Word: waltz
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Great Waltz (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In Alexander's Ragtime Band, Hollywood brilliantly reflected the changing moods of a U. S. generation through the songs of its outstanding composer. What that picture did for Irving Berlin, The Great Waltz does, in an utterly different but equally effective way, for Viennese Johann Strauss...
...addition, through the gay pattern of his waltzes, sung or played with an effectiveness rarely surpassed on a cinema sound track, The Great Waltz lightly weaves a fragmentary legend of the composer's life. The result is an operetta in which, for once, story and score become part of the same picture-the familiar tapestry, this time brighter and more improbable than ever, of life and young love in old Vienna...
That The Great Waltz succeeds so notably in evoking the flowery nostalgia inherent in Strauss's music may be partly due to the ironic fact that world events have made imperial Vienna something more than the stock romantic setting it was when a similar operetta had its Manhattan stage opening four years ago. Certainly, admirers of the new Vienna will find much to deplore in the picture's affectionate portrait of an era when the principal effect of Revolution was that it inspired a young musician to write a march; and when the most important effect of barricades...
...unreal and as graceful as the music it records and celebrates, The Great Waltz should charm most cinemaddicts, give opponents of swing their happiest moments of the season. Good sequence: Strauss, driving through the outskirts of his city at dawn, fusing the song of a bird, the notes of a shepherd's flute, the salute of a carriage horn into Tales from the Vienna Woods...
JOHANN STRAUSS WALTZES (Boston "Pops" Orchestra Concerts, Arthur Fiedler conducting; Victor: 10 sides). The Blue Danube is lacking, but Vienna's Waltz King is otherwise well represented...