Word: cowardly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nineteen ninety-nine was a big year for memorials. Humphrey Bogart, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire and Noel Coward, among others, would have been 100, Pushkin 200, and it was International Chopin Year, marking the 150th anniversary of the composer's death. While some were celebrated reverentially, others received more bizarre treatments...
...Though Coward, who died in 1973, is intensely beloved by a devoted coterie, the wider audience knows him mostly for his brittle, epigrammatic plays--particularly Private Lives and Blithe Spirit--or for that foolproof cinematic stirrer of the female breast, Brief Encounter. But where his plays and films bear the whiff of a long-gone age, Coward's songs retain their vitality: the frisky list songs that display his wit (Mad Dogs and Englishmen; Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington) and the achingly tender ballads that reveal his unmatched capacity for genuine sentiment (If Love Were...
...those titles aren't as familiar as Gershwin's or Porter's, there's reason for it. Historically, standards became standards by dint of three forces: cast albums and revivals of the musicals they arise from; jazz musicians mining the repertoire; and Frank Sinatra. But Coward's musicals are theatrically his weakest work; the harmonic simplicity of his tunes--one of the elements that give them their charm--provides scant inspiration for improvisers. And Sinatra recorded only two Coward songs...
Marcovicci points out that Coward's "language was so extraordinarily elaborate" that it seems all wrong coming from the lips of most pop singers. Impresario Donald Smith, who produced last week's gala, suggests another reason: "Coward himself was the greatest performer of his own works...
...early '60s. "I asked Noel if he was afraid of death," Stritch recalled, "and he said the only thing he feared was that he wouldn't be remembered." It is his oceanic talent--the range of skills that made him seem, so inaccurately, a dilettante--that has brought Coward's fear to the brink of sad, sad fact...