Love Song

Some months back I recorded Song of Love when it ran on TCM. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post here.

Katharine Hepburn plays Clara Wieck (1819-1896), a pianist and sometime composer who had a long career as a concert pianist. The movie starts off with one of her performances in 1839 (but to be fair to Hepburn, who was about 40 when she made the movie, the movie quickly moves to parts of Wieck's life closer to Hepburn's actual age at the time). Among the people in attendance at the concert are composer Robert Schumann (Paul Henried), who studied music under Clara's father (Leo G. Carroll who only gets the one scene). Indeed, Clara has fallen in love with Robert, 10 years her senior, something which her father really disapproves of.

But Clara, having fallen in love with Robert, marries him against her father's wishes. Cut to ten years later, when Robert and Clara have a whole bunch of kids (I think in real life they had eight in all, although I'm not certain if all of them survived infancy). Clara has become a housewife, managing the home with the help of a housekeeper, while Robert has gone on giving lessons and composing, trying to get an opera written and staged.

Knocking on the door one day is Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Now, if you know your music you'll know that Brahms is a fairly famous composer. But back around 1850 he hadn't yet earned the fame he'd have later in life and retains to this day. He had been given a recommendation to see Prof. Schumann. Seeing what a mess the household is in, and not having anywhere else to be, Brahms offers to rent a room, helping with the household management and apparently paying in to keep the place running and the increasingly indebted Schumanns afloat.

As this happens, bad things are happening to Robert. During music performances, we get shots of Clara or Johannes and hear the normal music, cutting to Robert, at which point the soundtrack has a dissonance added. This is the way the filmmakers signified what was some sort of mental illness. Of course, mental illness was not so well understood back in those days, with the condition being called melancholia; the modern-day best guess being bipolar disorder. Whatever the condition, however, it increasingly affected Schumann's life, leading to a suicide attempt and a couple of years in a mental asylum before he died, although this is glossed over in the movie.

Meanwhile, Brahms falls in love with Clara, although she's never going to return the affection. Not because of any dislike of Brahms, but because she could never hurt her husband like that, even though he ultimately realizes that Brahms has difficult feelings of his own to work through. Brahms doesn't want to hurt Robert either, not telling Robert that a publisher has rejected the opera Robert was working on. (In real life, the opera did get performed, but it's not part of the repertoire of commonly-performed operas today.)

Robert Schumann died in 1856 in the mental asylum, and Clara would live another 40 years, giving piano performances and trying to keep the legacy of Robert's music alive, with help from Brahms.

As I understand it, Song of Love gets the broad events of Robert Schumann's life correct, although the movie has a disclaimer at the beginning that it moves events around and dramatizes them for the sake of making a better movie. For example, Brahms did live with the Schumanns, but apparently it was only a couple of months.

Hollywood license aside, Song of Love is a movie that anybody who's a fan of classical music should really enjoy, thanks to all the good music that's pretty well presented, although it would be nice to hear more of Robert's orchestral works. I'm not certain if it will hold as much interest for people who aren't that into classical music, however, as the movie is certainly deeply rooted in the 1940s. But even for those people, Song of Love is definitely worth a watch.