Music
The title song may be the best-remembered part of the film. It was composed by Bronislaw Kaper and Walter Jurmann, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. It is sung by Jeanette MacDonald a half-dozen times in the film, and becomes an anthem for the survivors of the earthquake. It has now a popular sentimental sing-along at public events such as the city's annual earthquake commemoration, as well as one of two official city songs, along with "I Left My Heart in San Francisco".
Early in the film the song "The Darktown Strutters Ball" can be heard; this is a historically inaccurate inclusion, since the song was written in 1917.
During the two operatic scenes in the film, MacDonald sang excerpts from Charles Gounod's Faust and Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata.
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Famous quotes containing the word music:
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)