A Song Remembered
A Song Remembered
Frédéric Chopin Goes to War
This chapter discusses A Song to Remember, a “life” of the celebrated Polish composer Frederic Chopin that was released in the waning months of World War II. Despite its highbrow profile, it became a box office hit through its entertaining blend of fact and fiction, its patriotic message to contemporary wartime audiences, and its bewitching exploitation of Chopin's music. The Hollywood Reporter greeted A Song to Remember as a welcome addition to the recently imported European screen biographies of Beethoven, Schubert, and Handel. Other critics were equally enthusiastic. The film's casual concern for historical and biographical accuracy, however, outraged other commentators. Particularly notorious was a wholly fabricated penultimate sequence wherein the disease-ravaged Chopin embarks on a suicidal concert tour to aid Polish freedom fighters.
Keywords: highbrow profile, Polish composer, Frederic Chopin, box office hit, patriotic message, contemporary wartime audiences
Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
