that Hammerstein would have worried. As Mark Eden Horowitz points out in his introduction to this volume of letters, Hammerstein wasn’t interested in having his numbers covered. He didn’t think of them as numbers but as parts of a show – and if the show was put together properly, the parts were inseparable from it.