Saluting a 66th wedding anniversary with Chopin's pop music hit
If you'll pardon the personal stuff today, Aug. 14 is my parents' 66th wedding anniversary, and I just had to send them a cyber shout-out -- especially since there's a Chopin connection.
When they were dating in Washington, D.C., they had their own special song (do couples still have their own special songs?). It was from the 1946 movie "Till the End of Time," the story of Marines adjusting after the war. The movie's theme song left quite an impression on my parents. (My father served in the Marines, so that provided another strong connection to the picture.)
The song, which became a big hit in those days, was based on Chopin's A-flat major Polonaise, the one known as the "Heroic." Any couple that can hang on for 66 years seems pretty heroic to me, so let's hear it for Ken and Betty Smith.
Here's their song in a tender 1940s performance by ...
Ginny Simms, followed by a fully heroic account of the Chopin Polonaise that inspired it, played by a great keyboard artist of the 20th century, Georges Cziffra:
