Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9, 1893 to an immensely
wealthy family. Precocious in music, he began studying the violin when
he was six, and at eleven had one of his compositions published. He
pursued his academic studies at the Worcester Academy in Massachusetts
and at Yale; music study took place at the School of Music at Harvard
and subsequently in Paris with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. At
Yale he participated in all its musical activities and wrote two
football songs still favorites there, “Yale Bull Dog” and “Bingo Eli
Yale.” In 1916 he wrote the music for his first Broadway musical comedy,
_See America First_, a failure. During the next few years he was a
member of the French desert troops in North Africa, while during World
War I he taught French gunnery to American troops at Fontainebleau. Just
after the close of the war he contributed some songs to _Hitchy Koo_ of
1918, and in 1924 five more songs to the _Greenwich Village Follies_,
both of them Broadway productions. Success first came in 1928 with his
music for _Paris_ which included “Let’s Do It” and “Let’s Misbehave.”
For the next quarter of a century and more he was one of Broadway’s most
successful composers. His greatest stage hits came with _Fifty Million
Frenchmen_ (1929), _The Gay Divorce_ (1932), _Anything Goes_ (1934),
_Leave It to Me_ (1938), _Panama Hattie_ (1940), _Let’s Face It_ (1941),
_Kiss Me Kate_ (1948), _Can-Can_ (1953) and _Silk Stockings_ (1955).
From these and other stage productions came some of America’s best loved
popular songs, for which Porter wrote not merely the music but also the
brilliant lyrics: “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Love for Sale,”
“You Do Something to Me,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” and so forth. He
was also a significant composer for motion pictures, his most successful
songs for the screen including “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “In the
Still of the Night,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “Don’t Fence Me
In,” and “True Love.”
The most successful of all the Cole Porter musical comedies was _Kiss Me
Kate_ which began a Broadway run of over one thousand performances on
December 30, 1948, then went on to be a triumph in Vienna, Austria,
where it became the greatest box-office success in the history of the
Volksoper where it was given. In Poland it was the first American music
performed in that country. The text by Bella and Sam Spewack was based
partly on Shakespeare’s _Taming of the Shrew_, but it was really a play
within a play. A touring company is performing the Shakespeare comedy in
Baltimore, Maryland. The musical comedy moves freely from scenes of that
production to the backstage complications in the private lives of its
principal performers. In the end, the amatory problems of the two stars
are resolved within a performance of the Shakespeare comedy. This was
not only Cole Porter’s most successful musical comedy but also the
finest of his scores. Never before (or since) was he so prolix with song
hits in a single production; never before was his style so varied. The
repertory of semi-classical music has been enriched by a symphonic
treatment given the best of these melodies by Robert Russell Bennett.
Bennett’s symphonic presentation of _Kiss Me Kate_ opens with
“Wunderbar,” a tongue-in-cheek parody of a sentimental Viennese waltz.
It continues with the sprightly measures of “Another Openin’, Another
Show,” and after that come the plangent, purple moods of “Were Thine
That Special Face,” “I Sing of Love,” and the show’s principal love
song, “So In Love.”