1POPULAR CINEMA

unifying force behind Sierck’s conception of melodrama. Already the participation
of well-known musicians and the attention to musical detail suggest
that the UFA wanted to produce a serious music film with highbrow appeal.
Composer and conductor Kurt Schröder incorporated elements from
extensive musical performances into an evocative original score reminiscent
of later film scores by Erich Maria Korngold. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
which serves as a conduit between the trivial family drama and its
new ideological investments, was performed by the orchestra of the Berlin
State Opera. Soloists included the well-known tenor Hellmuth Melchert
and Erna Berger, one of the best coloratura sopranos of her generation. Not
surprisingly, the film was awarded the designation “artistically valuable”
and received a prize for the best music film at the Venice Film Festival. In
addition to the live performances, diegetic music structures the narrative in
the form of radio broadcasts and gramophone recordings. Throughout, the
act of listening to music is presented as a conduit for powerful epiphanies.
The score makes a clear distinction between the destructive effect attributed
to modern music (e.g., the jazz band in the New York episode, the
swing music at Charlotte’s party) and the ability of classical music to give
emotional sustenance and create connections across spatial and social divides.
Surprisingly, live performances and radio broadcasts are treated
equally, a comment perhaps on the growing importance of radio, the socalled
Volksempfänger (people’s receiver), in forging imaginary communities
of listeners in, and for, the Third Reich.
At significant points in the narrative, the film’s score takes up themes
from well-known musical pieces that are performed live in the diegesis.
Most educated audiences would have recognized these standard pieces from
the classical repertoire. A dense leitmotif structure dissolves the distinction
between diegetic and nondiegetic music, thereby demonstrating the allencompassing
power of melos. Several bars from The Nutcracker Suite by
Tchaikovsky appear first in the credit sequence and then return repeatedly
in the score, each time announcing an emotional crisis or insight. In the
same way that the live broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in New
York City reminds Hanna of her German roots, and the importance of family
and home, the allusion in the musical score to a theme from “Dance of
the Toy Flutes” confirms her primary identity as a mother. On the close-up
of a boy’s photograph and the word “child,” uttered by Hanna during her
first interrogation by the police, the camera shifts from the façades of cheap
tenements and an illuminated Manhattan skyline via the Atlantic Ocean to
Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 115