"Romanze In Moll" - Romance In Minor Key - (German 1943 with subtitles)

Cassius, hi! Yesterday night I managed to watch this movie. It is a masterpiece of a movie that plays with figures, music and things as symbols.

The bird inside the cave was the real meaning as a symbol. All they were living as enslaved birds inside their caves. Slaves in their caves, that these caves were made by themselves, and for themselves. No one was free to fly, no one was free for doing a swerve changing whatever was painful in their miserable society. That gossip lady was the symbol of the society. The hypocrite and the curious that puts nose to the affairs of other peoples' life. Strange that this gossip lady was not presented as a religious too.

Prudence that is higher than philosophy, as Epicurus says, is totally missing from all of them. Nobody measured properly and prudently among pleasure and pain. Their "ypolepsis" =false idealistic opinions were stuck inside their heads for making them to not doing a hedonic calculus, to enjoy their life, for living in happiness.

- The husband : was the most stupid-stoic personality in the movie. The slave stoic that did his duty to his master (see how he collects the cigar of his master when this falls down). The husband replaced the feelings of love and pleasure with his wife, with the gamble of playing cards. And in the end as it seems he would replace the gamble with the alcohol. Life for him was a circus, he wrote it in his shirt. A circus that all were living as enslaved animals, and he was the first in the list.

-The musician-lover : From the beginning he did know where he was getting involved with : a married woman that refused definitely to be next to him, and living with him, for enjoying the life with him. His gift to her with the necklace with pearls is symbolic. We do not give gifts (external things) to gain the feelings of love and pleasure. We love and be loved due to our personalities, and we are proud of what we have achieved through ourselves. And in the end, that musician killed the banker, for destroying his life, and for living as an outlaw.

-The banker : was the predator that wanted to gain feelings of love through blackmail. This is the same way as he wanted to gain money, he wanted to gain feelings of love and affection. For him, what was the figure of the lady-human and what was the business and money was the same thing. RES !

-The woman : the fatalist stoic who had the idea that her apathetic and miserable husband was her safety and convenience. Alas, the figure of his husband was her death. Because he declared to her, when she talked to him about that lady in the upper floor who was cheating to her husband and as she returned back to him...he told her that that wife was a hussy.

And the goal ? Virtue above all ! No one had achieved the goal of pure pleasure that is a FEELING that has for its principles the common benefit of friendship, the frankness of speech, the freedom, the bravery, and safety!

"res" is a latin word that means things...things that have no senses and feelings !

Let me add these to visually demonstrate the thesis: "Majors" and "Minors" are subjective reflections of our language and culture, and not of an inherent mathematical purity.

For example, consider all notes modeled on a circle that grows as it proceeds, like a spiral. Consider it spirals from the center. Now, consider, like a clock with 12 hours, that each tick-mark represents a different note of 12 tones.

If we diagram a "Major" chord, being the root note, a major third, and a perfect fifth, it looks like this:



If we diagram a "Minor" chord, being the root note, a minor third, and a perfect fifth, it looks like this:



BUT, if we diagram the messy, weird-sounding "Augmented" chord, we have perfect symmetry:



So, there isn't something physically pure about "Majors" and "Minors"––they just work really well with classical music, and contemporary, popular music (to our ears). Plato and Aristotle would have heard the "Major" chord to be absolute garbage (sort of how we hear an augmented chord), while they may have found the weird, augmented chord to be rather beautiful.

I feel the most in sympathy with the woman and almost as much with the husband. For the musician-lover, I have much less sympathy. The banker was the obvious villain, who ultimately turned what was already set to be a terminated, secret romance (at least secret to the unsuspecting husband) into a fatal tragedy.

Whereas I agree broadly with Elli's analysis, here are some details which I see differently:

"The husband replaced the feelings of love and pleasure with his wife, with the gamble of playing cards."

No, he still loved his wife. He enjoyed both his marriage with her and playing cards. When she asked him to stay back one night, he accepted.

His naive insisting on the morals of his time was a condition without which the tragedy would not have happened but he could not have known that beforehand.

"We do not give gifts (external things) to gain the feelings of love and pleasure."

Agreed. However, in such movies, giving gifts is a symbol to visualize the courting but it is not meant to tell that the love arises from the gifts. In this movie, the necklace itself and the repeated reference to giving gifts were excellent leitmotives. The skilled and persistent courting was what gained the woman's love, not the necklace or other material gifts.

"..., for destroying his life, and for living as an outlaw."

No. At that time, his life was not destroyed, and he was not an outlaw. He was at the apex of his career. He killed the banker to avenge his former lover.

"The woman : the fatalist stoic who had the idea that her apathetic and miserable husband was her safety and convenience."

No. Gratitude for some great help (for which no details were given by the movie) was her main motivation to marry her husband and to terminate the affair with the musician.

Moreover, the husband was not apathetic and miserable. He obviously enjoyed his life.

The English subtitles were almost always accurate translations. However, I noticed a few times that a statement with nuances was simplified into a plain stoic statement. So, in some sense, the English version is slightly more stoic than the German original.

The deep issue and question for me is who was passionate by feelings of love and of life in this movie ? And the person that tips more the scale is the musician, but not totally as he did wrong choices from the beginning till the end. No, he was neither the alpha male in the movie nor that kind of man who knows how to get what he wants and desires from a woman's nature, and from life in general. He appears to be so impatient for the right convergence with that woman, and the necklace was a symbol to hurry up the whole situation, for buying time, hers and their common.

As I said above the husband for me was the worse of all. Because he replaced the PASSION of love with the PASSION of playing cards. Because he did not offer to his wife PASSION i.e. the passionate emotions for life and love. Such a stoic personality, as the husband was, is not be able to offer true feelings and vibrating the emotions of a woman... any woman actually. A scene that he was asked by his wife to not play cards for a night does not show to me that he was passionate of love for his wife, and my impression is that this was from the first days or months in their common life, and till the end. For this his wife chose for cheating on him.

Slowly and by the personality of his husband this wife became an emotionally cold woman, a woman that was frighten to recognize her feelings, to the extent to not be passionate neither with the musician.

Sorry, but I am not totally in favor with the wife too. She was an emotionally cold and non passionate one, and to commit suicide for ending her life was the evidence. If someone feels the nothing, in the end, prefers the nothing. Because as far as I know when a woman is a true female nature, and when she is in love, she turns upside down the whole world to be with the one she loves.

Did you ever seen in your life a passionate from love woman ? She is doing like a singing and dancing volcano

and as that song says :

I am a woman in love and I do anything

To get you into my world and hold you within

It's a right, I defend

Over and over again

What do I do...

However, this fatalistic woman who has been stuck to the abstract goal of virtue, with her choices and her fears, led her for not being able to recognize her feelings and emotions, and in the end, she not only destroyed herself, but another man, and especially the musician who killed another person for her. His husband as he was a stoic apathetic nature, he was living in total ignorance by the goal of virtue, and the playing cards was to cover his illusions and his subordination to his job, to his master and to life in general. The only that was vibrating his emotions was the playing of cards, and a spectacle in a circus (what a miserable spectacle with enslaved animals that is preferred by miserable personalities indeed). The last scene with the husband breaking his wife's picture and leaving it on the floor, was the right scene to show us how miserable and apathetic personality he was.

My conclusion is : the Musician's action to offer to this woman, and from the first moments of their meetings, such an expensive gift was the first his wrong doing. Their first meetings were based on a thing, and not in passion of love and pleasurable or painful conversations for their past, their present and a perceptiveness of a future. Such expensive gifts do not lead to true feelings of love, and I'm positive about that. The bird inside the cave was a symbol of the enslavement of all, and the expensive necklace was the symbol of a thing that as expensive as it is...it was not able enough to replace true passionate feelings of love. All the persons in this movie were all disturbed, they did not feel true joy and pleasure, and they were choosing the NOTHING. All they were dead as the bird in the cave.

Thus, for the end for this movie we have the final ES 81. "The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honor and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with or caused by unlimited desire".

The deep issue and question for me is who was passionate by feelings of love and of life in this movie ? This issue and question does not lead to ambiguous responses imo !

I just watched the movie and caught up on the commentary. Not sure that I have much to add except a second female opinion.

I agree with Elli that the husband was the worst character. He may have "loved" his wife, but for the totally wrong reasons. At the beginning his chatter suggested that what he really loved about her was how pretty she was and that all of his friends envied him because of her beauty. Trust me, no woman wants to be loved for her beauty alone. I put "loved" in quotations, because I found this character to be completely dispassionate and I question how deeply he is capable of loving. When he stayed home with her I didn't feel like he did so because he loved her and wanted to stay but rather because he knew it was the "right thing to do." It was obvious that it was painful for him to be there when he would rather be playing cards.

As for the woman, they clearly didn't spend enough time on character development with her, because I couldn't understand what was so captivating about her. The only quality that the story really gave her was her beauty and beauty alone is not enough to enchant so many. There are too many pretty faces in the world. OK, I guess she did exhibit a quality of melancholy when suggesting the minor over the major key, but that should only influence the composer - and not everybody would find that captivating anyway. The woman seemed dispassionate to me too, and I was not able to understand or relate to her choices.

I don't have much to say about the banker. He was an opportunist who obviously wants what he wants and doesn't care who he hurts to get it. I cannot think of any method of pursuing happiness that is more displaced.

Of the main characters, the composer's character was the one I sympathized with the most, but I would not have made the same decisions he did. Like the woman, I too questioned whether his passion would last. It did through the movie, but I think there was plenty of reason to be suspicious of its longevity. I don't mean to suggest that he was being dishonest, I think he really believed that he would always feel that way. But it was contrary to his nature. He's being honest about what he feels and believes at that moment, but there is a big question of whether it would really have lasted. In that respect, I understand the woman's decision to stay with her husband. On the other hand, part of me thinks that whatever time she could have had with the composer would be much more pleasurable than the long safe life she could have with her husband.

I would like to point out that I also liked the singer. Yes, she was hurt and jealous that her affair with the composer was over as she had been replaced with another woman, but at the end of the movie she was able to give a great performance and congratulate the composer in a genuinely friendly manner. She still had friendly feelings towards her past lover who broke her heart. Bravo, singer!

Ok, I have a lot of things that I could say about that, but let me focus on what I think is the most interesting question. The question about the cage as well as the question about whether every ordinary man stands in danger of losing his wife to a more exciting man like the composer bring to my mind the link between money, love and a person’s happiness. All three themes are strong in this movie. The husband clearly exhibits that he feels that making money and his professional success is key to his happiness. The composer seems to be more carefree, but that might only be because he already has the wealth and the professional success. So we can’t separate his character from the wealth aspect entirely either. What is clear is that he feels a relationship with this woman is necessary to his happiness. He says he can’t live without her once he has met her and at the end of the movie he exacts his revenge on the banker by killing him. Perhaps you disagree with me, but I think that Epicurean ethics teaches me that I need neither wealth nor romantic love in order to experience complete pleasure. If I fall in love, but it is unrequited I am not doomed to a life of misery. For those reasons, I wouldn’t call the composer anymore Epicurean than the husband. In fact, his action of killing a man might be more anti-Epicurean than anything the husband did.

I’m having a really hard time coming up with a character from a movie or literature who I think would be a decent depiction of Epicurean ethics, though. Can you?