NEW!

The NCMI can now be browsed and searched on this website. The Index produced by Alan Farley and Dominic Vlasto has been available for some years on the Noël Coward Society website but has been moved here to allow for further development.

Please explore this interesting resource by browsing or searching for a particular piece of music, a song or a lyric.

Good hunting!

NCMI

Pages on the musicals of Noël Coward take a detailed look at all of the musical production - see Musicals

Each page contains sections providing infomation on the show: a synopsis of the book; a list of all the musical numbers with some audio clips of selected songs and music; details of recordings; reviews; short extracts from lyrics; a cast list and interesting facts and quotations - many by Noël Coward.

Archive images of sheet music, LP and CD covers and contemporary photographs are included where possible, together with items taken from the theatre magazines of the day including Theatre World, The Play Pictorial and Theatre Arts Monthly.

The major reference work upon which this website draws is:
The Noël Coward Music Index (NCMI)
by Dominic Vlasto and Alan Farley.

It contains detailed analysis of some 400 Coward songs, music, lyric and recordings and is currently being redesigned for access from this site.
In recent years many popular artists have recorded Coward's work using a wide variety of styles and approaches.

For example compare these two recordings of a Coward song 'Sail Away' from the musical of the same name - the first is a recording by Noël Coward from 1957, Noël Coward in New York (Phillips BBL 7167) and the second a version by The Pet Shop Boys from the 2002, Twentieth-Century Blues (EMI 7243 49463127) :

For many it is in Coward's lyrics that he reveals his true talent. During his life he was given the title 'The Master' to indicate the depth and range of his ability in so many fields of entertainment but it is in his use and application of the English language where his skill and sense of fun is best revealed.

His lyrics are loved for their witty and effective use of complex rhyming schemes, where internal rhymes and rhythms are used to create incisive, mental pictures of the absurdity of the human condition in both usual and unlikely situations.

Noël Coward - The Complete Lyrics edited and annotated by Barry Day and published by Methuen, offers the most complete picture of Coward's lyric writing.

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