Oscar Hammerstein II never set foot in Salzburg. He wrote his last work, The Sound of Music (1959), in a New York rehearsal room, working from Maria von Trapp's memoir. He died in August 1960, five years before the film reached cinemas. The words he wrote, "Edelweiss," "My Favourite Things," "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," are now the lyrical vocabulary through which the entire world pictures Austria.
The Story
Hammerstein came from a theatrical family. His grandfather Oscar Hammerstein I built the Manhattan Opera House; his father ran the Victoria Theatre. He grew up in a world of stages and rehearsals, and after a brief detour into law school he committed entirely to the theatre, working through the 1920s and 1930s on operettas and musicals with collaborators including Jerome Kern, with whom he wrote Show Boat (1927).
The decisive partnership began in 1943 when he joined composer Richard Rodgers after Rodgers's previous collaborator Lorenz Hart became unable to continue. Together they reinvented the form: Oklahoma! (1943) established the integrated musical play, where songs advance the drama rather than pause it. South Pacific (1949) tackled racial prejudice directly. The King and I (1951), Carousel (1945), The Sound of Music (1959): nine shows in seventeen years, eight Tony Awards, two Pulitzers.
The Sound of Music was built around the real story of Maria Kutschera and the Trapp family, who had actually lived in Salzburg, married at Nonnberg Abbey, and fled Austria in 1938. Hammerstein wrote the book and lyrics from New York, working from the source material. He died before Robert Wise's film transformed the Broadway show into a global phenomenon, before the Mirabell Gardens became one of the most visited places in Europe because Julie Andrews danced down its steps singing "Do-Re-Mi."
His last song, "Edelweiss," was completed during the Boston tryout performances, a waltz melody from Richard Rodgers and a lyric about a small Alpine flower that Hammerstein shaped into a quiet, devastating image of a man's love for a country slipping away.
