One Touch of Venus

Kurt Weill composed One Touch of Venus in 1943, with Ogden Nash and Sid J. Perelman collaborating on the libretto. Following its outstanding box office success, in 1948 Weill supervised the film version made in the Hollywood studios. In formal terms it has many of the hallmarks of the gol­den age of the musical. Weill maintained the alternation of scenes between spoken dialogue and catchy tunes; structured the characters as antagonists all rotating around the main protagonist; included dance numbers with great scenographic impact and the customary moments of irony (n. 27. Catch Hatch); and also drew on the tradition of American music in featuring a bar­bershop number (n. 19. The Trouble With Women).

The significance of One Touch of Venus for our enquiry into the change in attitude to music in the film musical transpires with the passage of the musical from theatre to cinema. No changes were made to the story; it was the music which underwent significant modifications. In fact Universal set out to make a film ‘based on’ the hit musical One Touch of Venus with the complete involve­ment of the composer. The outcome was a film that was every bit as successful; but how was the passage from stage to screen achieved?

Most of the musical numbers that featured in the stage version of One Touch of Venus were not used in the film version: only two were retained, Speak Low and That’s Him, and one new song was introduced (Don't Look Now, but) My Heart is Showing, composed by the arranger Ann Ronell. This new song and the music in the film in general do not feature particu­larly original orchestral writing. As in the stage musical, the protagonists are characterised by means of musical motives, but while in the theatrical version the motives were restricted to the individual numbers, in the film they become elements which recur and hence characterise the various scenes. Two of the elements in the stage musical are enhanced in the film: Venus’s disorientation and her nature as an outsider, the goddess of love, residing on  Olympus, come to earth as a woman like any other and totally inept in managing personal relationships.

We shall now analyse the audiovisual sequence of the metamorphosis of the statue of Venus (Table 1). This is a key moment in the plot of One Touch of Venus, as it is in the short story on which the musical was based (Anstey, 1898). The sequence is particularly indicative because it reveals some of the differences in the musical component in the film musical which we referred to at the beginning.

Table 1. Analysis of the metamorphosis scene, from One Touch of Venus (1948).

The scene of the metamorphosis is structured according to two main themes. In the film version the theme of the ring has two facets: on one hand the love potion, giving access to a supernatural world where other laws obtain (the law of absolute Love and Beauty), and on the other the theme of the kiss as a sensual representation of love itself. The theme of the love potion is in fact an innovation of the film. It recalls the classical lite­rary topos which was so popular in music theatre. In this context the potion serves two purposes: it creates a link between the New York of Ed­die and Venus’s Olympus and, by clouding the character’s perception of reality, opens the way to love based on the sentiments which breaks out of the confines of the bourgeois stereotype. Our analysis focuses on the com­plexity of the elements and the typology of the transposition at work. The main element in the film, with respect to the musical, is the emergence of an original relationship between music and image.

We can observe that the musical choices match the images: the progress of the action is accompanied by silences, which mark the begin­ning and end of separate formal micro-sections. The silences correspond to the crucial actions in the plot development: in the first Eddie savours the champagne, in the second he kisses the statue, in the third he sees Venus become human. There are two typologies of musical texture: in one the or­chestration is based on the woodwind and a temporal organization which highlights the characters’ movements and indeed gestures one by one, de­noting a clownish character and commenting on Eddie’s actions; the other features the main theme of Speak Low used almost as a Leitmotiv. This is played and developed by the strings, giving rise to a continuous, legato texture. Thus the two typologies display a different relationship between text and music: the first comments on the action, the second introduces another semantic plane which extends over a broader time span and with greater profundity. Here we can identify the motive of love as an absolute: as the statue reveals itself, Eddie instantly falls in love, to the notes of Speak Low.

One important aspect is the representation of the supernatural and thus of the statue’s metamorphosis; this follows on from Eddie’s kiss. The supernatural is represented in music by the use of electronic generation which, reprising the motive of Speak Low, provides the link between the real world of Eddie and the divine sphere of Venus. This is true in both the first appearance of Venus (8’ 14’’) to the notes of Speak Low, probably performed on the theremin, and in the second (20’ 08’’), in Eddie’s bed­room. Here the goddess appears unexpectedly, seen in a mirror and accompanied by a long held electronic sound: the timbre is non-harmonic, static, treated with an echo effect. The presence of electronic music only in these two passages highlights the transition between the two worlds.

This use of electronic music characterises the film as an example of intersemiotic translation since it makes it possible to synchronise the elec­tronic production with the images and because these sounds cannot be produced in a live performance. In fact the specific qualities of the elec­tronic medium are used to achieve a new rendering of something which, with the resources available in the theatre, did not permit a sufficiently realistic representation of the action in question. The divine is also ren­dered by means of the symbolic element of thunder and lightning, just as, after meeting Eddie, Venus calls on heaven and Jupiter to grant her extra time on earth in order to take leave of her beloved.

This innovatory technique is accompanied by a tried and trusted mod­ality of the language of music: allusion. When Eddie is standing on the ladder and is going up to the statue prior to the kiss, we hear a fragment of Tristan und Isolde, specifically the fragment based on a progression that precedes the dénouement in the finale of the opera (Act III, scene III, Mild und leise wie er lächelt, Isolde). However fleeting (8’ 08’’ - 8’ 11’’), this allusion to Wagner’s opera reinforces the significance of the love po­tion and of love that is both absolute and confusing to perception.

There is a clear functional distinction between the music used to un­derscore and the songs; the only two songs that feature, Speak Low and (Don’t Look Now, but) My Heart is Showing, take on a marked signific­ance with respect to the episode being narrated because the construction of the meaning and transmission of the message are entrusted to the music rather than to the camera shots. Weill distinguishes the underscoring from the two songs by structural means: the songs are based on a symmetrical thematic structure with a clear, straightforward development; the unders­coring serves as transition and is organized as a continuous progression of modules devoid of any symmetrical structuring.