C'est Fini

In a down-at-heel bistro on the French Riviera one night in August 1944, a pianist lazily fingered a nostalgic ballad from a crudely cleffed manuscript. Some G.I.s at the bar asked to hear it again. The musician played it once more, and then told its history. A Jewish friend of his in Nice, hunted by the Gestapo, had written it three years before, had left it with a publisher, then fled to the Alpes-Maritimes to join a band of the Maquis. Its title reflected its composer's despair: C'est Fini (It Is Finished).

To the Americans, C'est Fini sounded like a combination of Lili Marlene and I'll Never Smile Again. When they began to ask for it in every bar in southern France, the words were translated to English, the title was changed to Symphonic. By last week it was the No. 1 song hit of France. At Maxim's in Cannes, Yolande, the French Hildegarde, sang it. So did lesser entertainers from Monte Carlo to Marseilles.

Last week the song's author was happily aware that everything was not fini. Sallow-faced, balding Composer Alstone (ne Siegfried Alfred Stein), singing his hit, was the star of his own troupe at the Riviera G.I. rest center.

In Manhattan, Chappell Music Co. got set to publish C'est Fini as Symphony; song pluggers tried it out for name-band leaders. Husky-throated Marlene Dietrich recorded the French version for Decca. In translation, the French lyrics she sang were:

Symphony of a day that will always sing in my heavy heart,

Symphony of an evening in spring . . . it's you that I hear,

I see again the withered window blinds which to love one another you closed in the night . . .

The sound of your voice I now find again inside me.

It's finished, it's finished!

My symphony!

But U.S. listeners will get none of this pathos in the American version which Bing Crosby recorded last week. Chappell got Tin Pan Alley's Jack (That's Win Darkies Were Born, Sleepy Lagoon) Lawrence to write these syrupy syllables:

Symphony of love,

Music from above,

How does it start?

You walk in and the song begins . . .

Then we kiss, and it's clear to me,

When you're near to me,

You are my symphony . . .

My symphony!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.