Trude Rittmann, who died February 22 at age 96, was a classical composer who, after her career was derailed by the Nazis, came to America and built a career as a leading music arranger for dance and chorus on Broadway.

Among her credits in a career that stretched from the 1930s to the 1970s were the original productions of “Carousel,” “Brigadoon,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Paint Your Wagon,” My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi.” The musical theater teams of Rodgers and Hart and Lerner and Lowe were particularly reliant on her services, although she also worked extensively with Agnes de Mille, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins, as well as Virgil Thomson, Eliot Carter, and Aaron Copland.

“She created a sort of category for the kind of work she did,” a music teacher at Northeastern University, Douglas Durant, a longtime friend of Rittmann, said. “She was among the first to get credit, and appears to have been the first to get royalties for this.”

One of Rittmann’s talents was to take a motif, perhaps the tune to a song, and spin it out into something long enough to accompany dancing.

After viewing a performance of Balanchine’s touring American Ballet Caravan in 1939, a critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote that “Trude Rittmann is credited with ‘arranging’ the music from American melodies. He [sic] must have composed much of it himself for there was little music of that good quality being written in American in the nineties.”

Intriguingly, the Times’s critic, the redoubtable Isabel Morse Jones, seems to have had difficulty wrapping her mind around the idea that such a skilled arranger could be a woman. Later in the same review, Jones wrote, “The music was played on two pianos with vigor and precision, although at a too rapid tempo by Musical Director Rittmann and a young woman, programmed as Pablo Miquel.”

The diminutive Rittmann learned to stick up for herself to get credit for her talents, Mr. Durant said.

Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1908, Rittmann began piano lessons at age 6 and graduated from the Hochschule fur Musik in Cologne in 1932. A disciple of Stravinsky and associated with German avant-gardists Ernst Krenek and Stefan Wolpe, Rittmann became known internationally as one of the outstanding young composers in Germany, a doubly remarkable feat because she was a woman. Her Jewish heritage made it increasingly difficult for her to perform as Nazi rule intensified, and she left Germany in 1933, first for England and then America, where Lincoln Kirstein hired her in 1937 for Balanchine’s Caravan.

Rittmann’s cosmopolitan parents never really regarded themselves as Jewish, Mr. Durand said, and remained in Mannheim too long. Her mother escaped, but her father died in a German prison, supposedly a suicide. Her mother joined Rittmann in New York and eventually found work creating high-end millinery for department stores. The specter of the destruction of her family and way of life haunted Rittmann for the rest of her life, Mr. Durand said.

In 1941, Rittmann became de Mille’s concert accompanist, and in 1943 arranged the music for de Mille’s choreography in Kurt Weill’s “One Touch of Venus.” Her first Broadway show was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” in 1945. Four years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein used her again in their new musical “South Pacific.” This time, Rittmann was billed as “assistant to Mr. Rodgers,” although her primary duty was piano accompaniment.

An oft-told anecdote concerns an accident in rehearsals.

“When Mary [Martin] did the reprise of ‘Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,’ she would come back on while the girls were singing and do a somersault across the stage,” recalled William Biff McGuire in an NPR interview in 2004. “One time she lost her sense of direction and went off the stage, down into the pit, and crashed on top of the pianist, Trude Rittman. Mary was unconscious, so we got her out of the pit and rushed her to a doctor. Then one of the girls looked down, and saw that Trude Rittman’s head had been driven into the piano keys. The keys were covered with blood because she broke Mary’s fall and probably saved her life. The next morning, there was a football helmet filled with flowers on the piano, which Trude wore throughout the entire rehearsal period.”

By the time she finally retired, following a 1978 Broadway production called “The American Dance Machine,” Rittmann was thoroughly tired of Broadway, Mr. Durand said.

Still, she retained a sense of pride of what she had accomplished, and in recent years relished an annual visit to her Lexington, Mass., retirement home from the director and president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

Rittmann never married and leaves no survivors.