American composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and lyricist/librettist Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) were one of America's most successful composer/lyricist teams in the golden age of American songwriting. Their works for the musical theater produced a cornucopia of lasting songs. From the beginning of a collaboration that began in 1925 and lasted until Lorenz Hart's death in 1943, Rodgers and Hart shared the goal of writing music for the theater that joined lyrics and music with dramatic and emotional coherence. By the time of their last work together, their experiments in musical theater had prepared the way for Rodgers's later great musicals with Oscar Hammerstein II—works such as Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), in which the interaction of lyrics, libretto, music, and dance reached a new level. Rodgers and Hart's best known shows are The Boys from Syracuse (1938), for which the songs "Falling in Love with Love" and...