The Constant Nymph

Now, I know these soundtracks I've been posting are kind of random. That's how I got them, I listen to them for the first time in the days or week before posting the link. It was the oddness of how they were all part of the same (apparently failed, as the label no longer lists them in the catalogue) reissue series.

I'm not posting in any order either, as there's not really one to be had.

That said, this week's post is Erich (Elizabeth and Essex) Korngold's soundtrack to the 1943 CharlesBoyer vehicle The Constant Nymph.

It's a convoluted love story in which Boyer plays a poor composer the fourteen year-old daughter of whose mentor falls in love with him. The director, Edmund Goulding, later took on Maughm's The Razor's Edge (so-so, IIRC, as the movie sidesteps some of the book's trickier religious themes) and Of Human Bondage (both in 1946).

This string-heavy music is, not surprisingly, pretty melodramatic. I imagine Douglas Sirk's movies to be similarly soundtracked.

This is one that's probably more interesting if you know the movie, but the music is quite moving in its way.

This CD also includes an unused alternate take of the vocal Tomorrow.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Constant Nymph (320/rs)