Noël Coward, pictured in 1937 at Waterloo Station (photo: Noël Coward Archive Trust – with thanks to the Noël Coward Foundation)

​Mary Bevan

Soprano, whose recordings include ‘A Most Marvellous Party’, an album of Coward songs, with Nicky Spence and Joseph Middleton (Signum Records)

'Whenever Nicky Spence and I sang together,' Bevan begins, 'it always came back to the fact we both love doing comic songs and always had so much fun on stage together. We were always trying to find something that would allow us to tap into the fun, and Joseph Middleton suggested Noël Coward.'

The pair were relative Coward novices until that point. Spence knew ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington’, and Bevan loved ‘Mad About the Boy’. To tap into the worlds they knew best, then, Bevan suggested they pair Coward with classical composers who were writing around the same time; it’s one final (sonic) party for the legend.

Some had direct links. 'There’s a huge range of composers on the album,' Bevan outlines. 'Coward was quite scathing about Benjamin Britten, saying that he was "unable to write a good tune" (although he loved Peter Grimes). Coward had an affair with Ned Rorem, who’s also included.'

We ponder if such different writers require a different vocal technique every time. 'I feel the Coward songs sing themselves. The more lieder-like contributions from Poulenc, Quilter, Britten and Rorem – the latter’s setting of Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal is especially modern – require a more technically-focused way of singing. Because we’ve heard Coward sing the songs himself and almost speak it, it takes the pressure off. I felt so relaxed singing Coward.'

'It was completely freeing in a way that singing English song often isn’t. The English language can be quite hard and stressful to sing, something to do with the vowels and consonants. Especially for a man, Coward writes in the same pitch as your spoken voice, which allows you to focus more on the words.'

Mary Bevan, Joseph Middleton and Nicky Spence: getting into the spirit of Noël Coward and his songs (Photo: John Alexander)​

Bevan argues that Coward was driven more by the words than a desire to write a melody, where in other writers the music and lyric are equal partners. 'With Coward,' Bevan beams, 'I picture him sitting at the piano and improvising a song based on the inflections of speech.'

The original scores, then, can seem on the surface rather simple. It is Coward’s delivery that shows just how embellished that line can become. It means that, in Bevan’s words, 'there’s an improvisatory quality where the delivery is so key. It’s lovely to have that flexibility because you can do you.'

She suggests this has changed the way she approaches other writers and art song. 'I’ve always tried hard to be text-driven but Coward underlines to you the absolute importance of the audience being able to hear what you’re singing. What you are saying must be understood. But also, it’s made me more relaxed on stage, allowing me to be myself and not straitjacketed as an "art song singer". People want to see you as you, and Coward has made me more relaxed about doing exactly what I feel is right in my interpretation. That’s especially hard when you’re a young singer, to be confident about what you present to the world – and what you do with your face and body too, not feeling like you must stand still. People are more interested when you are as natural as you can be on stage. It’s amazing how much it releases something in an audience too. If we’re allowed to laugh, then we’re allowed to cry.'

'Anything that makes people laugh is always worth keeping alive', Bevan argues. 'It doesn’t happen so often in our quite serious world of classical music. We need to be light and fun too; that’s why we make music. Whilst it shows a mirror to our own humanity, we have to keep the whole spectrum alive; we can’t just have the dramatic or heavy.'

But, as an appropriately-laughter-packed chat wraps up, Bevan reminds us that Coward was more than a man of comedy alone. He wrote 'some beautiful and heart-breaking songs', especially given his perspective as a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. 'It’s the laughter that makes those songs even more special, because you see the humanity of him.'

Oliver Soden 

Author, whose books include 'Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward', Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Coward would be very pleased by the circumstances in which Soden joins me for a chat: he’s fresh (but perhaps not feeling it!) from the West End’s celebration of Noel Coward 125 at the Prince of Wales Theatre and an after-party that stretched to 2am. The all-star cast included Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Patricia Routledge. Soden was responsible for finding and ordering the material, working with RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans over several months to piece together 37 scenes that summarise Coward in plays, sketches and songs.

His was such varied work, but did it stretch to classical music? 'On his part', Soden responds, 'there might have been some mistrust. "Classical" implies some form of technical training that he didn’t have. Coward the composer was like Charlie Chaplin; he wasn’t trained, and so would dictate to an amanuensis, working with the classically trained Elsie April. When he did go for two hours of formal training at the Guildhall in his early twenties, he stormed out after being told he couldn’t use consecutive fifths! There was a division between classical and popular at least on training; but I think it’s almost purposeful on his part, because if you want to be a composer who could do blues, G&S patter songs and romantic operetta, it’s probably better to dictate the tunes you’re hearing in your head than be straitjacketed by a rigid technique that might belt you into one genre.'

'Think of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto in Brief Encounter; it was Coward’s idea that it should be played throughout the film, and that it should come from the wireless in the living room rather than as a soundtrack. You must delve beneath Coward trying to be the witty quip artist, into what he actually thought about classical music. If you delve, I think you find quite a deep engagement with the classical music of his century even if his image meant he had to hide anything that reeked of seriousness.'

Evidence: Stravinsky wrote to Coward and suggested they collaborate on a ballet, but distrustful of high art, Coward said no! Yet … Coward had already worked with the Ballets Russes on a ballet (Soden points to an especially memorable song called ‘The Automobile Age’ that’s scored for saxophone quartet).

Coward engaged with opera, too; he attended Peter Grimes at a time in his life 'when he had become rather fuddy-duddy and reactionary in his tastes'. He admired the opera, even if he quipped there weren’t enough tunes. In his early twenties, he attended a party where Gershwin played parts of the Piano Concerto before its premiere, and it’s believed he also heard Gershwin give an early private rendition of Rhapsody in Blue. 'He might not have been able to read sheet music, but obviously picked up great chunks by ear,' Soden relays. 'He played sections of the Rhapsody during The Vortex in 1924. What I don’t think anyone had put together was that there had been no professional performance of Rhapsody in Blue in Britain. We’re dealing with a 24-year-old Coward introducing audiences to one of the key compositions of his age, the Jazz Age.'

Soden points out that Coward became a chief disseminator of the American art forms of jazz and blues in the UK. His British inheritance – Edwardian parlour song and G&S – was melded with the new musical world from America, a world he experienced far sooner than many of his contemporaries given his frequent early travels across the Pond. His song ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ is thought to be one of the songs that introduced the concept of the blues into popular British taste.

This was, indeed, such a time of churn in the world and in music. Says Soden: 'I think he didn’t engage himself with the great modernist advances in music apart from to send it up; his modernity expresses itself in a mistrust of the modern. He was invited to the very first performance of Walton’s Façade; he saw Edith Sitwell with the megaphone poking through the curtain and thought it was ridiculous. He wrote a send up of it in the same year. What’s interesting is that after Coward’s send-up, Walton and Sitwell revised Façade and it was only at that point that they introduced numbers like "Popular Song", and it became much more Cowardesque; when Façade was first performed, it sounded more overtly modern, more allied with Pierrot lunaire. The revisions added a theatrical popularity that feels like an homage to Coward, so the tangles go both ways. Remember that Coward’s great song of 1923 is "Parisian Pierrot"; he wouldn’t have liked a note of Schoenberg, but this figure of modernism is there in Coward in a different way. He does belong, but as a misfit.'

His relationship with earlier classical music was stronger. A recording of Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus inspired the writing of Bitter Sweet, and several of his stage works attempted to revive the operetta form. 'You get these wonderful Lehár-esque waltzes. He’s a modern who engages with the jazz age of Gershwin but also looks back. With Coward there’s always some contradiction between the radical and the romantic, the new and the old. His great operetta Bitter Sweet ends with the Viennese waltz almost curdling into ragtime.'

Soden acknowledges he was familiar with even earlier music, too: 'I’m reminded of Coward’s lyric that Germany’s Beethoven and Bach were far worse than their bite! In private moments when he wasn’t trying to be funny though, he admitted how moved he was by Mozart. The trap with Coward is to believe him when he pretends to be ignorant; I think he’s almost always more informed than he let on.'

He even met Sibelius in the Second World War period, touring Scandinavia as a spy to send back information about how far Scandinavia was capitulating to Nazi propaganda; I can imagine the pair bonding over their twin musical passions of romanticism and patriotism.

Closer to home, Coward recorded the voiceover for Poulenc’s L’Histoire de Babar, and Soden finds clear links with the Frenchman: 'that wonderful way Poulenc has of swimming around in the shallows in order to be profound; you think it’s entirely light-hearted until you realise almost despite yourself that some depth has been imparted. It’s this sensuous surface that they both do so well.'

Soden’s previous book was on Tippett, and I suggest there are common themes with him, too: two men who were part of the establishment yet considered radicals, and both gay men at a time it was illegal. 'There are absolute parallels,' he agrees. 'Tippett’s admiration for Coward was large. Tippett was in his twenties and living in London at the time of Coward’s greatest successes in the ‘20s; at the time, Tippett was living with a theatrical manager who fixed tickets to see Coward in The Vortex. He saw Coward in those overtly homosexual plays and was equally struck by the music.'

But Coward’s chief legacy, Soden argues, was the dissemination of jazz to impressionable young classical composers. 'Look at a piece like Cavalcade, with its ending song "Twentieth Century Blues"; that song was important for classical composers of that Tippett-Britten generation, both of whom would incorporate blues into their music. They were introduced to it because of Coward. We know that a teenage Britten attended Cavalcade; Tippett was there too, and his autobiography’s title "Those Twentieth Century Blues" was a direct quote of Coward. In his final opera New Year, there’s a quote from Coward on the very first page: "dance little lady". There are clear cross currents.'

Soden believes we are in a Coward renaissance, noting how revivals of his plays are becoming much more serious in tone. 'All great comic writers are serious. To miss the seriousness is to miss the wit. Profundity and humour are indivisible. Comedy is such a good disguise to impart truths; especially if those truths, regarding sexual terrain, are illegal. You can get away with a lot more in a comic song than a serious one if you’re calling for gay liberation at a time when the Lord Chamberlain is censoring your scripts. This was art concealing art.'

Noël Coward in 1955 (photo: Noël Coward Archive Trust – with thanks to the Noël Coward Foundation)

To me though, the recent Coward revival has been limited more to his theatre work as playwright; what of Coward the songwriter, technically speaking? 'I think he’s first and foremost a lyricist and everything he did musically was a form of pastiche. But there’s a chromaticism, a harmonic complexity, and a rhythmic complexity; very accomplished singers acknowledge how difficult it is to perform. The complexity is so lightly worn, you don’t notice it’s there until you’re inside it as a performer. Take the first four notes of "Someday I’ll Find You", divorced from their context; they’re very odd, chromatic, unexpected, and the harmonies they imply are shifting. These almost-missteps make the music dance rather than limp.'

The wartime song 'London Pride' is another Soden points to for compositional flair. He underlines how it has the harmonic scheme of the Westminster chimes, so 'you have the sound of London stitched into the harmonic scheme of the song.' The allusions continue, with the first two musical phrases very subtly taking the melody of Deutschland über alles. It was musical warfare, taking back control of a national melody. But, with such complexity hidden beneath seeming surface simplicity, 'you start to see he’s not so far away from classical music.'

'This is a composer whose great birthdays were honoured at Aldeburgh. The last thing that Peter Pears sang to Britten when they appeared in public together was Coward’s song "I’ll See You Again", when Britten was dying. There was real admiration of a well-made song.'

'I like the idea of the songs as a starting rather than a finishing point. To hear Coward sing them in the '20s is to hear a bygone age. Hear Ian Bostridge sing them with new piano arrangements and they sound like Schubert. Hear Marianne Faithfull sing them and they sound like Kurt Weill. Joan Sutherland recorded Coward and lived up the same mountain in Switzerland. Michael Finnissy – associated with the music of the New Complexity movement – admires Coward and wants to make new arrangements. There’s this idea that Coward is a beginning for different genres and stylists.'

The very definition of the classical tradition is, surely, breathing new life into old work; the art of interpretation is a core aspect, finding relevance and energy in music from years ago. I note that Soden’s masterly biography of Coward, released last year, refers to his ‘lives’, plural. Appropriately enough for the man who was many things, through many a classical artist, his music continues to find new forms.

Oliver Soden’s ‘Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward’ is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Ian Bostridge

Tenor, whose albums include ‘Coward: The Noël Coward Songbook’ recorded with Sophie Daneman and Jeffrey Tate (Warner Classics)

A disc that was selected as a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in November 2002, it was the Head of A&R at EMI Classics who pushed Bostridge to record some popular repertoire. Bostridge had known Private Lives as 'one of the great pieces of theatre, where music plays such an important part', and pianist Graham Johnson had shown him the film of Coward performing in Las Vegas in the 1950s. Otherwise, his prior exposure to Coward had been small; so he called on Corin Buckeridge, who had worked as music director on a production of The Threepenny Opera that Bostridge had directed while at Oxford. Buckeridge’s musical theatre background made him the ideal choice of arranger for the album – and what arrangements these are! Divorced from Coward’s distinct personal delivery, the songs take on a new life and at times sound far closer to art song than imagined previously.

'I think Coward’s songs are very subtle melodically,' Bostridge tells me. 'The harmonies implied by the melodies are very interesting, and sometimes it was quite hard to sing the right notes. I had to develop a new way of singing. Legato yes, vibrato no. I really feel that a certain sort of vibrato would be out of place, because it moves too far away from speaking.'

This has led to new avenues, with ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ becoming a popular part of his repertoire. He has continued exploring Coward and Cole Porter with his album collaborator Sophie Daneman and has worked with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, including on a new classical song cycle and jazz standard encores, not to mention ‘Twentieth Century Blues’.

'I think having done the Coward, it pushed me in the direction of loosening up more. There’s nothing I hate more than the operatic singing of popular song! There might be a bit too much of it on the Coward disc, but there’s less of it when I’ve performed popular song more recently. I’d like to go back and sing more of the Coward.'

Speaking of the technical differences in repertoire, I wonder if there are connections too? 'In one sense, there are few direct links as Coward didn’t have a trained voice. I think of Lotte Lenya, who went from a fluting operetta voice – not particularly well-disciplined in the 1930s – to more of a speech-song style. It’s the same with Coward; come Vegas, he moves more towards speech and away from the melody. This is something you need to appreciate when singing this repertoire. But definitely it’s a repertoire where you can use legato, which is the foundation of all classical singing. Remember it was a period when people wrote popular songs that were sung by classical voices; famously, Ezio Pinza appeared in South Pacific. In a way, we’ve lost that.'

Sample Bostridge’s take on ‘If You Could Only Come With Me’ for a quick taste of an almost-classical depth, harmonic complexity and profundity that might take some by surprise. 'At the time of our recording,' Bostridge chips in, 'some people hated it because Coward is always so ironic and detached. There’s not so much irony in lieder, instead a much more engaged darkness of emotion. But we tried to bring a sense of that.'

‘Twentieth Century Blues’ is indeed a dark and serious song, both in its original version and in their arrangement. Bostridge is quick to point out the darkness extended to its staging in Cavalcade: '"Twentieth Century Blues" has a Brechtian effect where it comes in the show, as this ominous and seedy song is interrupted by a burst of patriotism. It’s like Brecht in reverse, a sort of alienation effect.' Bostridge has previously called Coward an 'English Kurt Weill'.

'Plus, there’s a lot of sadness about his sexuality. Think "I travel alone" and "Sail Away". But he would have hated to be associated with that. I think he hated being taken too seriously, even though he was widely respected and had a huge influence on people like Harold Pinter.'

With such an impact on theatrical luminaries, I raise Oliver Soden’s suggestion that Coward’s songs are character and lyric led, with the music more a skilful pastiche. Bostridge feels each song’s priority varies, but fundamentally 'he’s a great melodist. I don’t think we should underestimate his gift as a composer of melody. Yes, he had a lot of help writing music down and was very honest about that, but I wonder if he exaggerated just how much help he had as part of not wanting to be taken too seriously.'

Noël Coward, with conductor Richard Bonynge and soprano Joan Sutherland, in Jamaica in 1965 (photo: Noël Coward Archive Trust – with thanks to the Noël Coward Foundation)

Trying to pin down the essential quality of a Coward melody, we hit upon 'bittersweetness', with the melody implying an often plangent and shifting harmony.

How does it compare to singing Schubert? 'It’s a question of taste so you can’t go too far, but there are elements of popular singing that help you loosen up for the singing of lieder. When I sing "Der Leiermann" from Winterreise, I quite often do it in a way that comes out of having heard Bob Dylan sing. Having sung a lot of Coward, I’d say it’s a rhythmic looseness that I’ve since brought to lieder. Even if it’s a wonderful melody, you don’t sing the notes, you sing the words. They will vary in length and you can pull the rhythm around. The rhythm can operate in counterpoint to a strict pulse and the accompaniment. One of the main things you do in jazz singing is to really pull against the accompaniment, to drag or push forward against it; you would never quite do that in a classical song, but you can do that a little. It’s about flexible rhythm. It freed me up a lot.'

What about the other way: Schubert teaching something useful for singing Coward? 'I probably sang some of the Coward songs with a level of intensity that was unusual for that repertoire, and that probably came from Schubert. But it’s not always appropriate, for the silly songs. You don’t want to overload his music; I don’t think Coward songs can take an overweighting of emotion. Even if you push the emotion, there must always be a pulling back and a lightness of touch. "Someday I’ll Find You" comes out of an incredibly suppressed dialogue; I guess it’s a very English thing, this restraint.'

There’s nothing restrained about the Coward 125 celebrations and Bostridge welcomes the revival of interest. However, he cautions against moving too far away from the source: 'there was an album of pop singers performing Coward, and I was unsure of the delivery; it lacked a little bit of bite. Even if it’s detached and sometimes emotionally repressed, it should always have a little bite. There’s an edge in the delivery, the inflection of the melody and the accompaniment; avoid the sugary sweet. I hope we keep that and it doesn’t become overproduced.'