The genius of verse and song whose life was a Book of Job

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.