It's been a glorious afternoon here in Paris, warm and sunny, but I've spent it indoors playing CDs non-stop (my wife's in the UK, you see, visiting her mother and sisters, and working in the garden was an easy option to reject ).
Just now, I'm listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, a true gem, yes, but tell me - do people still link that wonderful second movement (the andante) with the marvellous Swedish film "Elvira Madigan"? I do every time I hear it, and have done for thirty years or whatever. Is this "The Lone Ranger syndrome"? Or do you suffer too?

Mmm. Looks as though it is just me then. And this, from Wikipedia, appears to support such an assertion:

"The famous second movement was featured in the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan. The limpid sounds bring to mind a lazy boat ride on a placid lake, which was the imagery used in the movie. This has led to an anachronistic nickname of Elvira Madigan for the concerto. The use of this nickname has decreased in recent years as memories of the seldom-seen Swedish film have faded."

I saw the movie when it first came out decades ago, and yes, I always associate the Mozart with it.

Annoying, isn't it, the Lone Ranger syndrome ?

Not just that and the Elvira Madigan but there was once a song 'Going Home' which had a melody from Dvorak's " From the New World" and then there was Flanders and Swann using a Mozart horn concerto for a song 'I got me a horn [and I wanted to play it]', a melody by Bach used in a British TV commercial for Hamlet cigars and as for Kismet and the music by a certain Mr Borodin, who would have been surprised to find his chamber music on Broadway

All it does is make it impossible to hear the original without 'hearing' the new words or 'seeing' the later pictures

Oh dear, Kismet - that brings back painful memories. I remarked to my daughter's piano teacher one day how very nice it had been over the weekend to have heard her practising the theme from Tony Bennett's song "Stranger in Paradise". He was not very impressed, believe me.

Still on the "Lone Ranger syndrome", I heard the second movement from Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 on the radio this morning and was unable to fix on the pop song based on the melody. I've since looked it up (info readily available on the Internet), but give the Rachmaninov a listen (unless you're more familiar with it than I am and can hum it to yourself) and see if you can work out which song it is.

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is a classically trained musician; natural in a family where father was an organist, composer and faculty member of the Royal College of Music, mother was a piano teacher and a brother is a famous cellist; whose knowledge of the classical forms shows. The humorous pair Kit and the Widow mischievously play classical pieces which are a surprisingly close fit to some of his greatest successes. He hasn't sued yet.Furthermore, the classical music station, BBC Radio 3, recently played a duet from an obscure French opera.The announcer observed that the following piece might sound familiar. It did. It sounded exactly like a hit song, a duet, from Evita (? It was familiar, anyway).

Well,greater composers than Lloyd Webber have found inspiration elsewhere. It's as well the similar pieces aren't universally known and played or classical enthusiasts would be suffering the Lone Ranger effect even more than they do now

And, as Peter Sellers, playing a talentless rock and roll star, said when explaining why his next 'hit' would be a rock version of Jeremiah Clarke's ["Purcell's"] Trumpet Voluntary: "Well, all we know is it's out of copyright, that's all that matters"