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Richard Rodgers.

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Richard Rodgers. By Geoffrey Block. (Yale Broadway Masters.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. [xii, 215 p. ISBN 0-300-09747-6. $32.50.] Music examples, illustrations, indexes.

Geoffrey Block's Richard Rodgers inaugurates the Yale Broadway Masters series, slated at this point also to include studies of Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, and Sigmund Romberg. According to Block's preface, the series is for the general reader and students, "serious scholarly books that wear their scholarship lightly" (p. [ix]). The volumes will vary in contents, but each will include a biographical survey, at least one chapter on a single show, an assessment of the composer's legacy, a worklist, and bibliography.

This description is important to help one understand Block's intentions. Richard Rodgers is the subject of recent, full-length biographies by William G. Hyland (Richard Rodgers [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998]) and Meryle Secrest (Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001]), and there are several other related studies, especially on Rodgers's collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II. Block complements these sources in a compact book, forcing difficult choices concerning coverage. He compiled The Richard...

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