Cole Porter's lyrics

Perhaps Donald Macleod has been stretching the definition of "composer" in recent years in his regular Composer of the Week programme on Radio 3. Musicals are essentially a collaborative venture and one of the distinctions between them and opera is that there is always a professional orchestrator on hand to provide the scoring for the former, while the opera composer tends to be in sole charge. Kurt Weill, one of the few writers of both musicals and opera, was rather scornful of composers who could not score their own melodies. George Gershwin, aspiring for opera- and concert-hall respectability, though largely self-taught, orchestrated his latter works, including Porgy and Bess, himself. For me, Irving Berlin, who could do little more than pick out his tunes on a piano , was a step too far for CotW. However, there is much less doubt about the classically-trained Richard Rodgers who could certainly write a basic score, though he found it a chore, and this week's subject, Cole Porter, similarly qualified.

Rightly, Macleod has concentrated on Porter's music and its sources. However, I find the origins of his skill at word-setting equally interesting. Porter was fiercely protective of his lyrics, and would rather withdraw a song from a show than accede to a request to alter even a line. (The one person for whom he made an exception was his long-time friend, Ethel Merman.) He particularly objected to Sinatra's altering his words in performance, once firing off a telegram to the effect: "if you don't like my songs the way I wrote them, why do you sing them?". His favourite interpreter was Fred Astaire, who did not have the greatest voice but who stuck squarely to the sheet music.

Cole's father, Samuel Fenwick Porter, is described in the Wikipedia entry as "a shy and unassertive man", though one finds this difficult to square with the fact that, starting with a single drug-store, he built up a chain of stores. He was also rather more hands-on with his boy's education than Wikipedia suggests. A seemingly-frustrated poet himself, he drilled the young Cole in the works of English poets, especially Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets like Donne. One wonders whether his initial reluctance to tackle Kiss me, Kate was as much due to resentment at this early training as to diffidence at matching himself against the Bard.

Sadly, I can back little of the foregoing two paragraphs with URIs, reliant as I am of my memory of the first biography of Cole Porter by his friend George Eells. Because this (naturally, in view of the date of publication) side-stepped its subject's homosexuality - while not avoiding descriptions of Porter's camp life-style - it has been largely disregarded in favour of Charles Schwartz's later work.
However, I feel that the early influences should be given their due weight.