Hearing his favorite classics mangled by a dance band, many a music
lover has longed to take out after the guilty man, but most lovers of
the classics do not know where to look. A 32-year-old Tin Pan Alleyite
named Ted Mossman is their man.By setting classics to 4-4 jazz time and adding banal lyrics, Mossman
has made more money rewriting masterpieces than the original composers
did in writing them. His most successful swipe was Chopin's Polonaise
in A Flat, which he turned into Till the End of Time. It was the
best-selling jazz record of 1945.* Taking Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto
No. 2 apart, he extracted Ever and Forever from the first movement, and
Full Moon and Empty Arms from the third. He rewrote the Liebestod from
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and called it Time Stands Still. He
converted Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf into Dingbat the Singing Cat
and is now waiting for When I Write My Song to make the Hit Parade. Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun became
Mossman's To Love a Dream.Among the few composers spared Mossman's working-over were Bach,
Beethoven and Schumann. Last week Schumann took the count. Mossman
published three Tin Pan Alley adaptations of Schumann, timed to soften
up the U.S. for a movie on Schumann's life, Song of Love, in which
Pianist Artur Rubinstein plays Schumann's music straight . Schumann's Trumerei will be crooned and swung as Fantasy; the
song Widinung will be known as Dedication.
From the great A Minor Piano Concerto, Mossman has wrung a vapid tune
called A Love Story.Mossman, a balding, limpid-eyed arranger who can bat out an
“adaptation” in a day, has done 400 of them. A graduate of
the Eastman School of Music, he has turned out some Gershwinesque
compositions of his own. His New York Concerto is to be played by the
Boston “Pops” Orchestra this summer. He has also won a
fellowship to study composition and conducting at Serge Koussevitzky's
Berkshire Music Center.Mossman draws the line at rewriting Beethoven and Bach. Says he:
“Beethoven can be adapted, but I don't like to — it's so
perfect.” With the air of a man piously renouncing a chance for a
fast buck he adds: “I'd never touch Bach. There are a couple of
themes in the St. Matthew Passion and the Magnificat —but I
wouldn't touch them.” * Helped by the notoriety, an undespoiled version of Polonaise
became the best-selling classical record of 1946.
