subscribe to this pageAccording to Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music (1990, p. 12):
uses passages from Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Schubert during opening credits and scene in concert hall.
borrows from Johann Strauss (waltzes) during shots of hotel's main floor. Rachmaninoff love theme, jazz for Kringelein's liberation. Music separate from dialogue. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13).
There is in fact copious underscoring of dialogue with music.
The ballerina's manager, lamenting the empty house, says after this he will do no more dancing, just jazz.
With the entrance of the maid into the ballerina's room (34:25) pop-jazz-dance music starts. It continues during the entrance of several more people, a subtlely comic sequence. When the ballerina returns and her manager dumps her the music turns briefly minor, ominous. A muted trumpet solo accompanies the ballerina's undressing. It stops when she exits the frame in the nick of time not to expose herself. There are then some moments of silence as the baron takes his gloves off. Then music reenters with the ballerina, this time Russian-flavored accompanying her phone call. It smoothely transitions into pop-dance music and continues quite incompatibly with her desperate monologue and the baron's intervention, and continues to the end of the scene with some nuances changes appropriate to the dialouge (end 42:46).
Sign for American Bar Jazz Band at 57:45.
1:39 - "The music has stopped. How quiet it is tonight. It was never so quiet in the Grand Hotel."
Innovative concentration of (7) stars in one film.
Novel (Menschen im Hotel) first translated to broadway. Also Vitaphone musical comedy picture Nothing Ever Happens (1933).