Hannah Robbins

‘Dear Doctor’: Sources for the collaboration between Cole Porter and Albert Sirmay

Dr Albert Sirmay (Szirmai) was a Hungarian born composer and music editor. From the early 1920s to the 1960s, he acted as publisher (through Chappell Music) for most of the leading Broadway composers of the day including Jerome Kern, Frederick Loewe, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter. But whereas Sirmay’s input was mostly limited to arranging publication versions of songs for composers such as Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers, he also acted as a copyist for performance materials during the process of writing several of Porter’s shows, including music that was never published.

Letters between Porter and ‘Doc’ Sirmay shed light on both the transcription and editorial process and is supported by various music manuscripts in the Cole Porter papers at both Yale University and the Library of Congress. This paper will specifically look at examples from Mexican Hayride (1944), Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) to consider the musical implications of this collaboration.

In addition to this, Porter and Sirmay’s correspondence also indicates a deeper personal relationship where Porter sought and Sirmay volunteered advice on professional matters. This paper will analyse examples of this through the 1940s and 1950s in order to characterise a possibly unique working relationship between composer and his publisher, copyist, and confidante.