TABLE TALK
If music be the food of love . .
DENIS BROGAN
hingion—I have been much subjected in ent weeks to music (and Musak), being most cases a captive audience in res- rants, bars, waiting rooms, and some s of transport ; and I have been ponder- one of the great changes of my life ; the fact that I can no longer recognise most the current popular tunes. Whether they 'e made the top ten or twenty means now hing to me. Gone are the days when I a pathological knowledge of the current —a proof, serious Musicians might say did say), of a misspent youth. I can recognise one or two airs from the vre of the Beatles but that is about all.
at it is one of the blessings of the com-. y I keep in hotels, bars, etc, that most he other customers are in my own situa- and the prudent providers of music e you eat (or drink), presumably know- their own business, dig up the not .for- n but long neglected tunes of my adoles- e and early manhood. - was first conscious of this and of the er of evocation that an old, liked—almost d—tune could have, in that most agree- of Australian cities, Brisbane. For one in 1957, in the warm Queensland winter th of July, I heard, in the equivalent of algar Square, the delightful sound of untain Greenery'. It was not merely that was one of the first triumphs Of Rodgers Hart (a better combination than Rodgers Hammerstein), but that I associated it 'The Garrick Gaieties' and those remote when Coolidge was in the White House was finding that New York really was dad on the Hudson' as 0. Henry called stead of one of the lower circles of Hell now usually "find Manhattan. In some , 'Mountain Greenery' recalls Andrew ell—at a great distance. For a moment nihilates 'all that's made to a green ht in a green shade', a thought that was possible in Washington Square and In Central Park. More relevant was its forecasting the bold and outrageous rhymes of that rising star, Cole Porter. 'A lesson from Mr Omar' was rhymed with 'away from pa and no ma', predicting the felicities of 'You're the Top'. Cole Porter, or his agents, were zealous in not permitting any foreign productions of his shows or 'disks' before the best bargain had been made and the best production had been arranged for. One of my self-employed duties used to be to smuggle the hits to England, inviting the choice and master spirits of the Oxford young to listen to the latest work of The Master.
And he was a master. In a highly percep- tive piece in the New Yorker by (I think) the late Wolcott Gibbs, the author wrote that when a woman said 'that was the year of "Night and Day",' she didn't mean it was the year that 'Night and Day' was launched but the year it meant a lot to her. And some- thing of the same could have been said of another set of verses (not Cole Porter's), 'These Foolish Things', a piece of madeleine that has its verbal felicities almost worthy of Cole Porter. 'Night and Day' has never quite gone out. 'Mountain Greenery' and 'These Foolish Things' are in apparent occultation at the moment. But what, in the last week or so. has 'clutched at my heart strings' was suddenly hearing 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square'—clutched partly because it brought back noisy memories of Berkeley Square in Lionel Hale's unprinted parody, but also because it brought back the belle epoque of the dying Europe of 1939.
Other `selections' evoked that remote past, like 'Begin the Beguine'. When it was very popular, a pedantic or jealous critic sug- gested that Mr Porter didn't know what beguine meant in French. Porter had served in the Foreign Legion after passing through Yale, and if he chose to name a dance 'the Beguine', that was his right.
But there were other memories. A few days ago, I found myself dining with the gratin of a midwestern city and found myself next to an eminent businessman, robustly hand- some as they are in bankers' advertisements but not so often in real life. He had been a brilliant student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shortly after I left Harvard and we joined in commiserating with each other on the destruction of the old North End of Boston. Where now was Scollay Square, where the Howard Athenaeum, where the burlesk house where I had first seen the then obscure Marx Brothers?
But we also discovered, to our mutual surprise, that we both had known and sung and treasured that more serious lament of the 'thirties, 'Little White Lies'. (My new friend's wife, member of a great midwestern political dynasty, also knew this lament over the gullibility of women and the perfidy of men. We both reflected on the melancholy tone of so many popular songs, usually the melancholy of ladies who had stooped to folly. (Less hardboiled than T. S. Eliot's young woman, they were not content merely to put another record on.) Some of these songs of unrequited love were not as banal. They may have been Schmalz but it was good Schmalz. There was that admirable minor masterpiece 'Be Still, My Heart' sung by Irene Dunne, I think, in Theodora Goes Wild. There was the defiant 'Can't Help Lovin' that Man of Mine' from Showboat. There were other versions on the theme that Burns (et pour cause) exploited so much (and best in Ye Banks and Braes). But the pangs of unrequited love were not and are not the only themes of the music of that remote age when talkies were coming in and the Charleston going out.
There were, for the moment, the revolu- tionary innovations of No, No, Nanette and The Girl Friend. (I never appreciated The Boy Friend enough since I still admired The Girl Friend.) The 'war between the sexes', to quote from James Thurber, was some- times shown in its rougher aspects as in Goody, Goody, where Dido has the gratifi- cation of seeing Aeneas getting his come- uppance from 'Venus tootle entiere a sa prole attachee. But mostly the girls get the worst of it and have to lament a world sadly lost, and the passing of youth and love. After all, this is an old theme ; and Lorenzo da Ponte put it perfectly: 'Dove sono i be! momenti Di dolcezza e di piacer?'
But he had the help of an even better setter of his lyrics than either Cole Porter or Mr Coward: Wolfgang Amadeus Chrysostomos Mozart.
Previous page
