When out with Cleopatterer
Men always made their wills;
They knew they had no time to waste.
When the gumbo had that funny taste
They’d take her hand and squeeze it
And murmur, “Oh, you kid!”
But they none of ’em liked to start to feed
Till Cleopatterer did.
and in each of these types Wodehouse was faultless.
Fortunately for him and for us these songs were set to a music which in addition to being delightful let the words appear, and occasionally was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all of the Princess shows and the collected scores are impressive. He is the most erudite of our simple composers and he manipulates material with inordinate skill. He can adapt German folksong (Freut euch das Leben underlies Phoebe Snow); he didn’t do so well by Kingdom Comin’, which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But his best work, The Siren Song, The Little Ships, The Sun Shines Brighter, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness of execution which are all their own. The Siren Song corresponds exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, with humour. Scattered between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of pebbles thrown against a window—which doesn’t open—for the song ends in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement. Compare the lines I have quoted above with “Come, come, I love you only,” from The Chocolate Soldier—phrases you would expect to arrive at the same musical conclusion. The crash of “Oh, Hero Mine!” in the second is good drama, saved from being too obvious by being sung to the coward Sergius and not to the protagonist Bluntschli. But in comparison the gentle ending of The Siren Song is, as song, superior: “So sang the Sirens, ages and ages ago”—and you take it or leave it. The music, at least, is not forcing your hand.