Song Without End (William Goetz Productions, Columbia, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards TCM showed a much more important Dirk Bogarde credit that was, alas, unlisted on their Web site (TCM.com has got awfully glitchy of late, with whole chunks of the channel’s schedule missing): Song Without End, a 1960 biopic of composer, conductor and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt (Dirk Bogarde in his only appearance in a film produced by a U.S. studio). By chance a new issue of The New Yorker appeared in today’s mail containing Alex Ross’s article “Lisztomania Enters the 21st Century” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/lisztomania-enters-the-twenty-first-century), a fascinating exploration of the many contradictions in Liszt’s music – and his life. I had few if any hopes for Song Without End; it was produced at the same studio (Columbia) by the same director (Charles Vidor) who had made the Chopin biopic A Song to Remember 15 years earlier, and everything I’d heard about it pretty much dismissed it as Hollywood schlock. Surprise: it actually turned out to be quite good, despite the predictable Production Code compromising that turned Liszt’s life story into a caricature of itself. Ironically, much of the film’s quality may have been the result of director Charles Vidor (who, like Liszt, was a native Hungarian) dying early on in the shoot; according to the “Trivia” section on imdb.com’s page for the film he only shot 15 percent of it. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said Vidor shot one-quarter of the movie as it stands, but either way his departure actually seems to have helped the film. Vidor was replaced by George Cukor (also of Hungarian descent, though he was born in New York City to Hungarian-Jewish immigrant parents), who got a rather nebulous title credit rather than the co-directorial nod he deserved, and screenwriter Walter Bernstein and cinematographer Charles Lang, who came into the project when Cukor did, weren’t credited at all. (The film’s credits list Oscar Millard as the writer and James Wong Howe as the cinematographer; another uncredited writer on the project was Leola Wendorff, who wrote the screen story.)

Apparently Millard’s script was so bad (recalling his work on the terrible Genghis Khan biopic The Conqueror five years earlier) that when Bernstein met Cukor to discuss the film, he joked that all Cukor had to do was replace Dirk Bogarde with TV comedian Sid Caesar and shoot Millard’s script as written. Whoever wrote the script, the film does a surprisingly good job dramatizing the contradictions in Liszt’s character: between the virtuoso performer and the serious composer, between the religious believer and the serial philanderer and adulterer (his two most important relationships with women, the Countess Marie D’Agoult – who bore him his three children – and the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein – were both with nobleman’s wives whom he seduced away from their husbands), between the showman and the artist, and between his own music and his support for other composers, including Richard Wagner (who appears here as a character, played by Lyndon Brook, who was also in The Spanish Gardener as one-half of a British servant couple at the consular residence in Spain). According to Alex Ross, the term “Lisztomania” was actually coined in Liszt’s lifetime by the German poet Heinrich Heine (the one Jewish writer Wagner admitted to liking), and in a very real sense Liszt and his contemporary, violinist Niccolò Paganini, were rock stars before rock stars (or rock music) existed. (So were the great operatic divas and divos of the 19th century: Giuditta Pasta, Giulia Grisi, Maria Malibran, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Giovanni Batista Rubini and others.) “The profile fits, and not always in a flattering sense,” Alex Ross writes in his New Yorker article. “Liszt could be cavalier about manipulating his audiences, as Dana Gooley shows in his incisive 2004 book, The Virtuoso Liszt. A very up-to-date system of ticket pricing held sway at Liszt’s concerts, with V.I.P.’s arrayed in comfortable seats around the piano and ordinary people crowded at the back. His charity events doubled as publicity schemes. Nothing could be more rock-star-like than endorsing piano brands while pounding instruments to the point of collapse onstage. Gooley writes, ‘Liszt turned the virtuoso concert into a spectacle of cultivated aggression.’”

A number of critics reviewing Song Without End when it was new criticized Dirk Bogarde for playing Liszt too much like Elvis Presley – though 15 years later bizarre British director Ken Russell would do his own Liszt biopic, Lisztomania, and cast a real rock star (Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, just after Russell had filmed the Who’s opera Tommy with Daltrey in the title role) as Liszt in a script that played even faster and more loosely with Liszt’s life than this one. Song Without End has the usual share of factual howlers, including a scene in which Wagner shows up at Liszt’s rehearsal in Weimar bearing the score of his new opera, Lohengrin, and asking Liszt to please, pretty please, perform it – right after we’ve just heard Liszt rehearse the Weimar orchestra in the Prelude to Act III of, you guessed it, Lohengrin. (And when the performance finally takes place, it’s not of Lohengrin but the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s immediately preceding opera, Tannhäuser.) The film also fudges the circumstances as to why Wagner needed Liszt to give the world premiere of Lohengrin; Wagner had participated in one of the many revolutions of 1848 in his native kingdom of Saxony (one of the many independent states into which what is now Germany was divided) and had been forced to flee when the royal family restored order and started arresting the revolutionaries. Wagner fled to Switzerland and wasn’t allowed back into any part of Germany for 16 years until Ludwig II (the mad king of Bavaria and a Gay man who thought listening to Wagner’s music would turn him straight) arranged so that, while Wagner still couldn’t come back to Saxony, he could go to Bavaria or any other part of Germany. Obviously this turn of events was way too politically incorrect for an American-produced movie made during the height of the Cold War – and filmed in Austria after Hungary’s Soviet overlords denied the filmmakers permission to shoot it there.

Song Without End has problems with the casting, notably the decision to use the French-born starlet Capucine as Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (Marie D’Agoult was played by the first-rate French actress Geneviève Page, and when Liszt leaves her for Carolyne we definitely get the impression he’s trading down – just as we did in Lisztomania); according to a letter Dirk Bogarde wrote to his family in England during the shoot, he was “relieved” when Vidor died in the middle of the film and said that at one point Vidor had physically grabbed and shaken Capucine “like a dead cat.” And the film’s ending is a Production Code-sanitized version of Liszt’s life: after his various attempts to get Princess Carolyne’s marriage either divorced or annulled are shot down by the Russian authorities and the Vatican, he gives her up and becomes a Roman Catholic monk, living the rest of his days in Rome and playing Johann Sebastian Bach on the organ in a church service. (Maybe it was too much to ask a Jewish-American writer like Walter Bernstein to keep track of the differences in various sorts of Christianity that make this plot line hard to believe, but not only were Carolyne and her husband Russian – and therefore married in the Russian Orthodox church rather than the Catholic one – but Johann Sebastian Bach was a hard-core Lutheran and it’s highly unlikely that a Roman Catholic cathedral would have performed the music of a Protestant composer.) The real Liszt did live in the Vatican for a while and took minor orders as the “Abbé Liszt,” and some of his later works reflect a growing interest in spirituality in general and Roman Catholicism in particular, but Liszt was no more likely to settle down into one set of spiritual beliefs than he was to settle down into one style of music.

Still, I quite liked Song Without End; Liszt’s musical as well as moral dilemmas came through strongly in the script and Bogarde’s acting was superb throughout. Unlike a lot of actors who’ve played musicians, especially pianists, Bogarde studied carefully under piano teacher and coach Victor Aller so he could synchronize effectively on screen with the pre-recordings by Argentinian pianist Jorge Bolet, his soundtrack piano double. Though there are a few of those abominable camera angles in which the director interposes the bulk of the piano between the actor and the camera to cover for the fact that the actor isn’t really playing, we get many shots of Bogarde’s fingers on the piano keys, as well as a few close-ups in which Victor Aller’s own hands doubled for Bogarde’s. Despite the inaccuracies and the fudging to keep the movie both politically and morally “correct” by the standards of the time, Song Without End is a quite effective film and Bogarde as Liszt is excellent in it.