As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to it rhythmically, so I call her the Cairo belly-dancer. The period 1880 to 1914 was the first golden age of popular songs, most of them British, the best of which my mother used to sing to me when I was tiny. I used to know all the words of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, though that of course was an American song, written and composed by Irving Berlin, born in Russia as Israel Baline, who became Berlin after a misprint in his first published score. Berlin, I gather, was not a likeable character (mean) and not much of a musician either, though the son of a cantor; he could not read music and could play the piano only in F sharp. But he wrote 1,500 songs, compared with Schubert’s 600, and they included more hits than anyone else created. I don’t like them much: ‘There’s no business like showbusiness’ strikes me as typically stagey self-indulgence, and ‘Anything you can do’ is smart-alec amphigory.
The writer-composer I really like is Cole Porter. Indeed, with the possible exception of Noël Coward (and Tom Moore), he is the head of his class. The two men were very different. Coward was lower-middle-class, like Moore, and never forgot that his aim in life was to succeed and enjoy it. He was a happy man, I think, on the whole, and certainly gave that impression when you saw him. Porter came from wealth: his mother was a Cole, a hugely rich family, and he married another heiress. He was always inheriting money, and when he was a young man he could rent the Ca’Rezzonico in Venice and hire barges and import bands to entertain his chums. He first tasted success as a brilliant amateur at Yale, but he took the trouble to get himself a proper musical education, and there was nothing he did not know about the technical arcana of his difficult, dodgy craft.
Porter was the kind of artist I most like and respect: one who takes infinite trouble to hone and perfect his skills, and is always humble and anxious to learn. He had in youth an extraordinary gift for verse, for rhymes and rhymes within lines. He was so greedy for words that he literally wore out dictionaries by endlessly rooting through them. (The only other writers I have known who did this were Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis: the latter told me he needed a new Oxford Pocket every three years.) Porter loved Roget and Fowler, and he kept handy every rhyming dictionary he could find. He wrote down lists of words and rhymes he wanted to use, rather like W.S. Landor and Walter Pater. His lyrics and the tunes he wrote for them can be extraordinarily complicated and unusual, triplet figures within duple metres, for example, and chromatic devices of daunting and dazzling bravura. ‘Let’s do it’ and ‘What is this thing called love?’ are pretty weird in conception even before you begin to examine the lyrics. Porter’s mentor in verse was, of course, Gilbert, but as a musician he turned to Schubert and Schumann, even Brahms, and composed on an art-song scale — ‘Begin the Beguine’ is 108 bars, before any repeat.
What I admire about such songs as ‘Night and Day’, ‘You’re the Top’, ‘It’s De-Lovely’ and ‘Just one of those things’ is that Porter took a good deal of trouble to ensure that listeners heard every word. And he had the backing of producers who shared his passion for articulation and audibility. When Louis B. Mayer was running MGM in the Thirties, and it put out the best Hollywood musicals ever filmed, he would go to great expense to compile try-out movies from the rushes and show them in cinemas where audiences, on leaving, were questioned about the words. One of my complaints against pop songs is that you cannot hear the words, partly of course because the singers are often barely literate and do not speak standard English.
Porter and similar creators were helped by the fact that the first half of the 20th century saw the theatre and the studios at their meticulous and stupendous best, before unions and restrictive practices destroyed quality (I once heard an indignant Groucho Marx hold forth on this topic). Peter Pan was an instant success, and has remained so ever since because the original London production at the Duke of York’s in December 1904 was put on with absolutely no expense spared in cast, rehearsal time, stage machinery and technical innovations — otherwise it would not have worked and would now be completely forgotten. When Porter’s Born to Dance was filmed in 1936, the combined stages were made 200 feet long, 100 high and 80 deep to hold the 300 dancers, filmed by 75 cameramen. The costumes by Adrian required 150 wardrobe workers and titivators, while the sets were the work of 1,000 carpenters, painters and scaffolders, plus 50 cleaner-polishers. In addition there were 125 electricians, 100 people in make-up and 25 prop-men.
I suppose a similar conscientiousness and perfectionism were displayed in the world of painting, especially in Italy and the Low Countries in the two centuries 1450 to 1650, and have never been demonstrated since, to our loss and the loss of art. Once we used our fingers and hands, limbs and voices, eyes and ears with a trained professionalism built up over countless generations (the earliest musical pipe to survive is 70,000 years old). Today we rest our bodies more and more, using our brains to conceive and direct the machines which plod and push and carry, and increasingly take on the skilled work too. Amplification has inflicted long-term artistic injury on singing, just as computers are destroying calligraphy, and our eyesight atrophies under the impact of visual mechanics. Recently large parts of the West End reeled with the impact of thunderous rock music generated by a vast noise-box in Hyde Park. Why the royal parks should promote this kind of nuisance to London residents is not obvious, though I suppose greed is, as usual, the explanation. But it occurred to me that the genius of a Cole Porter could contribute nothing to such an occasion, since words were silenced by decibels. Rock music is the single most blatant stigma of the death of civilisation that we are witnessing.
Porter’s own death was pitiful. It is gruesomely described in the fine biography of him published by William McBrien eight years ago. Porter said he composed best on horseback, and it was a fall from a horse which destroyed what little happiness he enjoyed in the intervals of his chronic depressions. As with Henry VIII, the blow led to a chronic case of osteomyelitis with increasing pain. But whereas horrible old Henry could take it out on wives, ministers etc. with the headsman’s axe, poor little Porter, after two decades of agony, had to submit to amputation (which in turn aggravated his despair and dependence on alcohol), frequent hospitalisation and operations, ending in delirium tremens and death. Terrible to think that an artist who gave (and gives) such pleasure should meet so spectral an end. But Porter had been much blessed with talent and worldly goods, and as Job said, ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’
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