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This chapter follows the trajectory of Porter's musical formation, starting from his first known composition that he wrote in 1901 at the age of ten and dedicated to his mother, a programmatic work for piano entitled “The Song of the Birds.” His compositions can be described as an amalgam of styles, combining his early classical training and exposure to opera, ballet, ragtime, popular music, and jazz. He had an innate gift for mimicking the sounds around him, breezily absorbing the idioms and nuances of the speech and melodies he heard. His social skills provided a network of influential friends and artists who provided him with ideas and feedback. By the late 1920s Porter had given up on the idea of becoming a serious classical composer and instead concentrated on writing sophisticated, witty lyrics, molding them to his signature musical style just for listeners who wanted to enter his world and share his encounters with elegance and artistry.

This chapter attempts to paint a portrait of Porter's life in Europe between the late 1910s and early 1930s. The persons and places he encountered there left their mark on a multitude of his songs. Porter stood at the center of the Roaring Twenties in Paris and of the 1930s and 1940s in New York and Hollywood, a product of the upper class, the personification of the notion of “style,” and of a philosophy that strives for a quality interpretation of life with an emphasis on creating beauty and well-being. But at the same time, he served as a subversive figure within his social order, openly displaying his considerable empathy for the outcasts of society, for his fellow men both black and white, and for persons whose sexuality differed from societal norms. His songs, some of the most outstanding of the twentieth century, allowed him to transcend life's struggles and hardships. Perhaps through them, both the performer and the audience, coming home with full hands and dancing feet, might do so as well.

This chapter analyzes Porter's performing style by drawing on published reports and eyewitness accounts of his abilities. It compares aspects of his performances with those of some of his favorite singers in order to identify shared stylistic elements, as well as ways in which his interpretations were unique. Though it will be impossible to appreciate the full measure of Porter's art from the scant historical evidence that documented his performing, we certainly have more to work with than is the case with Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers. The recordings not only make it possible to reconcile Porter's reputation as a performer with the evidence he left behind but also give us a rare opportunity to gain some insight into the interpretive qualities Porter was accustomed to and was able to bring out in the performance of his music.

In the years following the success of Anything Goes in 1934 only Rodgers and Hart surpassed Porter in producing musical hits on Broadway. In the mid-1940s, two successive failures, Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1946), prompted Porter and his backers to question the commercial vitality of the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein-type musical. The tides had turned and the examples of Rodgers and Hammerstein's second musical, Carousel (1945), Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Porter's own Kiss Me, Kate (1948) bear testimony to the power that Oklahoma! now exerted. Even these two old dog songwriters now felt the urgency of learning the new trick of writing integrated musicals. Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun and Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, remain the only musicals with unaltered books by these great songwriters that occupy a firm position in the Broadway repertory.

The lyrics of some of Porter's most celebrated songs underwent a double process of generalization (away from the specifically local references) and neutralization (bowdlerization) as they made their way into the larger culture. This chapter illustrates that process by looking at “Anything Goes” (from the 1934 musical of the same name) as an exemplary case study, tracing its path into broader consumption spheres from its sexually and socially mischievous original version through a series of differing, Porter-sanctioned alternatives in late 1934 and 1935 to its comfortable assimilation, by the 1950s, as an anodyne standard in the Great American Songbook to be interpreted by leading recording artists.

This chapter presents an annotated list of secondary sources whose major focus is either Cole Porter and his music or subjects closely related to his life and works. The bibliography will be of use to researchers who study Porter, his music, and the historical and cultural milieu in which he worked; it will also be of interest to those wishing to grasp the state of the field, as it serves as a general overview of the available research. The sources have been organized into six categories: biography; critical interpretation; musical construction; studies of particular songs, shows, or lyrics; contextual sources; and encyclopedic sources. Several sources that do not fall easily into any of these groupings have been listed separately.

This chapter looks at the work of Cole Porter. It begins with an extended commentary of his career, followed by details on productions, with data and song information. Porter was born on the banks of the Wabash. His maternal grandfather, J. O. Cole, was a hard-headed merchant who struck it rich in the California Gold Rush of 1848 and returned home to become one of the richest men in Indiana. By his fourteenth birthday Porter was at boarding school in Massachusetts, and in 1909 he entered Yale. He majored, apparently, in writing football songs—Bulldog is still sung—and varsity shows. His first professionally published song was Bridget, in 1910.

This chapter explores the extensive range of musical references in Porter's songs to view the meanings that emerge out of this eclecticism, with particular focus on “Begin the Beguine” and its history of varied interpretations in sound recording and cinema. Throughout Porter's works, the exotic, something one dreams of from home and experiences only on a rare voyage abroad, is a metaphor for the true love that is passionately desired but ultimately elusive. This metaphor appears to reflect an ambivalence that likely characterized Porter's own experience as a gay man in a heterosexual marriage in early and mid-twentieth-century America.

Anything Goes was Cole Porter's first major hit. Anything Goes does not conform to the organic “Wagnerian” model of some pre- and post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals beginning with Show Boat. Instead it presents a striking parallel with the generally less ostentatiously organic world of Baroque opera, in which great stars and show-stopping arias can ensure at least short-term success. In any of its forms, including the 1962 Anything Goes that held the stage for almost three decades and the 1987 reincarnation with its new book and numerous interpolated songs, Anything Goes still works.

This chapter offers several ways to think about how music appeared in Porter's social world. The term “musicking,” coined by musicologist Christopher Small to incorporate all musical performance acts, from composing to playing to listening to dancing, under a single rubric, is an excellent label for Porter, whose personal performances were as central to his life as his songwriting. He was a consummate musicker: his passion for music was always socially embedded to a degree that complicated any straightforward decontextualization. And in this respect, he was united with many of his friends and allies. This becomes clear from a brief account of his earlier career.

This chapter focuses on the score created by Porter for a ballet-pantomime premiered by the Ballets suédois in 1923. The archive of the Ballets suédois is kept at the Dance Museum in Stockholm. The museum also houses the orchestral score of the Porter ballet, which was completed by Charles Koechlin under the title Within the Quota. The score can be described as a marvel—a modest one perhaps, but much bolder in its substance than Koechlin's cleaned-up, highly Europeanized orchestration. Porter endorsed that orchestration, and the impulse behind it, which finds Koechlin seeking to abstract and estrange Porter's American idiom, to give it a kind of expat identity. Judging from the reviews, however, Koechlin's scoring did no favors for the Ballets suédois, or for Porter, who turned back to Broadway. Although the score did not survive the organization that commissioned it, Within the Quota became known, even in absentia, as the first “jazz” ballet.

This chapter considers the factors behind the failure of the show You Never Know. It suggests that You Never Know fell victim to producer John Shubert's meddling in and mismanagement of the show, as well as his disingenuousness in playing Porter against director Rowland Leigh, Leigh against George Abbott, and all three of them against his own intentions to expand the show beyond what any of the principals, and eventually the critics, thought it could bear. This meddling was itself a result of internal strife within the Shubert Organization. An anonymous reviewer identified show's chief problems in Theatre Arts Monthly: “As an intimate revue it might have passed, but it dies under the weight of musical comedy routine and the size of the theatre.” Porter was not to blame for these problems, but he was either unable or unwilling to do anything about them.

This chapter focuses on Porter's years (1909–13) at Yale. Looking back at these years, the musical comedy scores Porter wrote for his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and for the annual smokers of the Yale Dramat were the most significant aspect of his college experience for his subsequent career in the musical theater. With his five show scores—Cora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913), and Paranoia, which he wrote for his alma mater while a student at the Harvard School of Music in 1914—Porter transformed musical comedy at Yale from what had been an occasional divertissement into a tradition that for many years held an honored place in the university's cultural life. He developed a proficiency in writing for the stage that prepared him ably for what would turn out to be a forty-year career as a composer-lyricist for Broadway and Hollywood.

This chapter considers how the lyrics and music of Cole Porter songs might be thought of in relation to one another in essentially musical and poetic structural terms. The goal is to describe what the lyrics and the music sound like together rather than what they mean or express together. The analysis focuses on three songs: “Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, ” “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and “You'd Be So Easy to Love.” These three songs and others suggest that Porter entirely confounds the notion of a song as a setting of a text and that his songs compel us to think of words and music in terms of one another and on an equal footing. This sharply subordinates any notion of the music “expressing” the meaning of the words, and thus throws analysis back onto those features of music and words that are shared—things like rhythm, pitch, syntax, and sound in the sense that creates assonance and rhyme. In these terms, Porter's songs, while being cast often in some variation of a conventional form, have their own dramatic shapes and in sometimes quite intricate ways lead the listener along a purposeful progression from beginning to middle to end.

This chapter focuses on the Arnstein's case against Cole Porter. In a complaint filed in February 1945, Arnstein claimed legal authorship of seven of Porter's greatest hits: “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” “I Love You,” “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” and “Don't Fence Me In”.

After Hermes Pan completed work on Betty Grable’s Sweet Rosie O’Grady he was invited by Cole Porter to choreograph Mexican Hayride on Broadway but refused, preferring to continue his career on the West Coast. Following the production of Pin Up Girl, however, Pan grew dissatisfied with Hollywood and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani with the view of becoming a monk. Realizing that monastic life was not to his taste, he returned to the West Coast only to be introduced to muralist Diego Rivera who invited Pan to Mexico and painted his portrait. Back at Fox Pan continues turning out musical films including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair before he is lent out to Paramount to choreograph Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby and featuring “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” After the completion of That Lady in Ermine, Fox drops Pan’s option.

No one would mistake Cole Porter's “Love for Sale” for a love song. Yet this less-than-subtle song about the world's oldest profession, from the 1930 musical The New Yorkers, confronts the nature of love and, by extension, the love song genre. Because of its daring text, it not only was banned in Boston but was considered so risqué that at the time radio stations across America refused to play it. Porter's musical setting of his infamous lyrics also deviated from the normative structures found in contemporaneous popular—and especially love—songs, and his structural departures were not simply motivated by relatively obvious concerns for text painting. This chapter attempts to unpack and understand these musical anomalies through close analyses of harmony, counterpoint, and text.

This chapter examines Porter's Kiss Me, Kate. Written in 1948, it holds a unique place in Porter's career and represents the fullest flowering of his mature talent. Porter met the challenge of the “new style musical comedy” by composing Kiss Me, Kate and simultaneously surpassed his past triumphs while establishing a new standard for the genre. The score's subtle refinement, depth of expression, and inventiveness, as well as the total integration of music, lyrics, and libretto, distinguish Kiss Me, Kate as Porter's masterwork. Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway at the New Century Theatre on 30 December 1948, with a run of 1,077 domestic performances and subsequent international performances.