When you reach my age and stage of life, you'll have accumulated a certain set of songs that you don't actually like, but that feel like part of you because your parents did. Maybe for you it's---say---Bruce Springsteen or Abba. As my dad was born in 1926, I heard a lot of really good music: authentic vintage jazz, big band, and so on; some musicals I quite liked and still like; and a whole lot of crap that just seemed to quaint for words.
I was reminded of this one while looking for the preceding recording by Mario Lanza (Recondite Armonia from Tosca by way of the film The Great Caruso).
On a fateful and very dark day sometime back in the Seventies, my father FORCED his teen-aged daughter to sit through Sigmund Romburg's "The Student Prince." I don't remember a thing about it except that I was bored to tears.
But this song is definitely inextricably woven into the fabric of my life. My dad, like me, had the annoying habit (annoying to anyone else but the listener, that is) of playing songs he liked OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And this is one that I will forever associate with the strange five years my family spent in a house my parents (more literally than you'd think) built on a cliff overlooking the Catawba River. Though it was 15 miles from anywhere else back in the day, we had parties every weekend in the summer---that is, my parents had them, and they were rather wild---and at EVERY SINGLE PARTY my dad would bring down his hi fi (he had the same record player from the time I was born to his death when I was 30) and play this song over and over and over and over.
I seem destined to be plagued by drinking songs. Another one that is all mixed up with my adolescence is the drinking song from Hoffman (in which I was an inept member of the chorus back around 1974).
Anyway, back to the Student Prince Recently, I heard this song again. I was at a movie theater and it was the basis for an advertisement for some sort of bottled water. Till then, I'd mostly forgotten it. But now that it's back, I might as well add it to the collection....
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