Coward, Noël. (1899-1973)

"Bitter Sweet," Signed presentation copy

London: Chappell & Co.. 1929. First edition. Printed piano-vocal musical score. 9 x 11.25, 163 pages. Full blue cloth with title-plate on front board. Original color printed wrappers bound in, signed and inscribed on the original front cover, “For M. Galliard, With many thanks for his charming rendition of this music, Noël Coward 1930.” First few pages slightly soiled at edges, front cover with one tear repaired (not affecting signed area) and otherwise in very fine condition.

Bitter Sweet is an operetta in three acts written by Noël Coward and first produced in 1929 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, where it ran for a very successful 967 performances. Of the songs in the show, the best known by far is "I'll See You Again," used as a recurring motif throughout the play. Short on memorable Cowardian dialogue, Bitter Sweet nonetheless stands out as containing some of Coward's best music and has always been popular. It was filmed twice, in 1933 in black-and-white (in Britain, with Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravet in the leading roles) and in 1940 in Technicolor by MGM, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. It has been suggested that the operetta has an early use of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual", in the song "Green Carnation" where four overdressed, 1890s dandies sing:

Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer

At our disintegration.

Haughty boys, naughty boys,

Dear, dear, dear!

Swooning with affectation...

And as we are the reason

For the "Nineties" being gay,

We all wear a green carnation.

The suggestion is that Coward uses the "gay nineties" as a double entendre. The song title alludes to the gay playwright Oscar Wilde, who famously wore a green carnation himself. (The first use of the word "gay" in this sense recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is in a novel published in America in 1951, but earlier instances have been found.) (4450)

Signed Document/Item Theater