Movie Without End

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last fall, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his films that I hadn't seen before. One of these was Song Without End, which I mentioned briefly a few months back due to the short that preceded it when TCM ran it.

Song Without End is a biopic of Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. As the movie opens up, he's finished his time in Paris, where he set the world on fire with his piano concerts. He left for a village in the Alps due to the insisitence of the Countess D'Agoult (Geneviève Page), the mother of his children, who wanted him to raise his children rather than being a rock-star performer. Since then, another man, Thalberg, has become the pianist toast of Paris, so Liszt's friends Chopin and George Sand come down to the Alps to visit him. Them having visited him, it gives him the idea to go back to Paris and put on another concert to show he's the one who still has the drawing power, not this upstart Thalberg.

Liszt's concert is, a you might guess, the one that's a big hit. Among the few audience members at the concert that Thalberg ultimately cancels is Princess Wittgenstein (Capucine). She decides she should go to the Liszt concert to see what Liszt is all about. This gives the viewer the chance to listen to a lot of piano music, and it's not just Liszt's music, as he was known to promote quite a few composers, from the aforementioned Chopin to the tragic Robert Schumann and, later in the movie, Richard Wagner.

Anyhow, the Princess, having seen Liszt, falls for him just like all the girls in Lisztomania which I blogged about over the summer did. Except that there's a slight problem, which is that she's already quite married to Russian Prince Nikolai. Still, despite having children by one woman, Liszt also falls for the Princess, and follows her to Vienna looking for any excuse to do so. He then follows her to imperial Russia when the Prince asks him for a command performance for the Czar.

A further problem for Franz is that despite not being faithful to one woman, he'd really like to consider himself an observant, even devout Catholic, having thought about joining the clergy. And for Catholics, when it comes to marrige, the marriage is supposed to be eternal, only to be broken by the death of one of the partners. Just watch A Man for All Seasons. Yes, you can get an annulment, but that's only supposed to happen in very limited circumstances. Granted, for the class of people Liszt was pursuing, it was just as much political. But politics might always go wrong.

The story in Song Without End isn't the most exciting one, as Liszt was "just" a celebrity anot not a political leader, when the whole political marriage thing would carry overtones of serious foreign relations. The story is also given somewhat short shrift, which I think is a deliberate choice. Liszt composed a lot, but also performed a lot of other people's music, and there's a ton of music from multiple performers put on the screen here. If you like classical piano, you'll definitely like the music. It would just be nice if it could be in service of a better story.