"The 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight opens with a kind of musical cure. The great Polish pianist Stefan Radetzky, injured while flying in combat, is in a London hospital. Amid the sounds of bombing-the film was both made and set during the Blitz-he mechanically bangs out clusters on his piano, all memory and identity gone. His doctor observes, "If we could get him better, I should feel that we'd done something for the world, something for . . . well you know what I mean." Before joining the Royal Air Force's new Polish ...
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"The 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight opens with a kind of musical cure. The great Polish pianist Stefan Radetzky, injured while flying in combat, is in a London hospital. Amid the sounds of bombing-the film was both made and set during the Blitz-he mechanically bangs out clusters on his piano, all memory and identity gone. His doctor observes, "If we could get him better, I should feel that we'd done something for the world, something for . . . well you know what I mean." Before joining the Royal Air Force's new Polish squadrons, Radetzky had toured incessantly, performing his Rachmaninoff-style Warsaw Concerto to raise funds for the war effort. Now he is rendered useless, another casualty. But music will come to the rescue, reanimating him and restoring him to the world. When he suddenly begins to play his concerto once more, his memory flooding back, his doctor comments hopefully, "Perhaps that music will bring back a lot of things." Radetzky is one of many pianists who show up in wartime British films, beleaguered but playing on. In these films' frequent recourse to art music and musicians, they call on some familiar tropes, casting music as spiritual sustenance and consolation in wartime or as building morale and solidarity. As this episode suggests, though, these films also probe a more elaborate set of concerns with music's efficacy, with its power to do things in the world. In Dangerous Moonlight, music is something that can be mobilized for war. At the same time, it stands for what survives war and stands apart from it. The tension between these two positions is key to this book."--
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