Between song and tone poem: La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Lady, Max Ophuls, 1934) and the archeology of Italian film music

La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Lady, 1934) is Max Ophüls’s eighth feature-length film and the only one he directed in Italy. The film was anticipated by a massive promotional campaign around the country, marking the debut of publisher Angelo Rizzoli as a film producer. Like in other better-known Ophüls movies—e.g. Liebelei (1933), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and Lola Montès (1955)—music plays a fundamental role. The Italian composer of Russian origin, Daniele Amfitheatrof, provided an effective scoring for the oneiric flashback setting of the story, including source music and a successful title song encapsulating the leading character, Gaby Doriot (Isa Miranda), as a Garbo-like movie star. The core of the film, however, revolves around a symphonic tone poem, which, by diegetically entering the plot, sparks the adulterous romance between Gaby and the older Leonardo; this very music underscores the desperate accident in which Leonardo’s wife, Alma, dies after becoming aware of the affair, and returns to haunt Gaby until her remorse becomes unbearable. Besides serving as an unmistakable ingredient of Ophüls’s melodramatic style, the emphasis this film puts on both the tone poem and popular song, is symptomatic of the trends, debates and tensions underlying Italian cinema’s transition to sound. By tracing these trends back to the 1910s, this paper argues that, similarly to what Walter Ruttmann had done one year earlier with Acciaio (Steel, 1933), Ophüls contributed to de-provincialize Italian film music discourse and practice, by bringing a cosmopolitan European touch to it.