Monthly Archives: November 2017

Music

Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, Elvira Madigan (1785)

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In the course of lunch recently, my good friend and subscriber to this blog, Jason, suggested that I do a piece on one of his favourite pieces of music, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, the “Elvira Madigan” concerto. “You’ll know it” he said, when I conceded that I couldn’t bring it to mind from its name. Upon listening to it later, I nodded…of course, yes, I know this alright, and yes, Jase, it certainly does qualify for an “occasional glimpse”!

The concerto is in three movements, but it is the second movement, the Andante in F major, that is the well-known part we’ll highlight here. Mozart wrote the concerto in 1785, in the middle of a prolific creative burst in Vienna in which he wrote no fewer than eleven masterpieces in a 24-month period. It was written for one of his so-called “subscription concerts”; he would hire a venue, engage some musicians, take all the proceeds from the concert and hopefully make a profit.

I was intrigued to learn how the concerto came by its nickname, “Elvira Madigan”. What a story it turned out to be! It is a relatively recent nickname, as it is named after the 1967 film Elvira Madigan made by Swedish director Bo Widerberg in which the andante was prominently featured. The film is based on the true and tragic love story of Danish tightrope walker, Elvira Madigan (the stage name of one Hedwig Jensen) and Swedish nobleman and cavalry officer, Lieutenant Sixten Sparre of the Scanian Dragoon Regiment.

While performing in Sweden with her stepfather’s circus in 1887, Elvira Madigan met Sixten Sparre and the two fell in love. However, since he was a married man and from a different, higher social class, their love was doomed. After two years of exchanging love letters, they absconded and holed up in a hotel in Svendborg in Denmark for a month. From there, 21-year old Elvira and 34-year old Sixten took the ferry to the nearby island of Tåsinge and stayed at a little pension in the fishing village of Troense. When Sixten’s family withheld financial help, the couple’s last hopes faded. They went out to the forest, had a last meal…and then committed suicide with Sixten’s service revolver.

They are buried together on Tåsinge and to this day their graves are still visited by tourists and romantics from all over the world. Mozart’s emotional and dreamlike melody fits their tragic story perfectly. Take a quiet time to experience the music, below, whilst perusing the accompanying images I found of Elvira, Sixten and the places in which they spent their last days. If you remain unmoved, you may want to just check your pulse…

 

Elvira and Sixten
Film, TV, and Theatre

Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

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Writer/director John Hughes had had a series of successful movies in the eighties featuring teenage angst and adventures (Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) when he embarked on this, the more grown-up movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s a comedy, and it is indeed packed with comic set pieces, but it’s a lot more than that: it has a genuine pathos and poignancy.

Inspired by an actual hellish trip that Hughes had personally experienced, in which various delays and diversions had kept him from getting home for an entire weekend, Hughes apparently wrote the first sixty pages of the script in just six hours. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, a marketing executive desperate to get back home to Chicago to see his wife and kids for Thanksgiving, and who along the way becomes saddled with shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). Mishaps befall the two throughout their travels, and they endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims.

The success of the movie is founded on the essential natures of its two principal actors: Steve Martin and John Candy embody themselves, and this is key to why the film is able to reveal so much heart and truth. Neal spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, whilst Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway. It is road trip and buddy movie rolled into one, done to highly comedic effect, and my family returns to it time after time.

The last scenes of the movie deliver the emotional payoff we have been half-expecting all along. Neal undergoes a kind of moral rebirth: we know he has learned a valuable lesson about empathy, and there is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform. Incidentally, there is a moment just before this scene where Neal, on the train home before he returns to find Del, starts to laugh quietly to himself as he recalls their misadventures. It’s wonderfully natural and it turns out that there was good reason for that: unbeknownst to Steve Martin, Hughes had kept the cameras rolling in between takes on the Chicago train, while Martin was thinking about his next lines, and in so doing captured this unguarded moment. I include it, along with a few of the other great scenes in the two-part montage below.