Word: musicically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...evening last week, a small, elegantly groomed man with thinning black hair, a limp, and the smile of a tired elf, took a party of friends to see the new Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate. The show is such a smash hit that ordinary playgoers find it impossible to get seats for any performance sooner than next April. Seats are just a little harder to get because this one satisfied customer has been buying up so many of them. At a cost of more than $1,000, Cole Porter, who wrote the music and lyrics for Kiss Me, Kate, took...
From Broadway to Padua. Porter's music is 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...
...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's advice to switch to music; Paris, where he studied at the Schola Cantorum with Composer Vincent d'Indy; and the playgrounds of the Continent...
While working on a show, he keeps his music and lyrics in neat sets of looseleaf notebooks and Manila folders, and he follows a chart of the book's plot for spotting his songs. The only top-ranking Broadway composer besides Irving Berlin who writes his own lyrics, he usually begins with a song title to fit the plot situation, then finds his melody, and later fits the words to it. He begins with the last line and works backward. Close at hand is an exhaustive library of rhyming and foreign dictionaries (he speaks French, German, Spanish and Italian...
When a Porter song is finished, it generally has a few added staves that are the germ of an orchestral arrangement. He writes out the lyrics in a neat, printlike hand, to be typed by his secretary. First to hear the music is Budapest-born Dr. Albert Sirmay, chief editor of Chappell & Co., Porter's publishers, and also his musical secretary, friend and adviser for 22 years. While the composer plays the song on one of his baby grands, Dr. Sirmay jots down notes and sometimes warns him about cribbing inadvertently from the 400 songs (250 of them published...