Musical Stages: An Autobiography by Richard Rodgers [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Rodgers, Richard

Published by Random House, New York, 1975

Very good condition black boards, red cloth spine, and gold spine lettering contained in a very good condition price-clipped photographic and color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Coda and Index. Illustrated with two sections of black-and-white photographic plates. Spine weakened between pages 190 and 191. A vintage Valentine's Day 1996 neatly scripted gift inscription at the upper section of the blank first free front endpaper and the former owner (a retired US Navy Commander) name and address label is affixed to the inner front board. The page edges are lightly foxed (see photographs). "For more than five decades Richard Rodgers, the dean of the American musical theatre, has been composing songs that are sung all over the world, and Musical Stages is his long-awaited autobiography. From the day he saw his first broadway show, in 1909, Mr. Rodgers was hooked, and his only ambition thereafter was to compose for the stage. But in the beginning it wasn't easy; though he and Lorenz Hart formed their famous partnership when Mr. Rodgers was only sixteen, it was not until he was twenty-two (and was about to give up the theatre in discouragement to enter the babies' underwear business!) that the team achieved success in 1925 with the first edition of The Garrick Gaieties, whose refreshing score and lyrics were the foundation of a new kind of theatre. The rest is musical history. Since then Mr. Rodgers has written over a thousand songs, almost all of them for the scores of over forty Broadway musicals. Of these, twenty-five were written with Hart, and nine with Oscar Hammerstein II. Because Mr. Rodgers has a n excellent memory and a capacity for friendship, and because he has known virtually everyone in the musical thatre in this century, Musical Stages is packed with good stories, revealing glimpses of celebrities off-guard, fascinating passages on the art of lyric writing and composing (with examples of both lyrics and handwritten bars of several songs to demonstrate his points), backstage and Hollywood anecdotes, and the inside story of such glamorous success as Pal Joey, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, THe King and I and The Sound of Music. Some of the people you will meet in the pages of this book are Florenz Ziegfeld, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, the Prince of Wales, Billy Rose, Maurice Chevalier, Samuel Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Irving Berlin, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. But readers will be equally entranced by Mr. Rodgers' family -- not only his wife Dorothy and his two children, Mary and Linda, but the parents and grandparents who encouraged him when he was trying to break into the magical world which he has been in love with all his life. Musical Stages is a heartwarming American success story, told in his own words by the world's most popular composer. Through his songs Richard Rodgers has probably given more pleasure to more people than anyone else in the twentieth century; Musical Stages is one more gift in this tradition, but it is not the last, for at this moment he is at work on a new musical." -- from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. Seller Inventory # 007092

Bibliographic Details

Title: Musical Stages: An Autobiography by Richard ...
Publisher: Random House, New York
Publication Date: 1975
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Benvenisti, Ronald (jacket photograph)
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: 1st Edition