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- The
1940s "concerto film" is typically classified as melodrama,
and also frequently a "woman’s film." This is a
category of film story produced primarily for a female audience,
about a female protagonist, and centered on aspects of domestic
life (home and family) and romantic relationship (marriage, affairs,
adultery, the "fallen" woman, love triangles, and so
forth). The film melodrama provides a further context for the
enactment of concerto "relationships" according to the
formal, social, and psychological determinants that shape its
narrative and cinematic style.70
On the formal level, concerto excerpts provide musical "punctuation"
to emotional situations or settings, as well as "structural
significance"71
in conjunction with particular narrative events or characterizations,
as in the case of Brief Encounter’s "separation
theme," or the "mutual rondo" scenes closing many
concerto films.
- Melodrama’s
social determinant involves the representation of power relations,
particularly (in the woman’s film) the relationship of a
female protagonist to some manifestation of the patriarchal social
order (a husband/father figure, the bourgeois family/home ideal,
or the range of social conventions which shape and control a woman’s
identity and agency). The story of her struggle within or against
the social order can be paralleled to the metaphoric struggle
enacted musically through the concerto, particularly when this
character is a pianist who "performs" the confrontation
"publicly." But her act of desire and defiance entails
a certain degree of suffering, the emotional impact of which is
heightened when the narrative and/or musical perspective of the
film belongs to the story’s "victim" (as in Brief
Encounter).72 The
resolution of this valiant but doomed endeavor comes about through
her ultimate capitulation in the face of those greater forces:
renunciation of the object of desire (her child in The Great
Lie, her lover in Brief Encounter, her career in I’ve
Always Loved You) and reconciliation within the matrimonial
or domestic social order.73
-
But to thus
constrain the protagonist’s agency and desire—to pre-ordain
the impossibility of her struggle—is to generate a degree
of emphatic, overwrought ("melodramatic") emotional
tension within the story,74
hence the psychological determinant in the melodramatic narrative.
As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith explains, the impossibility of a "happy
ending" which resolves all the accumulated desires and
conflicts generates a melodramatic excess, and "the
more the plots press towards a resolution the harder it is to
accommodate the excess."75
This over-the-top pressure does have a cinematic outlet, however:
The
undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the
action, subordinated as it is to the demands of family/lineage/inheritance
[the patriarchal social order], is traditionally expressed
in the music and … in certain elements of the mise
en scène. That is to say, music and mise en
scène do not just heighten the emotionality of
an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for
it.76
In musicals,
Nowell-Smith asserts, music and dancing are the means for "the
siphoning of the excess" (74) generated by the plot’s
push for resolution. In the concerto film, by extension, the
soundtrack music or "performance" itself can convey
this emotional release, often in the story’s climactic
or concluding scene.
- Nowell-Smith
further theorizes this mechanism of the film melodrama in Freudian
terms, linking it to the psychopathology of hysteria. Just as
psychic trauma is somatized into physical symptom according to
psychoanalytic theory, the melodrama’s "unaccomodated
excess" repressed at the narrative level is transferred onto
or into "the body of the text" itself,77
including the musical soundtrack. As a "hysterical"
soundtrack device, then, the concerto can embody or enact a character’s
psychological interiority and represent relationships within
that character’s body, or between "sides" of the
body or mind—another manner of "personification"
of the dialogue or conflict between concerto agents. With the
social order of patriarchy idealized as the female’s "natural"
or "healthy" state of relationship, such conflict may
be portrayed metaphorically as psychosomatic illness. In Ombre
et lumière, for example, Isabelle’s Chaikovsky
performance induces her physical paralysis and mental hallucinations.
In Brief Encounter, Laura Jesson considers herself a "neurotic
creature"—she breaks into unpredictable, unexplainable
fits of laughter or tears, and suffers debilitating faints which
her husband and friends cannot understand. Her lovesickness is
equated with hysteria by her husband’s question regarding
the crossword puzzle (in which "romance" fits in with
"delirium"), and as an explanation for her "fainting
spells" she suggests with resignation, "I suppose I
must be that type of woman." The Rachmaninoff concerto, as
soundtrack music tied directly to her interiority, carries the
melodramatic excess of her psychosomatic affliction and her gradual
nervous breakdown culminating in a suicide attempt.
- The
basic narrative formula for the melodramatic "concerto relationship"
is evident in the following films:
A female pianist-protagonist struggles to assert individual agency
and desire against the confines of the surrounding patriarchal
social order (represented variously by her husband, doctor, mentor,
manager, teacher, conductor, and so forth). A physical or psychological
illness afflicts the protagonist, its effects coming to the fore
in a climactic moment of confrontation, the concerto performance
itself, which culminates in her physical and/or emotional capitulation.
As resolution to this defeat (when there is the usual "happy
ending"), an appropriate romantic relationship alleviates
the psychosomatic distress and restores her proper place within
the social order. It should be noted that such narratives of concerto
struggle are not limited to Hollywood productions.
- The
afflicted female protagonist who "performs" the excessive
piano concerto need not even be a pianist per se. In The
Story of Three Loves86
(1952), Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
is the music for acclaimed choreographer Charles Coutray’s
new ballet. Paula Woodward is a talented ballerina who yearns
for the leading role, but she collapses unexpectedly in the middle
of the audition. Her doctor informs her that she suffers from
a serious heart condition, and must never dance again—but
after attending the ballet’s premiere, Paula stays behind
and dances alone on the deserted stage as the music echoes in
her mind (here, as in Brief Encounter, the concerto discloses
the female character’s psychological interiority and conveys
the narrative excess of her emotion). Unbeknowst to her, Coutray
has been watching. "You’re dancing itself," he
tells her, "You’re music itself!" (Paula embodies
the concerto struggle and its melodramatic excess within her own
mortally ill body). Flattered by the maestro’s attention,
but aware too of the dangers of her condition, she decides to
give all to one last dance of her life, just for Coutray. Before
her inevitable death, however, the two enact a sort of marriage
vow accompanied by the "mutual rondo" of the Rhapsody’s
Eighteenth Variation.87
-
But
even without an afflicted concerto "performer" as
female protagonist, the film melodrama can enact the mythology
of struggle and capitulation through a piano concerto-style
soundtrack. This is evident in the following four films about
the "fallen" woman, a female character-type who has
challenged the social order and must suffer the consequences:
- But
female characters are not the only ones to struggle through a
piano concerto in the film melodrama. Nowell-Smith notes that
the melodrama "often features women as protagonists, and
where the central figure is a man there is regularly an impairment
of his ‘masculinity.’"94
As in While I Live, in which the female protagonist’s
inability to complete her own concerto leads to her frustration
(even death) as well as the subsequent disruptions to marital/heterosexual
order caused by her alter ego, the following
four films present an uncompleted piano concerto as a representation
for the identity crisis of a male pianist-protagonist:
(This plot line may owe some of its inspiration to the well-known
story of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s psychological breakdown in
connection with the composition of his Second Piano Concerto.95)
His "masculinity" called into question by some form
of mental or physical impairment, the would-be composer is unable
to complete or perform his own concerto just as he is unable to
consummate his relationship with a female character and thus enter
into the patriarchal social order.
- Even
though films such as Dangerous Moonlight and Night Song
feature male pianist-protagonists struggling against illness to
achieve musical and romantic conquest, these two melodramas can
still be considered examples of the woman’s film because
of the starring roles played by Sally Gray or Merle Oberon, respectively,
as the afflicted male’s benefactor, muse, and love interest.
Publicity for Night Song demonstrates that this is also
a story of a woman’s struggle to achieve idealized romantic
relationship. In a direct appeal to female viewers, one poster
proclaimed that "Only another woman’s heart would understand
why she dared this strange deception to win his love!" One
newspaper review of Night Song called the film "A
Concerto for Miss Oberon," assigning the female protagonist
possession of the man as well as his piece.108
- The
reputations of the actual pianists who performed concerti on the
soundtracks of 1940s melodramas (Artur Rubinstein in Night
Song, for example) was a promotional selling point, but could
also play a role in the reception of such films for the female
audience. Richard Dyer asserts that the announcement of British
pianist Eileen Joyce as the performer of the Rachmaninoff Second
Concerto in Brief Encounter lends "a particular female
inflection to the music" for the film’s audience.109
Joyce also recorded the soundtrack for The Seventh Veil
the same year, while British pianists Harriet Cohen and Betty
Humby-Beecham played for Love Story and While I Live,
respectively. Audiences could identify with not only the female
protagonist and "her" concerto, but perhaps also with
the films’ behind-the-scenes female concerto soloists as
the "real" women who endured "real-life" professional
and musical struggles.
- These
"concerto films" could also provide
a fantasy or escapist entertainment for the female audience identifying
with the female concert star or metaphoric "soloist"
(Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie, or Laura Jesson in Brief
Encounter) who performs independently, assertively, and expressively
within the patriarchal social order. Furthermore, such melodramatic
romances could vicariously provide "an extramarital dalliance
in all its achingly brave and honourable middle-classness,"
as Alexander Walker describes that of Brief Encounter,
"[offering] absolution for folk of Laura or Alec’s age,
in or out of uniform, who had ‘let their standards drop’
and wanted to repent before peace compelled a return to respectability.110"
But if "A Lady Surrenders" (alternate title for Love
Story, poster pictured) in this endeavor, perhaps it is the
lot of "ordinary, moral, high-thinking citizens" (such
as Laura Jesson) to endure "the pain and grief caused by
having one’s desires destroyed by the pressures of social
convention.111"
- Scholars
frequently discuss the abundance of melodramas and women’s
films during the 1940s—during and after World War II—in
light of that era’s significant social, economic, and ideological
changes affecting women’s place in the patriarchal social
order (Elsaesser, for one, notes melodrama’s "interiorization
and personalization of what are primarily ideological conflicts"112).
Many aspects of public and private relationship were in
a state of flux and reconfiguration during this period, from career
opportunities and professional relations to domestic and familial
concerns. The soundtrack concerto, representing the concept of
relationship in musical and performative terms, could provide
a musical and cinematic metaphor for such conflicts and their
possible resolutions.
- In
addition to heightening the emotional "excess" in these
melodramas, perhaps the high-art classical-music trappings of
the soundtrack concerto could also vouchsafe the social acceptability
of such tales of adulterous love and subversive desire, and validate
the emotional investment audiences felt for their "fallen"
female protagonists. In a 1950s survey of British cinema audiences
which measured the emotional impact of particular films in terms
of whether they caused viewers to cry, not only Brief Encounter’s
subject matter prompted an emotional reaction: respondents also
mentioned the power of the film’s soundtrack music to bring
forth tears.113 In
his autobiography, Stewart Granger (Kit in Love Story)
gives his frank appraisal of that film’s plot ("the
biggest load of crap I’d ever read"), but also admits
the emotional impact of the film’s melodramatic music: "Margaret
Lockwood is dying of some unnamed disease. We meet. I don’t
tell her I’m going blind. She doesn’t tell me she’s
dying. The audience knows all this but we don’t. … She
is a pianist/composer and writes the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’
… It was a smash hit and there wasn’t a dry eye in the
house.114
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References
70.
These
theoretical categories are discussed in three important essays
on the Hollywood melodrama: Thomas Elsaesser’s "Tales
of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,"
Goeffrey Nowell-Smith’s "Minnelli and Melodrama,"
and David N. Rodowick’s "Madness, Authority and Ideology:
The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s," all reprinted in Home
is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s
Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute,
1987). Page numbers refer to this volume.
71.
Elsaesser’s terms (50). Theorists of film melodrama have
tended to focus on elements of mise en scène (composition
of frame, lighting, décor, color, gesture, and "the
symbolization of objects") which represent or complement
the story’s emotional and psychological aspects. Rodowick,
for example, asserts that "the highly expressive mise
en scène of the domestic melodrama did not so much
reproduce as produce the inner turmoil of the characters;
or in other words, the dynamic relations of the mise en scène
took over the objective signification of the social network which
entrapped the characters and strictly determined their range of
physical and emotional mobility" (274). But the soundtrack
of the film melodrama frequently contributes an analogous manner
of representation. Rodowick’s definition of the formal aspect
of melodrama can apply equally to the soundtrack concerto: "a
system of conflict determined by the figuration of patriarchal
authority which in turn mediate[s] the relationship between the
social and psychic determinations in the text" (279).
72.
Elsaesser writes, "Melodrama confers on [the characters]
a negative identity through suffering, and the progressive self-immolation
and disillusionment generally ends in resignation: they emerge
as lesser human beings for having become wise and acquiescent
to the ways of the world [i.e., the social order]" (55).
73.
Nowell-Smith writes, "What is at stake (also for social-ideological
reasons) is the survival of the family unit and the possibility
for individuals of acquiring an identity which is also a place
within the system, a place in which they can both be ‘themselves’
and ‘at home,’ in which they can simultaneously enter,
without contradiction, the symbolic order and bourgeois society"
(73).
74.
Elsaesser writes, "A typical situation in American melodramas
has the plot build up to an evidently catastrophic collision of
counter-running sentiments, but a string of delays gets the greatest
possible effect from the clash when it does come. … [T]he
visual orchestration [again, a reference to mise-en-scène,
but in the metaphor an acknowledgment of music’s role] of
such a scene can produce some rather strong emotional effects."
Elsaesser goes on to note the "pressure" generated by
the accumulating "obstacles and objects [including the concerto
itself] that invade [the characters’] personalities, take
them over, stand for them, become more real than the human relations
or emotions they were intended to symbolize" (60-62).
75.
Nowell-Smith, 73.
76.
Nowell-Smith, 74.
77.
Nowell-Smith writes, "In hysteria (and specifically in
what Freud has designated as ‘conversion hysteria’)
the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns
converted into a bodily symptom. The ‘return of the repressed’
takes place, not in conscious discourse, but displaced onto the
body of the patient. In the melodrama, where there is always material
which cannot be expressed in discourse or in the actions of the
characters furthering the designs of the plot, a conversion can
take place into the body of the text" (74).
86.
Directed by Gottfried Reinhardt, starring Moira Shearer (Paula
Woodward) and James Mason (Charles Coutray).
87.
Charles: "Am I going to lose you again? Promise me I
shan’t! I want us to be together. I want us to do these things
together. I want you to be with me always!" Paula: "I’ll
be with you." (They kiss as the Eighteenth Variation swells
on the soundtrack.) Charles: "That’s a promise?"
(She affirms.) Charles: "I’ll wait for you!" Paula:
"You don’t have to wait for someone who’s with
you always." The same music accompanies a similar tale of
romantic union beyond death in Somewhere in Time (1980).
Here the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody functions both as source music
and as soundtrack cue linking the past and present for the protagonist
moved by nostalgia and loss—a young man pining for a long-deceased
actress he has only seen in a photograph. Through an experience
of time travel he is "reunited" with his beloved for
a brief period, they pledge their eternal love for each other,
and she "lives on" in his memory afterwards.
94.
Nowell-Smith (72).
95.
In 1898, Rachmaninoff suffered a nervous breakdown generally
attributed to the critical rejection of his First Symphony. Plagued
by doubt and insecurity, he gave up composing until Dr. Nicolai
Dahl, a neurologist specializing in hypnotherapy, successfully
treated his depression. Restored to confidence, Rachmaninoff was
able to complete his Second Concerto, which received critical
acclaim upon its premiere, and he dedicated the work to Dahl.
108.
A. E. Wilson, "A Concerto for Miss Oberon," The
Star [Los Angeles] (August 6, 1948): 6.
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