The Concert as Drama

In the final scene of One Hundred Men and a Girl (Henry Koster, 1937), Patsy (Deanna Durbin) sings “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” from Verdi’s La Traviata under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. She has spent the majority of the film trying to persuade the famous conductor to sponsor her father’s orchestra of unemployed musicians (the one hundred men of the title), which accompany her here, and as Siegfried Kracauer recognised: “As we listen to the songs Deanna sings and the concert pieces Stokowski conducts, we never cease to be concerned with the girl’s attempts to win the conductor over to her cause, and the suspense in which we are thus kept limits, if not exceeds, the purely aesthetic gratifications.” ¹ This scene represents the culmination of her efforts. Yet, beyond this balance between aesthetic and narrative gratification, the scene also helps articulate musically the film’s closure; and it does so in a rather unusual way. As Patsy’s aria comes to a close, the orchestra simply refuse to finish. Instead, they continue on with a brief fanfare and a final statement of the main motif from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a performance of which Stokowski had conducted to open the film. The camera cuts away from Patsy, and as we see Stokowski in full body shot, the words ‘The End’ appear on screen. What are we witnessing here? Nothing less, I would suggest, than the on-screen orchestra usurping the role normally ascribed to the orchestra of the underscore—the ‘pit music’ (to invoke Michel Chion’s terminology) or Claudia Gorbman’s ‘non-diegetic music’—namely to bring about narrative closure. ² This has always been one of the roles of music in film, to articulate beginnings and endings, and here we have concert close and film-narrative end sutured together in a single on-screen moment. ³ The fact that we ‘see’ what is normally ‘unseen’ (namely, orchestral underscore) is significant in that it draws attention to the role of music in a way that will ultimately cause us to question distinctions between those distinct diegetic layers that are at the heart of Gorbman’s narratological-based theories, as we will find in Chapter 7.