ROSE EVERYWHERE - A Song Lost and Found

On November 6, 2022, The Shanghai Observer reports a story about how a Chinese pop song, made famous by a Jewish-German-Canadian musician, now returns to the family of the original composer in Shanghai. (Original Chinese story is reported here: https://www.shobserver.com/staticsg/res/html/web/newsDetail.html?id=547224&sid=67).

Otto Joachim (1910-2010) was a German Jewish musician. He and his brother cellist Walter escaped the Nazis in the late 1930s and landed in Shanghai, the only major port in the world open to Jewish refugees at the time.

While in Shanghai, the brothers worked at the Municipal Orchestra (today the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra), and opened a violin shop. They also organized their own band to perform at a café on Avenue Joffre (today Huaihai Road). There, they made friends with famous Chinese composer Chen Gexin. Mr. Chen was famous for many of his film scores. One of the songs he composed for the film “Wondering Singing Lady” (天涯歌女 1941), “Rose, Rose, I Love You”, was an over-night hit. Otto Joachim arranged the song into a ten-part small band score, including vocal, violins, guitars, piano and percussion, and recorded it with RCA. After the war, the Joachim brothers left Shanghai and immigrated to Canada. They settled in Montreal and became musicians of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Otto brought all his manuscripts with him, among which was his orchestration of “Rose, Rose, I Love You”. American pop singer Frankie Laine later sang this in English and hit the top 3 of the Billboard chart in 1951.

In September 2022, the Shanghai Symphony presented a chamber music concert “Hebraic Legacies” to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relationship between China and Israel. One of the encore pieces was a transcription of the song “Rose, Rose, I Love You”. Ms. Liu Ming, concertmaster of the Shanghai Symphony, explained to the audience that they had tried to find Otto Joachim’s original arrangement but without success. So, she and pianist Zhang Lu had to transcribe their own violin-piano version.

One man in the audience, Xu Shen, son of famous Far-East Jewish history researcher Professor Xu Buzeng, later tells the story to his friend Fang Sheng in Canada. Fang immediately starts to search online about the Joachim brothers. Though Fang knows they had prominent careers in Canada, he actually doesn’t realize how famous they actually were. When Otto passed away in 2010 (when he was almost 100), CBC carried a news story recounting his achievements, including his experience in Shanghai (https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/montreal-composer-otto-joachim-dies-1.891303). Fang comes across a PDF catalogue listing of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) of THE OTTO JOACHIM FONDS. Through that Fang learns that Otto had donated all his manuscripts to LAC a few years before his death, and the institution established the FONDS – a collection of all related materials about one person or organization, to Otto Joachim’s name. In the section of ARRANGEMENTS, the first listing is "Roses Everywhere", with the original composer listed as “Svengali”. Fang recalls that composer Chen Gexin had a quarter of Indian heritage. Would that be Chen’s Indian name? Fang checks through Xu Shen, and indeed, Xu confirms it from none other than Chen Gexin’s son, Chen Gang, himself also a famous composer who composed the “Butterfly Lovers” violin concerto.

Fang requests a PDF copy from LAC and Xu Shen shares it with Professor Chen Gang. The 87-year-old Professor Chen was very touched that after 80 years, “Rose, Rose, I Love You”, originally composed by his father, brought to the world by Otto Joachim, now has returned to Shanghai, all the way from Canada. A perfect circle is completed.