WALKING ALONE.(musical legacy and biography of Richard Rodgers)

When the composer Richard Rodgers died, in 1979, after sixty-two years in show business, forty musicals, and more than nine hundred songs, Lionel Trilling--an eminence grise not given to hyperbole--announced, "Few men have given so much pleasure to so many." Leonard Bernstein said, "He has established new levels of taste, distinction, simplicity in the best sense, and inventiveness." Rodgers's music, alternately mischievous and elegant, playful and brooding, stately and surprising--what Ethan Mordden called his sunbeam of melody--sometimes struck a sentimental note but never a vulgar one. To speak the titles of some of his most famous songs--"Isn't It Romantic?," "Some ...