Concerto Struggles: Female Pianists
• Stress and strain: Gefährtin meiner Sommers/Companion of My Summer78 (Germany, 1943).
Pianist Angelika Rink is exhausted by the demands of international concertizing. She plays a concerto in the Beethoven Hall in Berlin, but collapsfes onstage at the end of the performance. Press materials for the film included an article describing the physical and mental consequences of the her push for artistic perfection and professional recognition:
"What didn’t it cost Angelika Rink to reach the point where the audiences of her concerts were filled with inspiration and her managers were scrambling around her! The career of a pianist requires untiring work–an indefatigable, physically demanding, exasperating struggle to achieve technical mastery of the keyboard, to turn technique into playing, until the obedience of the fingers can be assumed and artistry serves the spirit alone. Tireless energy for spreading one’s name and gaining recognition among music lovers, tireless effort too in the draining hither-and-yon of concert touring. Indeed, Angelika’s health suffers from this continual rush and pursuit, so that one day her nerves give out, and she must take refuge in the quiet countryside village of her youth."79
Subsequently in the story, Angelika falls in love with Manfred, a childhood friend who is content with his modest calling as a village doctor. At first their two different career paths seem incompatible, but Angelika ultimately decides to forsake the Scheinglück (false happiness) of her fame: she marries Manfred and accepts her destiny as a Hausfrau in the idyllic countryside village.
• An affair of the heart: Love Story,80 also known as A Lady Surrenders (UK, 1944).
Pianist Lissa Campbell learns that she has only a short time left to live because of heart disease. She decides to quit performing and spend her remaining months resting by the sea in Cornwall. There she falls in love with an ex-RAF pilot, but keeps her mortal illness a secret from him, just as he keeps his impending blindness, the result of a war injury, secret from her. Experiencing romantic feelings for the first time in her life, Lissa is inspired to compose a concerto (Hubert Bath’s "Cornish Rhapsody"81) to express her love for Kit and her impressions of the spectacular seaside. She performs the piece as Kit is undergoing a dangerous eye operation, but she is overcome with emotion in the middle of the concerto and faints onto the keyboard. In the film’s climactic performance scene in the Royal Albert Hall, Lissa is physically and emotionally ailing as she once again struggles valiantly through the concerto. Afterwards she faints again–but this time into Kit’s waiting arms.
• Another weak heart: Solistin Anna Alt/Soloist Anna Alt82 (Germany, 1944).
Self-sacrificing pianist Anna Alt tries to support her husband Joachim’s composing career in any way possible. She decides to concertize again, though she tires easily in performance because of "a weak heart." Her doctor forbids her to perform ever again: "It’s a wonder that you’ve lasted this long," he cautions. "You are still young, and for a woman there are certainly other occupations." But Anna has a crucial task to accomplish: her husband’s piano concerto must be premiered. In the film’s climactic performance scene, Anna is physically and emotionally ailing as she struggles valiantly through the concerto, and she collapses onstage as the ovation begins. In the hospital, wavering between life and death, Anna is reconciled with her husband, who has achieved his compositional breakthrough, and she gains new strength to live–away from the piano.
• Hysteria: The Seventh Veil83 (UK, 1945).
In a
melodrama rife with Freudian subtexts, pianist Francesca Cunningham is dominated
by an overbearing mentor/manager, her "uncle" Nicholas, and tormented
by a neurotic fear of injuring her hands. When the memory of a childhood caning
on her hands resurfaces just before a performance of the Grieg Concerto, she
struggles valiantly through the concerto while suffering deep psychological
distress, and she collapses onstage as the ovation begins.
Further
tragic damage to her hands, a broken engagement and another frustrated love
affair bring Francesca to a mental breakdown, but her condition of senseless
catatonia is cured through hypnosis. In the end, a restored Francesca has the
opportunity to decide which romantic relationship she will continue: instead
of choosing either her former fiancée or her new artist-boyfriend, she
leaves with Nicholas, whom she has always loved (and hated?) the most.
(3.9 MB)
• Tuberculosis: The Other Love84 (1947).
Pianist Karen Duncan is diagnosed with tuberculosis after she collapses during a concert tour, and she must quit her career to recuperate at a Swiss sanatorium. (The script credits an unpublished short story by Erich Maria Remarque as its source, but seems more a retelling of "Camille" with borrowings from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.) She falls in love with a dashing playboy, but hides the fact of her illness from him, and together they embark on an impetuous romantic fling with near-tragic consequences. As in The Great Lie, the image of concerto struggle is presented immediately in the film’s opening credits, with Karen playing the dramatic main theme from the first movement of Anton Rubinstein’s Concerto in D minor, op. 70. Later in the film, in a moment of soloistic assertiveness, she impulsively plays the first movement cadenza in defiance of her doctor’s orders to rest. Karen admits, "I’m feverish, I have morning temperatures and evening chills, I’m losing weight—but I don’t care … I’m happier than I’ve ever been before!" Though Karen is mortally ill, a makeshift "happy ending" has her return to the sanatorium and marry her compassionate doctor for the short remainder of her life.
• Amnesia: While I Live85 (UK, 1947).
Pianist Olwen Trevelyan’s accidental death leaves the composition of her own concerto unfinished. Twenty-five years later, a mysterious young woman arrives at the Trevelyan estate and immediately goes to the piano to play along with a radio broadcast of the concerto; at the point where the piece was left unfinished, the woman collapses. Her identity is shrouded in mystery, for she suffers from complete amnesia—however, she does wear a wedding ring. Julia Trevelyan, Olwen’s domineering older sister, develops a psychological fixation on her dead sibling’s reincarnation, who may simply be an overworked magazine story writer suffering from a delusional "association" with the deceased pianist. The soundtrack concerto (Charles Williams’s "Dream of Olwen") functions notably here as a carrier of the narrative’s melodramatic excess. It "verifies" that the unknown woman is Olwen by having her perform synchronously and note-for-note the dead woman’s composition. At the end of the film, it signifies Julia’s ultimate defeat as she forsakes her desire for another "Olwen" and her possibly lesbian-inflected investment in Sally, the mysterious guest. In its final crescendo the concerto also sustains the narratively simplistic "happy ending" reuniting the cured amnesiac with her anxious husband—a reconciliation which ends Sally’s liberating "dream of Olwen" and returns her to the uninspired domestic order.
References
78. Directed by Fritz Peter Buch, starring Anna Dammann (Angelika Rink) and Paul Hartmann (Manfred Claudius).
79. Geno Ohlischlaeger, "A Woman’s Heart Caught Between Career and Love: Anna Dammann in the Role of a Celebrated Pianist," undated publication in press materials file for Gefährtin meines Sommers at Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv, Berlin.
80. Directed by Leslie Arliss, starring Margaret Lockwood (Felicity Crighton/Lissa Campbell) and Stewart Granger (Kit Firth).
81. Hubert Bath, "Theme from the Cornish Rhapsody" for piano solo (New York: Sam Fox, 1944).
82. Directed by Werner Klinger, starring Anneliese Uhlig (Anna Alt) and Will Quadflieg (Joachim Alt). The film was re-released in 1950 under the title Wenn die Musik nicht wär.
83. Directed by Compton Bennett, starring Ann Todd (Francesca Cunningham) and James Mason (Uncle Nicholas).
84. Directed by André de Toth, starring Barbara Stanwyck (Karen Duncan), David Niven (Dr. Antony Stanton), and Richard Conte (Paul Clermont). Music: Miklos Rozsa.
85. Directed by John Harlow, starring Audrey Fildes (Olwen Trevelyan), Sonia Dresdel (Julia Trevelyan), and Carol Raye (Sally Grant/"Miss Olwen"). The film’s title was changed to The Dream of Olwen when it was re-released a few years later, on account of the composition’s popularity.