Event

Till the End of Time: The Legacy of Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in Postwar America

Between the 1910s and the 1940s, countless arrangements of Chopin’s piano pieces appeared in movies, ballets, musicals, or as hit singles on the radio. One such arrangement, the song “Till the End of Time” based on the Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53, topped the Billboard charts in a recording by Perry Como days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945. While military associations were attached to Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise already in the nineteenth century (one example is Jan Kleczyński’s 1870 programmatic narration of a knightly cavalcade), “Till the End of Time” provides a fascinating metamorphosis of the piece’s legacy, initiating a new melancholic frame of reception in the postwar popular imagination. In July 1946, the movie Till the End of Time capitalized on the success of the hit song, and added another layer to the piece’s complex intermingling of military and sentimental associations in its portrayal of a group of marines having to cope with the challenges of rehabilitation upon their return to the United States after the war. This paper will investigate the process of musical recomposition that effaces (or “covers”) the meanings attributed to the original as a metaphor for the urge to forget and start anew in postwar America. Inspired by Peter Szendy’s “philosophy in the jukebox,” I will argue that the repetitive structure of the hit song (that seems to repeat itself “till the end of time”) eschewed the dramatic potential of Chopin’s work in order to construe an image of America untouched by the miseries of war.