Oscar Hammerstein: 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning'

Oscar Hammerstein the Second owned a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and that farm changed American musical theater. Hammerstein was already a successful lyricist when he began collaborating with composer Richard Rodgers in the early nineteen forties. In the early nineteen forties, looking out at the rolling pastures near his home here in Doylestown, he is said to have written the opening number for a new show about Oklahoma Territory.

The lyric he put to paper, describing corn as high as an elephant's eye and a bright golden haze on the meadow, captured exactly the landscape around him. Oklahoma opened on Broadway on March thirty-first, nineteen forty-three, and ran for two thousand two hundred twelve performances, a record at the time. Hammerstein and Rodgers went on to write South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

Together they transformed the Broadway musical from a series of songs into an integrated dramatic form where every number advanced the story.