210 - To Joy, 1949, Sweden. Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

210 - To Joy, 1949, Sweden.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

When you see that the film is entitled To Joy, your first thought might be to wonder if Beethoven's 9th Symphony is involved.

The answer is Yes, and beautifully so.

Ingmar Bergman was an artist, and he knew music as well as the other arts.

He had led the Helsingborg City Theatre earlier in his career, before he became a filmmaker.  Later, he went back to Helsingborg and saw their orchestra.  They were playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for their season finale.

The conductor, Sten Frykberg, loaned Bergman the score so that he could follow the performance note for note as he was listening.  This demonstrates Bergman's knowledge of music as well as his status.

Bergman was touched by the evening.  The symphony was composed of unpaid amateurs, yet they played with passion and heart.  Bergman thought of himself when he directed his first feature film, Crisis in 1946--a novice making mistakes but performing with passion and heart, yet filled with doubts.

He was also going through a break-up in his marriage.  More doubts.

So he combined these ideas and made a film.

He had already started writing it, about a group of theatre performers.  He changed it to be about orchestra musicians.

Stig and Marta play violin.  They are new members of this symphony.  They will fall in love and marry. 

Marta loves Stig.  She believes in him.  She encourages him and supports him.

But he is full of doubts.

He will play solo for Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and Bergman himself says he plays violin "with about the same lackluster skill as I exhibited in Crisis."

This was very personal for Bergman.

Stig's lack of confidence affects both his career and his marriage.  For Bergman, the marriage would die too, but the career would go on to new heights.

Also important, and personal to Bergman, is that he cast Victor Sjostrom in the role of the orchestra conductor.

Twenty-eight years earlier Sjostrom had made the silent film which we saw recently, The Phantom Carriage (1921) (198, July 17), and it had inspired Bergman to become a filmmaker.

Bergman got the idea for The Grim Reaper, which he used to international acclaim in The Seventh Seal (1957) from The Phantom Carriage.

And he honored Sjostrom as his mentor in the film he made that same year, Wild Strawberries (1957).  We will be seeing both of those films soon.

But he first honored his mentor here, as the conductor of the orchestra in To Joy.

The love story may end in sorrow, but the music does play with joy.  And we watch the real orchestra play to the real music.

Twenty-six years later Bergman will film his adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975), and we will see that film as well.

In the mean time sit back and listen to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Smetana.

We begin with the ending, with a tragic explosion, and then we move seven years back in time.

In the Autumn.  When Stig and Marta met at the symphony.

And we get a glimpse of how important seasons are to Bergman.  Time of year matters to him.  The calendar matters.  And the light.

To joy.

*                              *                              *                              *                              *

Note On a Word

I performed my first musical in the 8th grade, when I was a member of FDR's cabinet in Annie.  During the play, Miss Hannigan's brother Rooster enters the orphanage with his girlfriend Lily, and they try to hustle Miss Hannigan for money.

He asks her if he can borrow ten dollars.  "So's all I need is a ten to tide me over."  She does not budge.  So he negotiates down.  "A fiver, Aggie?"

A fiver, Aggie.

It was then that I learned that the word fiver meant a five-dollar bill.  And lines doing as lines do, that line has stuck with me for life.  "A fiver, Aggie?"

And I have used it here and there when it fit the situation.

So as we are watching this film, To Joy, something jumps out.  When Stig and Marta meet and talk after orchestra rehearsal, he asks her, "Can you lend me a tenner?"  And there it is.

A tenner is a ten-dollar bill--or in Sweden, a ten-krona note--just as a fiver is a five-dollar bill.  Stig is asking Marta if he may borrow a ten-krona note from her.

So perhaps this slang was in its currency (ha ha) when Ingmar Bergman wrote To Joy in 1949.

And Thomas Meehan would have been of a generation who knew the slang when he wrote Annie in 1977.

And Ken Ludwig would have also known it when he wrote Lend Me a Tenor in 1986.

So Lend Me a Tenor is a play-on-words on the phrase "Lend me a tenner."

Good to know.