Full Moon & Empty Arms

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 (from Saint-Saens' aria My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice) 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 (TIME, May 26). Schumann's Traeumerei 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.

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