Duke Ellington's Music for the Theatre

Duke Ellington's son Mercer has said that his father was frustrated in only one area of musical ambition: his desire to do his own Broadway show. Though Ellington wrote many theatrical pieces, he was never able to achieve success as a composer for the stage, and today his stage shows receive little attention from music historians. Nevertheless, these works occupied a significant place in Ellington's creative imagination, and many of the ideas he employed in their composition found their way into