Song of Love (1947)
Directed by Clarence Brown
Our essay for the Film of the Week really ought to be written by my daughter Jessica, whose knowledge of the music and the lives of Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann, the figures at the center of this week’s film, is as an encyclopedia to my index card. But here goes! Song of Love is about the great power of music to bind human souls together, and though a lot of the specific scenes in the film are fictional, the general outline of the lives of Robert and Clara is true, their devotion to one another is true, his slide into mental illness is true, his partial amnesia and early death are true, and the deep and pure friendship of the younger composer, Johannes Brahms, and the love he also feels for Clara, are true. In other words, the screenplay writers got the heart of it all right, and that’s what counts in such a work of art as this; you watch a movie to enter a human story, not to tot up biographical details. By contrast, you may read biographies that are accurate in the dates and places and names, but are quite false and even slanderous from beginning to end.
Here is the heart of this story. Robert Schumann (Paul Henreid), a musical genius from his early childhood, is the star student of Professor Wieck (Leo G. Carroll), and he and Wieck’s daughter Clara (Katharine Hepburn) fall in love. Clara is herself an accomplished pianist, with a quite promising career ahead of her. And so she was, in real life: no less than Felix Mendelssohn conducted her in her triumphant appearance before the Viennese public, when she was but 16 years old. The greatest German dramatist of the time, Franz Grillparzer, wrote a poem in her honor, linking her name with that of the titanic Beethoven, whose work she championed. Many of these events had to be telescoped in Song of Love, because when Robert first came to live with the Wiecks, he was an 18 year old boy and Clara was only 9. He waited nine years, then proposed to her, and against her father’s opposition she and Robert were married. The old man was stubborn and vindictive, and that meant — it is well portrayed in the film — that the Schumanns were often just on the lee side of poverty.
It is hard to call their marriage happy, if by that word we intend a certain easiness and pleasure. It was joyful, yes, tumultuous, certainly, crowded with event, no doubt; not to mention the food and the laundry and all the rest of the housework you have to get done when you have seven children. There’s a scene in Song of Love that comically portrays the needs of a baby when Mama is at the piano in front of a big audience of music aficionados: the maid motions to Clara right in the middle of a difficult piece, with a squalling baby under one arm and her other hand free to make a thumb-sucking gesture. What does a baby know about the wrong time to get hungry?
Robert is, as often happens, underappreciated by the people of his time, but one young man sees through the fog of inattention and envy. He’s Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). I’ve heard people place Brahms up there with the three other giants among musical giants, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and I wish I could say that I knew enough of Brahms’ music to venture an opinion. But Brahms did go to Robert Schumann, having chosen him among all the composers in Europe to be his teacher. And just as Schumann had lived in the home of his teacher, Professor Wieck, so Brahms came to live in the Schumann home, and he came to love Clara, too. The film portrays their love as entirely ideal, Platonic, pure — and that is exactly what it was. Unfortunately, Robert becomes mentally unstable; incessant ringing in his ears did not help matters, nor did his failure to impress the public. He asked to be committed to a sanatorium. There, in fits of lucidity, he still tried to compose; but according to Clara, and this too is portrayed with marvelous delicacy in the film, he sometimes composed pieces that he had already composed years before, having forgotten that he had done so. The doctors kept Clara from visiting him in person for more than two years, and when she did finally see him, he was like a candle guttering out; he died two days later.
The music in Song of Love is a feast in itself, with many pieces by Schumann, Brahms, and that showman and virtuoso of impossibilities on the piano, Franz Liszt (Henry Danniel). Katharine Hepburn was quite a pianist in her own right, and what you’ll see as you watch her hands flying over the keyboard is not a special effect; she’s really striking those keys and they are the right ones, though what you hear is the performance of Arthur Rubenstein. He trained Hepburn for several weeks, and said in the end that she could play almost as well as he could. But it’s the performances themselves that stand out. Katharine Hepburn here does not play the brittle and high-toned woman that she often plays, a role I’m not fond of; she gives herself over to the role of a very different sort of human being in Clara Schumann. Paul Henreid (you may remember him as the heroic fighter against Nazism in Casablanca) is simply perfect, for conveying a man of intense and tender feelings, ingenuous, one of those souls the world will often crush as under the wheels of a juggernaut. Robert Walker (the sly and cultured psychopath in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) is a boyish Brahms, gentle, well-spoken, in love with Clara, but genuinely devoted to his friend and teacher, Robert. Brahms really did love Clara Schumann, and he proposed to her after her husband’s death, but she turned him down, determined to spend her days preserving, publishing, and promoting her husband’s works. She and Brahms remained very close friends.
If much of this story seems implausible now, more’s the pity for us.
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Now here I thought the movie of the week might be The Sound of Music.