配乐
Melodrama, as Sirk once defined it, is drama with music. The Blue Angel had already illustrated both worlds with music: the bourgeoisie, with its traditional melodies whistled by Professor Rath in the morning (“Practice fidelity and honesty…”), is contrasted with the honky-tonk of the current pop songs (“Get out there, give ’em the old schmaltz,” advises the director, shooing Lola Lola out onto the stage). “Classical or modern?” asks von Bohm of Mrs. Kummer in the Fassbinder version, when he learns that her daughter is a “singer.” The pop hits of the fifties telling of wanderlust and lovers’ bliss make up—in contrast to the directions in the screenplay––Lola’s repertoire in the Villa Fink establishment: “Am Tag als der Regen kam,” “Plaisir d’Amour,” and above all Rudi Schuricke’s “The Fishermen of Capri”: “When in Capri the blood red sun sinks in the sea…”
The building commissioner naturally prefers classical music and plays the violin himself. The violin playing was Armin Mueller-Stahl’s idea: the actor had once studied music, and his passion suited the character and could be used for dramatic purposes. Alone in his house in the evening, he plays Vivaldi on the violin, hesitates a moment, and then changes to the motif from “The Fishermen of Capri.” He has made his decision and goes to the Villa Fink; when he walks through the door, we hear the line from the song: “…then my dreams did awaken, then you came along.” The score, composed by Peer Raben, corresponds to the colors: superficial thrills, bold emphasis on the emotions, harmonic melodies, but, like the main theme, set in two keys so that the music seems false and hypocritical.
“A white ship sails for Hong Kong,” sings Freddy Quinn during the opening credits; Konrad Adenauer, manuscript in hand, sits listening next to a tape recorder. Sound documents, used with more restraint and less complexity than in The Marriage of Maria Braun, also form an ironic level of commentary in Lola. In the scene when the lovers Lola and von Bohm are sitting in the car, we can hear scraps of a speech by Adenauer: “The world was filled with unrest during those weeks. In different places on earth, changes took place on a grand scale.” The chancellor speaks of “times still not pacified,” of the Hungarian uprising and the federal border police in his own country, and finally declares that “defenselessness offers an enticement to an aggressor.” When, toward the end, Lola is a guest of the Schuckerts, the marriage, as at the end of The Marriage of Maria Braun, is brought about by a deal about which the man in question knows nothing, and once again we hear in the background a radio broadcast from a world soccer championship, this time from 1958 (Germany vs. Sweden): a player is being sent off the field.
