Ah, autumn! On the one hand it’s the start of crisp, invigorating fall weather and the new school year; on the other it’s the end of summer and the inevitable slide towards winter. I’ve always loved fall, but as a gardener I also mourn the end of the growing season, trying to comfort myself with the refrain, “Next year!”
Three pieces of film/stage music capture this two-sided aspect of autumn: “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42 (1971), “Les Feuilles Mortes”/”The Autumn Leaves” from the post-WWII French film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of the Night), and “September Song,” originally written for the 1936 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later used in the 1950 film September Affair.
I could write an entire post about each of these beautiful pieces, but since I originally sang them as a medley I’m combining them into one. (See info at the bottom of this post about the medley and its performance.)
The first song in the medley, “The Summer Knows,” clearly refers to the classic idea of a summer romance and its inevitable end in the fall. It was the theme song of the 1971 film Summer of ’42, which is one of those coming-of-age, young-man-falling-for-older-woman stories, with this one taking place on Nantucket Island. A teenage boy is “eagerly awaiting his first sexual encounter” (hey—that’s what the synopsis says) and ends up having a brief affair with said older (but still young) woman, whose husband has gone off to war and who dies in the course of the movie when his plane is shot down. She and the boy have one night together, and then she leaves the island. The adult Hermie tells us as the film ends that he never found out what happened to her. The plot was based on the actual memories of the screenwriter Herman Raucher, who wrote the script and then a novelization of it. Thus the teenage boy is named “Hermie.” “The Summer Knows” forms the theme song of the film and won a Grammy in 1972 for “best instrumental composition.” The lyrics were written by the longtime husband-and-wife team of Abe and Marilyn Bergman, Its closing words, “One last caress, it’s time to dress, dress for fall,” lead beautifully into the next song.
The medley moves on to both the French and English versions of “Les Feuilles Mortes/The Autumn Leaves.” Yves Montand became quite famous for this song, which he performed originally in the 1946 film mentioned above. That film, not to put too fine of a point on it, bombed at the box office, both in France and the US. To quote Wikipedia, “Overall, Les Portes de la nuit is considered hollow by many with regard to the plot.” The song has been immensely popular, though, and Montand performed it in at least one later film and in many concert versions. The French lyrics are much more complicated and nuanced than Johnny Mercer’s English ones that he wrote in 1950. (But in spite of, or perhaps because of, the simplicity of Mercer’s lyrics, he “made more money from ‘Autumn Leaves’ than from any other song that he wrote.”) I’m going to include a full translation at the bottom of this post for those who are as obsessive as I am about such things; but if you’d rather not wade through all the verbiage here’s just a short example:
Lines in French:
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle.
Tu vois, je n’ai pas oublié…
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Et le vent du nord les emporte
Dans la nuit froide de l’oubli.
Translation:
Dead leaves are picked up by the shovel.
You see, I haven’t forgotten…
Dead leaves are picked up by the shovel,
Memories and regrets too
And the north wind carries them away
In the cold night of oblivion.
(https://lyricstranslate.com)
Lines from Mercer’s version:
The autumn leaves drift by my window
The autumn leaves of red and gold.
I see your lips, the summer kisses,
The sunburned hands I used to hold.
The two versions are so different that at first I thought they couldn’t possibly be from the same song. If you sing the French lyrics you have to cram in a lot more words per musical phrase. The original has the opening verses sung to a different melody from the familiar one. You’ll see in the final video below that when Montand performed the song in a later film he left out the initial verse.
And I haven’t even gotten to the composer and original lyricist! They’re both quite famous in their own right, at least in France. Jacques Prévert wrote the lyrics and also the screenplay for the film as a whole, and Joseph Kosma wrote the music. The two men collaborated on many projects, and when the Nazis occupied France during WWII and placed the Hungarian-born Kosma under house arrest, barring him from composing, Prévert managed to get Kosma’s work into films by having other composers “front” for him.
Well, I must hasten on to the last piece in the medley, “September Song.” The music is by composer Kurt Weill and the lyrics by the playwright Maxwell Anderson. Talk about two heavy hitters! What is so interesting about the song’s origins is that it was written only because Walter Huston (father of John Huston, grandfather of the great Anjelica Huston) insisted that he have a solo in the musical Knickerbocker Holiday. His voice wasn’t all that great but he knew how to put the song over, and it has become a popular classic. It is said that “Anderson and Weill wrote the song in a couple of hours for Huston’s gruff voice and limited vocal range.” (Wikipedia) The words are sometimes altered a bit depending on the arrangement, but the version I’ve sung seems to follow the original lyrics that have the same speaker throughout—the older man who is pursuing a younger woman and knows that he doesn’t have time to “let the old earth take a couple of whirls” to allow her make up her mind. In the plot of the music he doesn’t get the young woman, though—she marries the young man she loves, and all ends happily.
Here are the promised videos, and then the full translation of “Les Feuilles Mort” is after that. I have a weakness for Jackie Evancho, so she beat out Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand for the first song.
A lovely comment on the above video: Daniel was 82 and I was 80 when we married. He was the love of my life and I was his. We chose this song and this version to be played at our wedding. We had 559 beautiful, glorious and golden days together, the happiest of my life and, I hope, his.
Here’s the classic rendering of Mercer’s version by Nat King Cole:
| Oh ! je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes Des jours heureux où nous étions amis. En ce temps-là la vie était plus belle, Et le soleil plus brûlant qu’aujourd’hui. Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle. Tu vois, je n’ai pas oublié… Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi Et le vent du nord les emporte Dans la nuit froide de l’oubli. Tu vois, je n’ai pas oublié La chanson que tu me chantais. Refrain : C’est une chanson qui nous ressemble. Toi, tu m’aimais et je t’aimais Et nous vivions tous les deux ensemble, Toi qui m’aimais, moi qui t’aimais. Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s’aiment, Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit Et la mer efface sur le sable Les pas des amants désunis. |
Oh, I wish you’d remember. Happy days when we were friends. In those days life was better, And the sun is hotter than today. Dead leaves are picked up by the scoop/dustpan. You see, I haven’t forgotten… Dead leaves are picked up by the shovel/dustpan, Memories and regrets too And the north wind carries them away In the cold night of oblivion. See, I haven’t forgotten The song you used to sing me. Chorus : It’s a song that looks like us. You loved me and I loved you And we both lived together, You who loved me, I who loved you. But life separates those who love each other, Slowly, quietly and quietly And the sea erases on the sand The footsteps of broken lovers. |
The arrangement referenced in this post was commissioned by the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, written by composer and arranger Paul Langford in 2001. We reprised the piece in 2019. I don’t find that the music has ever been published; it seems to have remained the sole property of the Chorale.
© Debi Simons
