Word: lyricism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When frail, nervous Spanish Composer Manuel de Falla died two years ago in voluntary exile in Argentina, he left behind some fiery and famous works: the lyric drama La Vida Breve, the ballets El Amor Brujo and The Three-Cornered-Hat But most of his friends said: "He died too soon; he died without finishing his master piece...
...just as distinctively his. Many of his songs, like Night and Day, favor a long melodic line that breaks out of the traditional four-measure bounds of the popular ballad. He can write gaily, in complicated rhythms (as in Anything Goes). He can match a pointedly off-color lyric with an insinuating tune (as in My Heart Belongs to Daddy). But the true Porter hallmark is cut in the bittersweet lament of What Is This Thing Called Love? and in the sultry, Latin fervor of Begin the Beguine, I've Got You Under My Skin, In the Still...
...grandson and heir of coal and lumber Tycoon J. 0. Cole, who was worth something like $7,000,000. Though it took Cole years to satisfy his oh-such-a-hungry yearning for success on Broadway, getting there was not much more difficult than what a Porter lyric describes as "a trip to the moon on gossamer wings."* His comfortable itinerary included stops at Worcester (Mass.) Academy, where he got into trouble for writing off-color lyrics; Yale, where he got a B.A. and wrote the Eli football songs Bingo and Bulldog; Harvard, where he took the law dean...
...another lyric he expresses his bedrock feeling toward human beings which goes beyond any theory about them...
...title of this revue has nothing to do with most of the episodes, but some of the lyric writers (there are several) must have felt that another musical with a New York theme was about due, a month or so having lapsed since the last one. Consequently there are a couple of songs in which the chorus shouts loud hosannas for such things as Rockefeller Center, the subway system, Lord & Taylor (remember the dear dead days when everybody was singing songs about Macy's?), and, of course, Fifth Avenue. "From Dubuque to Westminster Abbey they want the Fifth Avenue Look...