Sweet 'Song of Love'

Should anyone else feel like frittering away a Saturday morning, join me in continuing to enjoy "Song of Love." Come on, do it. It is a holiday weekend.

I love this movie!!

There is this scene up above with Brahms and Clara Schumann. They are at the premiere of his First Symphony, and then they take off to have fun. And then there is this scene when Brahms proposes to Clara.

It is such a sad scene! I am not giving anything away. We all know how this story comes out.

These are good actors. And the Brahms actor he has dark hair, but otherwise he looks like Brahms. His face, his hair. Who is this guy? I keep looking up his name and forgetting it. Let me look it up again. ... Robert Walker. Wow, he died young, just 31 years old, a few years after this movie. No wonder I had not heard of him.

"Clara, you are endlessly young. What does age matter when the years don't touch you?"

Meanwhile there is this strolling violinist playing that beautiful Brahms waltz. You hear this waltz all the time but there is such deep love in it, especially that middle part.



Then the violinist changes his tune. Here is where I love YouTube. I love the comments. Somebody writes about this video: "I bet poor Brahms wanted to strangle that violinist..." Hahahaaa.

An odd thing, I am reading up on this Robert Walker. I wanted to know why he died so young. He starred in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train." I love old movies and have seen far more of them than the average person has, but I have big gaps in my knowledge, so I had not known that.

Walker was born in Utah and he was a devout Mormon. You do not hear of too many Mormon movie stars. His life seems to have been very unhappy. His parents divorced when he was little and then he was divorced from his first wife, Jennifer Jones, because she left him for David Selznick. I remember Leonard Pennario explaining that situation to me. He was friends with Jennifer Jones but he felt bad about the divorce because, he told me, she had two kids with her first husband. So this is the first husband, our Johannes Brahms in "Song of Love."

Speaking of this movie, Walker responded badly to the stresses in his life and and it seems he became an alcoholic with psychiatric disorders which is why he died so young.

Sounds a lot like Robert Schumann, you know?

Maybe he was miscast.

Anyway. Poor Brahms, poor Clara, poor Robert Schumann, poor Robert Walker. But a good movie all the same. So many roads to explore when it comes to "Song of Love." So many discussions! Also there is a lot of good piano in it which I understand was courtesy of Arthur Rubinstein.

The whole movie is up on YouTube in 10-minute segments.

Enjoy!