Sondheim pits Porter against Coward

Talking to Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall last night, Stephen Sondheim gave a glimpse into his own theory of lyrical composition by contrasting Noël Coward (whom "I intensely dislike") and Cole Porter.

The problem with Coward, he said after some hesitation, was that he was born poor, and so when he writes about the rich, he does so with the outsider's sneer. Porter, on the other hand, was born rich and thus could treat his peers with good humour and kindness. Sondheim compared Coward's "I've Been to a Marvellous Party" with Porter's "Well, Did You Evah?", both songs about parties, noting Coward's emphasis on deformity and ugliness, against Porter's stress on habits and manners. He would have loved Coward to write a lower-class musical.

But the core of his point was that Coward never meant anything he wrote, whereas Porter was sincere. When Kelly pointed to a song like "Mad About the Boy", which is fraught with Coward's suppressed homosexuality, Sondheim said that he may have meant the sentiment when he thought of the song but by the time he wrote the lyrics, it was synthetic. Coward was too in love with wordplay - "a masturbatory cycle" - whereas Porter used it in the service of the song.

Sondheim was in town to promote his new book, Finishing the Hat, the complete lyrics from 1954-1981, which sets out his "golden rules" for lyric-writing: "Content dictates form; Less is more; God is in the details; all in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters." He also spoke about the influence on his life and career of Oscar Hammerstein II; his ability to write nervous breakdowns in song; and how "Rose's Turn", the climax of Gypsy, was the theatrical climax of his career.

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