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I beg your pardon, Herr Strauss, he says. Theyre not calling for you; theyre calling for your son. Amid the crowds exhortations for Strauss the younger to return to the podium, the father snarls sarcastically, The late Strauss and his illustrious son.
All this is not lost on the jealous Rasi, who resents Strausss obvious affections for the Countess and his ambitions to leave the bakery. He protests, Ive given up everything for you. All my dreams. And now Ive started on a career as artist with gingerbread and chocolate cakes! In desperation, Rasi turns to the Countess for support.
But the Countess is supportive of Strausss musical career. If he listens to you now, she warns Rasi, hell never amount to anything. Rasi resigns herself to the fact that Strauss will choose his career over her. Back in his apartment, Strauss finds the Countess, who has come to congratulate him on his success at the beer garden. They kiss. Alerted to the budding romance, the Countesss husband bursts into the room.
But Rasi, repentant over her selfishness toward Strauss, arrives just in time to escort the Countess away by a back stair and take her place. When the Count sees Rasi instead of his wife, his suspicions are allayed.
The ruse has worked, and Strauss can return to Rasi. In the last scene Strauss, Sr. He has been literally toppled from the podium, deposed from the seat of power, as it were. A woman comes up to him and requests an autograph. He regards her for a moment, then signs his name. After another pause he adds Senior beside it a tacit confirmation that he has accepted his son as his equal. There are hints of the essential Hitchcock here.
He teases proscriptions by the British Board of Film Censors against adultery see the conclusion of this chapter for a fuller examination of the censorship code by suggesting the affair between Strauss and the Countess in a farcical, rather than graphic, manner. There is the use of doubled charactersthat is, father and son, significantly reflecting in this instance the paradigm of composers struggle against social conformity for artistic independence; and Rasi and the Countess, reflecting the duality of the working girl and the wealthy dilettante.
Class divisions are debunked, both in the witty counterpointing of aristocratic life with the bemused asides of the servants; and in the contrasting of the artificial divisions between Strauss the elders stuffy, conventional concert music with his sons more lively and populist dance music. As if to confirm Strauss the younger as a peoples artist rather than an elitist composer, he is shown composing the Blue Danube waltzthe principal diegetic and extradiegetic leitmotif of the filmwhile working in the bakery.
In a montage blend of. He listens to the whirling crank of the dough-beater. He picks up the rhythm and begins humming the tune. The crank turns faster, the batter spatters his face, and the melody quickens. Strauss excitedly turns to Rasi and sings her the completed tune.
Thus, artistic inspiration is fused with working practicalities. Strauss is both musical genius and regular guya surefire recipe for musical bakers! The film betrays its theatrical origins at times. Its tableau-like character groupings, artificially stylized sets, frontally presented action are quite charming.
Preserving the musical sense of the original operetta, Korngolds adaptations of Strausss waltzes have a primarily diegetic function as source music that is either sung by Matthews or performed by the Strauss orchestra strategies praised by historian Charles Barr as prophetic indications of Hitchcocks later use of music in Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much. And the light and airy filigree of the sets resembles the scenic dcor found in later period films by Max Ophuls.
Only in the set piece of the film, Strausss conducting of his Blue Danube waltz, is the otherwise static camera unleashed. The orchestra performance is, properly enough, foregrounded and visually amplified through the elaborately choreographed camera moves of cinematographer Glenn MacWilliamsthe whole thing counterpointed by cutaways to shots of the pleased Countess and the sobbing Rasi.
Although we may see it in hindsight as more than just a footnote in Hitchcocks career, Waltzes from Vienna elicited only tepid responses from American critics at the time. Despite a capable cast, reported the New York Herald, the production somehow misses fire, giving evidence of rather ineffectual production.
And Motion Picture Daily noted: Here is a film that will charm music lovers because of the immortal compositions of the two Strausses, father and son; but except for this there is little else in the way of entertainment. American audiences will probably fail to appreciate what little humor is presented.
But the publics appetite for Johann Strauss biopics was undiminished. The Motion Picture Herald noted, It is not a highbrow screen offering to which only the intelligentsia may be bidden.
It is essentially a mass attraction. And Film Daily agreed that classical music was given a tremendous wide appeal to the pop elements as well as the lovers of classical music. The Variety critic applauded Dmitri Tiomkins musical arrangements as one of the memorable achievements of this kind presented on the screen, which has been selected for its haunting quality and is treated with fine dignity and respect. And the critic for the.
Motion Picture Herald wrote that the film was magnificently staged, picturesque and artistically wrought, with a set design that minutely reflect[s] the splendor and glory of Vienna during the time of Strauss mature life. The Great Waltz was based on an operetta of the same name with book by Moss Hart, which had premiered at Radio City on 22 September It is unclear at this writing if this particular operetta is related in any way to the source material for the Hitchcock film.
Its European credentials were impeccableit was adapted and written by Austrian migr Walter Reisch, who had had experience with composer biopics and classical music-related films in his native country he wrote a silent film, Ein Walzer von Strauss, in ; musically supervised by Tiomkin; performed by Austrian songstress Milija Korjus; and directed by the acclaimed, recently imported French director Duvivier. Studio chief Mayer himself greenlighted the picture as an opportunity to pursue his avowed duty, as he saw it, to bring culture and taste, in the form of enlightenment, to the masses.
In this Hollywood version Strauss Fernand Gravet works in a bank instead of a bakery, his potential infidelity involves an opera singer instead of a countess, and his breakthrough tune is not Blue Danube but Tales of the Vienna. Of the rivalry with his father, there is nary a trace.
The story is allowed to carry forward to Strausss involvement with the Viennese Revolution of and beyond, to his last years as the Waltz King idol of Vienna at the end of the century. By contrast to the quaint theatrical artifice of the Hitchcock film, this version is served up in an extravagantly cinematic concoction of dazzling camera work and spectacular image-and sound montage sequences.
The action begins in Vienna in the mids. After quitting his job at a bank, twenty-year-old Strauss assembles an orchestra of unemployed musicians to perform his waltz music to the Viennese masses.
It is evident that his music is not merely the product of academic study and aristocratic patronage; rather, it comes directly from the people and the world around him.
For example, the celebrated Tales of the Vienna Woods sequence depicts the composer inspired by a morning coach ride through the MGM back lot doubling for the Vienna Woods. Accompanied by the celebrated opera diva, Carla Donner Korjus , he listens to the triple-time clopping of Rosie the horse, the tweeting of the birds, the piping counterpoint of two peasants flutes, the blaring horn of a passing coachman, and the trilling of the coach drivers harmonica.
A tune begins to take shape. The harmonica launches into a riff, the triple-time meter accelerates, the birds twitter on the downbeat, and Strauss begins to hum a fragment of the melody. Donner completes the phrase. Both voices blend, and soon Strauss and Donner are standing up in the coach, gesticulating wildly as they belt out the Vienna Woods theme.
Likewise, the famous Blue Danube waltz is composed under the most mundane of circumstances: As Strauss sits on the dock and watches the dawn come up over the river, he listens intently to the tooting of the harbor boats, punctuated by the slapping sounds of the washerwomen scrubbing laundry against the stones. Gradually, as strains of the music well up on the soundtrack, an elaborate visual montage ensues, consisting of shots of printing presses cranking out the sheet music in many languages, string players performing in the concert hall, and dancers in many ethnic costumes whirling across dance floors.
Music like this levels all classes into a delirious democracy of dancers, entranced in common by Strausss Verzckungswalzer Bewitching Waltzes. This is reinforced by another of the films set pieces, Strausss debut at the Dommayer Beer Garden. The place is empty when he and his band first take up their instruments. It is only when Donner drops in and joins in the music that the citizens outside in the surrounding public square begin to take notice.
Gradually, one by one, curious shopkeepers, aristocrats, and servants alike cluster about the doors. As the music mounts in intensity, the trickle of visitors becomes a stream.
Soon the place is packed with whirling dancers. A rousing. Photographed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, the sequence is one of Hollywoods most delirious displays of virtuoso camera work and editing.
Meanwhile, Strauss the democrat turns revolutionary as he and the people march to the barricades in the insurrection against Austrian tyranny. The new young emperor, Franz Joseph, quietly appears and asks Strauss what they are rebelling against. The emperor replies softly, And how are you oppressed, Mr. To which the composer sniffs, Oh, never mind that. If you know whats good for you, youll sneak out the back way. He tweaks the emperors nose and is promptly arrested. But woe unto Strauss when he forgets his humble origins.
His affair with Donner bespeaks his seduction by professional and class opportunism. In the end, after Donner abandons Strauss, the composer returns apologetically to wife, Poldi, the bakers daughter Luise Rainer , and home.
You cant find happiness in rich palaces, confesses a repentant Strauss, or in hearts covered with gold braid, or behind false, painted laughter. In the final scene, late in the s, the aging Strauss, now at the end of his career, has a reunion in the Imperial Palace with Franz Joseph. The emperor escorts him to a window, through which is seen a huge crowd of people paying their respects.
Vienna is giving you the love you gave Vienna, he says. He confers upon Strauss the honorary title King of Vienna. Its a neat consolidation of the antimonies of the classical composer paradigmthe man of the people is also the aristocrat of art; and the private dreamer is privileged to speak in the voice of the people.
According to the opening title, The Great Waltz dramatizes the spirit rather than the facts of [Strausss] life. That spirit was obviously tailored for contemporary s audiences.
For example, the films references to the citizens rebellion against Austrian tyranny, perfunctory as they are, do point up the fact that the film was made at the time of the Nazi Anschluss, when the Johann Strauss Society in Vienna was banned. This was not lost on the critic for the Fox West Coast Bulletin, who acknowledged that the picture has a modernity unusual in costume drama Moreover, it is clear that that spirit is also in keeping with Depression Americas unemployment crises.
Strausss pickup orchestra of shopkeepers and unemployed citizens resembles those other musicians ensembles organized at MGM by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in their Busby Berkeley vehicles Hey, kids, lets put on a show! Fernand Gravet and a fictitious character named Poldi Luise Rainer.
And the swing stylings of the music they perform function in the same way as the waltzes and polkas in Strausss timethey unify disparate audiences of young and old, from all economic and social classes, in a democratic expression. Many elements of the historical Strauss are deemed extraneous to the film and have been omittedchiefly, as already noted, the bitter musical rivalry between Strauss and his father and the political squabbles that further divided their relationship.
Strausss affairs and his three marriagesto Henrietta Treffitz Jetty in ; to Angelika Lili , a singing student much younger than he in ; and to Adele in are simplified into the figures of his wife, Poldi, and mistress Carla Donner. A Strauss biopic that would more frankly deal with his many affairs and marriages would appear much later, in , with the Austrian film Ewiger Waltz Eternal Waltz.
As for the music, although the debut at Dommayers Beer Garden has historical verification, important dates of the key compositions have been rearranged: The Vienna Woods and Blue Danube were actually composed much later than the s, in A few critics rejected the whole business.
Franz Hoellering, writing in The Nation, dismissed the film as phony, awkwardly written, and, with the exception of the woods sequence, as unoriginal as it is crudely directed.
Others, like the critic writing in Stage, attacked the actors: A sleek Fernand Gravet, an over-frivolous and too-too-zealous Miliza Korjus, and a harassed and unhappy Luise Rainer play an obvious and sometimes embarrassingly ineffectual drama of wife versus opera star. If the populist sentiments and Jewish heritage of Strauss were deemed by American filmmakers as an appropriate protest against the turmoil of the Nazi Anschluss in , the figure of George Frideric Handel , a transplanted German, was appropriated by British filmmakers to speak on behalf of besieged Britain in Norman Walkers The Great Mr.
Handel, scripted by L. Dugarde Peach and Gerald Elliott and produced by Ranks GWH Productions, was essentially a wartime film intended to bolster patriotic sentiments among its viewers. Released to embattled Londoners at the height of the Blitz, it wears its British nationalism on its sleeve and makes of the composer a proper British patriot. At the same time, as I discuss below, here is a Handel who embodies and balances the antimonies of the possessor of will and industry the populist figure and the possessed of divinely inspired genius the transcendent genius.
The Great Mr. Handel depicts the composers London years, spanning his assumption of British citizenship in ; his association with the theatrical producer, John Jacob Heidegger; the wrangles over the patronage of King George II and Frederick, Prince of Wales; the contests between rival opera companies; the relationship with singer Susanah Cibber; and the composing of Messiah in with the attendant controversy about allowing actors to sing from New Testament texts.
In a parley with a church bishop the German-born Handel Wilfrid Lawson consolidates his Englishness, his artistic agenda, and his spiritual values in one neat package: Pardon, but I am even more certainly an Englishman than yourself, my Lord Bishop.
I am English by Act of Parliament. You are English by no act of your own. I am English by choice. I think it better suitable that I compose anthems for Englands King. I know my Bible well. I choose texts myself. At the same time the film must confirm Handels status as a man of the people. The monumental image of the solemn and heavy-jowled genius is set aside, for the most part, in favor of a very human, social figure, the associate and friend of aristocrats, singers, servants, and street vendors alike.
To a degree this is consonant with commentator A. Craig Bells assessment of the historical Handel, who displays the temper of temperamental prima donnas. Handel walks the streets, inspired by the ditties of the flower vendors and the fishmongers.
Despite his own financial straits, he opens his house and his pantry to orphaned children and persuades his creditors to assist him in establishing a hospital for foundlings. Invited to come to London to premiere his new Messiah, he insists on employing the services of a common actress, Mrs.
Cibber Elizabeth Allan , as a soloist. An actress singing a sacred work? An actress believes in God, Handel replies. Is that strange?
As she auditions her role, the lamplighters and shopkeepers outside gather outside the window in hushed reverence. The set piece of the film is Handels composing of Messiah. Occupying fully one-third of the running time, it is an ambitious attempt to capture in a complex montage of image, words, and music the processes of creationnot Handel as the possessor figure who consciously transforms the voice of the people into an art form, but as the possessed and passive servant of God.
Slumped at his desk, transfixed in the grip of inspiration, Handel views through his window a succession of tableaux vivant, each derived from a biblical passage and accompanied on the soundtrack by appropriate excerpts from the Messiah music.
When faithful Phineas arrives with food, Handel ignores him and mutters, I saw the firmament open, the glory of all heaven before me, the great God himself. Never have I known such happiness. He who gave me this work to do will give me strength to do it. Handel bends back to his work, muttering, Now leave me. As he continues to watch through the window his visions of the Christ storythe manger scene, the gathering of the apostles, the crucifixion, the Resurrection and ascension into Heavenwe get the distinct impression that he, like us, is watching a movie, an elaborate costumed panoply of characters and events that, tastefully done as it is, is nonetheless just this side of a Cecil B.
DeMille biblical epic. Three days pass. Finally, the exhausted Handel puts aside his pen and tells Mrs. Cibber, I heard the voice, the voice imperative; and it said, Write.
And I asked, What shall I write? And straightaway the answer was put into my hands. And here is the fruit of my laboring. Capping the entire sequence is the performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, , when nobility and common folk alikeyes, including two of Handels orphaned charges stand up during the Hallelujah Chorus.
A concluding title says it all: Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings. To be sure, in circumstances like this, Handels genius must ultimately be. Courtesy Photofest. For studio chief Rank, here was a perfect opportunity to indulge not only in patriotic sentiments, but in a religious agenda he had been pursuing with the GHW production company, which had been formed as part of what has been called the British Religious Film Movement. Writing something like Messiah must be depicted as more divine inspiration than mere diligence and hard work.
Handel: It was the achievement of a giant inspired, the work of one who, by some extraordinary mental feat, had drawn himself completely out of the world, so that he dweltor believed he dweltin the pastures of God. What happened was that Handel passed through a superb dream. He was unconscious of the world during that time, unconscious of its press and call; his whole mind was in a trance. I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself!
For twenty-four days he knew those uplands reached only by the higher qualities of the soul. Ironically, as Bell observes, Handel traditionally fits into no convenient. German-born, Italian-adopted, English-bred, he stands apart, solitary and unique. His position, while being a measure of his all-embracing universality, puts him out of court for the more chauvinistic musicologist, being too German for the Italians and too Italian for the Germans and English.
Even in his adoptive country, England, where his best-known music is set to English texts, his true greatness is realized in a limited and unsatisfactory way. In addition to its wartime credentials, The Great Mr.
Handel was, like its Hollywood counterparts, consciously crafted as a prestige picture that would appeal to a mass audience. The decision to make the film was an effort on my part to study J.
Arthur Ranks desire to make better films for the public, recalled director Norman Walker, which was not too well served at the time.
I convinced [Rank] there was a ready-made public in the choir and musical societies who every year drew vast audiences.
So we got together with our script writers and musical director and succeeded in writing a script that pleased Mr. Rank; and he whole-heartedly agreed with me that it should be made in color. American critics were generally enthusiastic. It is an eye-and-ear filling gem which will delight the audiences for which it was attended, wrote the Hollywood Reporter.
Wilfrid Lawson gives a brilliant performance as Handel, making the composer a living human being. Less reverential portraits of Handel would have to wait decades before the release of three more biopicsTony Palmers God Rot Tunbridge Wells! Another composer conscripted by biopics into service as a wartime patriot was Frdric Chopin Columbia Picturess A Song to Remember, filmed in and released in early , was directed by Charles Vidor and featured the young and virile Cornel Wilde as the frail and consumptive composer.
Written and produced by Sidney Buchman, with music adaptation by Miklos Rozsa and piano performances by Jos Iturbi, the Polish composer is depicted not as the morbidly sensitive aesthetic of the Parisian salons, but as a fiery Polish patriot who abjures a life of artistic self-indulgence and political neutrality for the sake of the Polish struggle against tsarist tyranny.
A Song to Remember is not only the best remembered of all Hollywood composer biopics, but its savvy blend of fact and fiction, its lush Technicolor palette, sumptuous production values, and bewitching exploitation of Chopins musicas both soundtrack score and diegetic performancequalifies. Robert A. Thus, any alterations in the historical record were made deliberately, according to the working con- texts of industry and consumer exigencies and demands.
And we should never Try as I might to smile cynically at that old pirate, I am forced to admit he achieved his ambition, perhaps in spite of himself.
Millions of viewers have been introduced in dramatic fashion to lives and musics they otherwise might never have encountered. This writer is one of those millions. A personal note is in order. Its vivid hues, heightened drama, and exciting musical presentation were unforgettable. As a result, for years thereafter I embarked on a search for more information about Chopin. I attended concerts and haunted record stores trying to identify the music I had heard.
It was no use trying to reconcile story with history. It was a lot more rewarding to enjoy their doubled pleasures as a synergy, a cooperation, a polyphony of separate but related elements. Introduction 5 break things. They may be a nuisance at times, but they bring fresh per- spectives to our lives. Like parents, we viewers must practice tolerance while warily remaining on the watch.
In their dreams several men, separately and individually, pursue this woman until she disappears into the winding streets of a mysterious white city. Upon awak- ening, the dreamers determine that by building a simulacrum of this dream city, they can capture her. Ultimately, they only encounter— and recognize—each other.
Laudisi, who all along has stood apart from the proceedings and watched in bemusement at the growing confusion. He does the only thing a reasonable person can do in the face of paradox: he laughs. This book chooses neither to contest nor to contribute to such learned disquisitions. They insist, explains historian Niall Ferguson, on reconstructing the determining conditions of events.
The counterfactuals we need to construct are not mere fantasy: they are simula- tions based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible out- comes in a chaotic world.
You might call it deep intuition, if you were polite. They themselves were subjected to considerable invention on the part of their biographers, acolytes, and friends. It functions as a kind of counterpoint to the histori- cal life. The two primary models for these mythic constructions, against which other composers would be measured to greater and lesser degrees, were George Frideric Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
He creates an impenetrable solitude within his soul [where he] contemplates and worships the ideal that his entire being will seek to reproduce.
Neither category was responsive to populist responsibili- ties. Paren- thetically, this paradigm, with many variations, can also be found in the many celebrity biopics of athletes, entertainers, scientists, politicians, soldiers, and so on.
Ultimately, they are all brothers under the skin. Musical Canons Meanwhile, the growth and proliferation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of music publishing, instrument manufacture, and concert management increased the public consumption and familiarity with another canon—that of particular classical and popular works. Whereas as late as most Viennese and Parisian concertgoers had scoffed at the idea that the greatest music might lie already in the past, by things had radically changed.
Ball biopic Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Vitaphone short subjects from to brought to moviegoers programs modeled after the kinds of mixtures of classical and popular music long since established on vaudeville bills—the juxtaposition of opera singers and classi- cal instrumentalists, including Giovanni Martinelli and Mischa Elman, with music hall and Broadway stars such as Al Jolson and Fanny Brice.
I was born with this music in me. These antimonies must meet, as it were, somewhere in between. If you can make them both serve, you will give America a voice. They border on identity. Chapters One and Two examine in detail a substantial representation of Hollywood and foreign biopics of classical and popular composers made during the studio era — Both Russell and Palmer usher the composer bi- opic into the postmodern attitude and sensibility.
They employ subjective intervention, in- vent micro-narratives as alternatives to history, and raise questions about They, too, deserve our attention. However, this book is only a beginning. Sorely needed, moreover, is an examination of French, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian, and Spanish composer biopics.
And particularly lamentable is the conspicuous absence in current scholarship of the role composer biopics have played in the political and propaganda agendas of Nazi Germany in the s and in the Russian and Eastern European communist regimes during the Cold War. Introduction 17 completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. Johnson— we may be really seeking a likeness of ourselves. Do you have the semblance of a reputation? Then people want to know the color of your bedroom slippers, the cut of your dressing gown, the kind of tobacco you prefer, and what you call your favorite greyhound.
By no means coincidentally, it Under the supervision of the moguls—Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Darryl F. This was my first composer pun theme, so no quibbles there. Both complete unknowns for me. Back before public schools became so PC, my Jr. High choir sang his "Ceremony of Carols" in Middle English accompanied by a harp for a special Christmas performance.
Favorite clue was 42A Ruled quarters? Yes, the theme was familiar, but still nice. Wow, I learned a lot today: Coe, Tiant, mozetta, zydeco. A good one. For the longest time I could not see the other meaning for "luster.
If you're up for a musical treat listen to Britten's War Requiem. You can even find it on YouTube if you want just a taste. The piece includes traditional Latin parts of the mass and the poems of Wilfred Owen.
Britten was a pacifist so don't worry about it glorifying war. For opera haters like Seth you will find it totally unlike anything you ever heard. And, wake up! Was that mislead intentional? HAYDN works is you simply speak the pun. The word IN is then contained in the pun, and so on that level it works. Howard B: It seems to me that Amy appreciated that distinction, as she named the movie correctly in the post.
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