Last word
Singing songs
Geoffrey Wheateroft
'Strange, how potent cheap music can be,' says the hero of Ian Kilbannock's favourite play. (That's enough of clever allusions.) No singer of cheap music has ever had such a potent effect on me as Ruth Etting, of whose death at the age of eighty-two we learnt on Monday morning. I can remember exactly where and When I first heard her unmistakable voice. It was the winter of 1966, at a Party of the Raymond Carrs' in North Oxford. I think I was dancing with the woman who is now married to our theatre critic. (That's enough of subProustian reminiscence.) At all events I was captivated, and tried to get hold of a Copy of the gramophone record. It was eventually necessary to send as far as New York, though I think that the LP is now in print here. Ruth Etting was not a great creative artist like Billy Holliday, but a wonderful Minor popular singer. There was more than an element of luck in her career. In the best tradition of the musical-about-a-musical she was plucked out of the chorus line at the last moment When the leading lady fell sick during a Pre-Broadway run in Boston. (I forget the singer's name, which is as well, for I do remember that she did not fall ill Precisely: her fondness for the bottle finally undid her.) It was then that Ruth Etting first sang 'Ten cents a dance', the song that made her famous, though it was another song, 'Love me or leave me' that was taken as the title of the Doris Day movie about Ruth Etting. One can half see why Miss Day was chosen for the Part. There was a touching innocence about Ruth Etting. But, and this is why She was so much more fascinating than Ooris Day, it was bruised innocence. Iler voice is part little-girl-lost; and in part it sounds of cigarettes and gin and unhappy love affairs. This was the quality that Made her the purest of all torch singers, that special Thirties breed. Torch songs — a mixture of camp Chromaticism, Masochistic melancholy and rueful memory — are really impossible to define except by example. 'Love me or leave Me' is the best-known, but the paradigm is 'Mean to me': I can hear Ruth Etting singing as I put down the words. RIP. Writing about popular music is, paradoxically, as liable to produce accusations of pretentiousness as writing about 'serious' music. Private Eye has never laughed louder than when Mr Richard Buckle announced that the Beatles were the greatest song writers since Schubert. Although hyperbolic, however, that judgment does not seem to me inherently preposterous. Of course, Lennon and Macartney were not the greatest song writers since Schubert (George Gershwin was: Pseuds' Corner please copy). But man's native gift for song, for setting words to music, must nowadays repose somewhere and is as likely to be in popular music as in the fag-end of the tradition of high European music. I am in a stronger position than most to make the pronouncement. I have a chestful of campaign medals for my support of new music, and scarc;ely an opera has been premiered in London over the last ten years without my presence. (I remember that I missed Tippett's The Ice Break for irritating reasons: having returned from abroad for the last performance, which I had arranged to see, duty called me to hear instead Mr Maudling explaining his interesting business activities in front of his peers. Those who have experienced both will know that almost any evening in the opera house is preferable to almost any evening in the House of Commons, and I made a promise to see the piece as soon as possible, which will be next May).
Some of these new operas were marvellous — Maxwell Davies's Taverner; some were dire — no names. No one, though, could possibly claim for any of them lyrical simplicity. None is ever going to be widely popular. The argument about the decline of Western music, the widening gap between composer and audience, is a complicated one. Some music was never meant to be popular, in any sense. The 'Musical Offering' is as 'difficult' as anything by Schoenberg; Beethoven's quartets have never been whistled in the street. Opera was different. Once, it genuinely was popular music. When Mozart quoted several tunes during the dinner scene in Don Giovanni he knew that they would be -recognised by his audience: 'Non pit) andrai', the number of his own which he quotes, had caught on in Prague. (An alpha-level opera-goers' quiz question is to identify all the tunes quoted in the scene.) When Rigoletto was first performed in Venice, 'La donna e mobile' was known throughout the city before the first night.
That can never happen today, not at least with self-consciously 'straight' music. (It is a nice irony that thirty years ago the jazz and pop world knew classical music as 'longhaired' music.) I suppose that Evita is the nearest thing to Rigoletto, but that shows the other side of the problem for, although it certainly had a song which was whistled in the streets, Evita is not to be compared to Verdi even at his most barrel-organic. Perhaps we should be content with very rare popular song writers of genius, and otherwise bathe in cheap music's simple potency.
Previous page
