Composition
The song was written in the then small French fishing village of Le Lavandou—now a favourite resort for British holidaymakers and second-home owners—shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. According to Maschwitz, the title was "stolen" from a story by Michael Arlen. The song had its first performance in the summer of 1939 in a local bar, where the melody was played on piano by Manning Sherwin with the help of the resident saxophonist. Maschwitz sang the words while holding a glass of wine, but nobody seemed impressed. In the spring of 2002, an attempt was made to find the bar where this song, which would later become a standard, was first performed with the view to having a blue plaque set up. With the help of the local tourist office, elderly residents were questioned, but it proved impossible to establish the venue.
The first stanza (which is properly called a "verse," which is often spoken as an intro) and the additional lyrics (properly called the "chorus") were in the original song as written but are rarely sung in recordings (those of Bobby Darin, Mel Torme, Blossom Dearie, Twiggy, Vera Lynn and Rod Stewart being notable exceptions). Twiggy's version was featured in an episode ("Fran's Gotta Have It") of The Nanny.
It was published in 1940, early in World War II, when it was first performed in the London review New Faces by Judy Campbell (later the mother of Jane Birkin). In the same year it was also performed by both Ray Noble and then by Vera Lynn. The tune is a recurring theme in the Fritz Lang film Man Hunt (1941).
Read more about this topic: A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square (song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
—Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)