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Rudolf Friml: Affectionately

335 views · Published 5 May 2016 · 1:58 · Indexed 21 October 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2016 · Music

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Phillip Sear plays the fourth piece from the 1919 suite of five pieces 'Love Messages' by the Czech composer Rudolf Friml (1879–1972).
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Friml is remembered today for his hugely successful operettas 'The Vagabond King' and 'Rose Marie'. However, he started his professional life as a pianist, having studied piano and composition with Dvorak in Prague—and was still performing as a pianist into his nineties. He moved to the USA in the early 1900s and published several light piano suites there. It is fascinating to trace through them changes in his style from the early Dvorak influences towards the cosmopolitan Hollywood composer he became.  The suite from which this piece comes seems to have been a personal romantic gesture: it is dedicated to the actress Elsie Lawson, who had been a lead in Friml's operetta 'Glorianna' (1918), and who became his third wife in 1919, the year this suite was published.  Apparently his second wife, Blanche Betters, a chorus member in another Friml operetta, "Katinka", had hired detectives when Friml had taken too warm an interest in Lawson. 

Thumbnail image created with Wombo Dream ( https://rb.gy/ekerq ).
#americanmusic #affection 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear
http://www.psear.co.uk (Email:  [email protected]  
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