Edelweiss

[eppur_se_muova]

One night in September 1959, Oscar Hammerstein II came home late for dinner to his house on 63rd Street in Manhattan. He'd been for a doctor's appointment, and been told he had a stomach ulcer. His new show, The Sound Of Music, was just about to begin its out-of-town tryout in New Haven, but Hammerstein would have to miss it and go in for an operation. On the big day, Dorothy Hammerstein and his sons William and James went to the hospital, and afterwards were given the bad news by the surgeon. They had removed three-quarters of Hammerstein's stomach but had been unable to get all the cancer cells. He had six months to a year to live.

What to do? "Because of the kind of person he was," said William Hammerstein, "and the super-positive attitude he had towards life, we decided not to tell him. Because it wouldn't have done him any good." But they did tell his composing partner Richard Rodgers. In New Haven that week, Rodgers knew but Hammerstein didn't that the most successful team in theatre history was trying out its last show. As always, the composer was business first. After getting the news, he called in his daughter Mary, a talented writer in her own right - she's the author of, among other confections, Freaky Friday, and back then she was busy working on her own first musical, Once Upon A Mattress. In the event that Oscar was too sick, her father wanted to know, would Mary be available to handle rewrites and extra lyrics?

In mid-October the production moved on to Boston, and Hammerstein was well enough to take the train up from New York. As usually happened on an R&H show, everything was going smoothly with just a few little peripheral matters to be attended to here and there. But, after watching the show in Boston and with only a week and a half till they moved on to Broadway, Rodgers and Hammerstein felt there was something lacking in the score. The plot of The Sound Of Music is often mocked - captain meets nun in Nazi Austria - but it works if you get the underlying emotions right. Baron von Trapp, whose family has lived on this land for generations, is facing a terrible decision: The Anschluss is transforming his country, and he has no choice but to leave it. But for that to have any impact on an audience you have to understand that this man loves his native land, and that fleeing it will exact a toll. How to express that? A song obviously. But what kind of song? Theodore Bikel, the actor and folk singer, had been cast in the role, and could certainly relate to the von Trapp experience, because he'd lived it: He had been born in Vienna but his family had escaped to British Palestine after the Anschluss. More to the point, he could also strum the guitar. So Dick and Oscar figured they should write a number Baron von Trapp could play live on stage - an "old" Austrian folk song, to be performed in Act Two as part of the Trapp family's singing act at the Kaltzberg Festival.

So fifty years ago, in a room at the Ritz-Carlton furnished with a piano, the last ever Rodgers & Hammerstein song was written. As always in this partnership, the words came first:

Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Every morning you greet me
Small and white
Clean and bright
You look happy to meet me...
***
more: http://www.steynonline.com/6683/edelweiss

[elleng]

1. Thanks,

to you and them.

[SheilaT]

2. I know the post is primarily about the song,

but I find the paternalism of that era, not informing a patient he has cancer, to be creepy. Not telling someone about a fatal illness is pure negligence, in my opinion, even though I'm old enough to clearly recall the different attitudes and behaviors of that era.

[LiberalElite]

3. When my mother had three

months to live from cancer we made the decision not to tell her. It wasn't paternalism.

[Hoppy]

4. Would she have lived differently? Made a bucket list trip?

Would you want to be told?

There are pros and cons to each side of this issue.

[LiberalElite]

7. you don't know my mother

and I'm not going to discuss it.

[SheilaT]

5. Perhaps paternalism was a poor word choice on my part.

And of course I know nothing at all about the situation with your mother. But I know that in the not so distant past it was standard for doctors to tell patients little or nothing about their actual condition, and often not even tell the families. That came to be seen as quite wrong, that patients should know their condition and participate in medical decisions.

I know I'd want to know if I had a terminal illness.

[LiberalElite]

8. see above tks

[bemildred]

6. The usual thing, in my view, is you tell them if they ask.

If they don't ask, they probably don't want to know. That you are dying becomes pretty obvious as time goes on, and the ones that want to do something about it will ask. A lot of people like to cling to normalcy all the way down, and I would not begrudge them that.

[SheilaT]

9. What I'm mainly responding to is not telling someone he or she is

dying. While I recognize that circumstances vary, I'm old enough to remember when not telling the patient that he or she was going to die soon was the norm. And I personally think that's wrong. From everything I'd read back then, the dying patient often could not figure out that the end was pretty near, and was therefor deprived of the opportunity to make amends or to say goodbye.

I do want to stress that I'm not judging a contrary decision, especially when I do not know the specific circumstances. But I truly believe that honesty is the best policy here.

Just my opinion.

[bemildred]

10. Well, I agree with you about the case in the OP.

It seems a little too manipulative too me. It is one thing to keep silence about the situation, and another to actively spread dis-information. I would personally have no trouble with anybody who chose not to bring it up, but I would get quite annoyed at people who actively tried to mislead me.

And yeah, I remember all the paternalistic crap, there was a lot of stuff people thought I was too weak to handle too, and that wasted a lot of my time and energy in life. And I'm WASP all the way and smart as a whip. I can't really imagine what it's like for people from deprived backgrounds. The best I can do is remember being a disrespected kid. And it is not anything like gone yet, we are still awash in fake experts who want to order everyone around. People who cannot control themselves and so find it necessary to control everybody else.