I cherish Henny Vrienten most for what he did for Rudolph Valentino

In the week that already began dramatically with the deaths of Jan Rot and Arno Hintjens, Henny Vrienten has now joined musician heaven. Far too young at 73, but still 41 years older than he was in one of his most famous songs. A bit weird, but mostly very sad. One of our country's most sympathetic musicians is no more.

My generation grew up with the music of Doe Maar. For the first time, Dutch pop music was not something for parents but for us! It was about sex and drugs and rock&roll with songs like Nederwiet and Don't be afraid of my cock. But surely the anthem of my teenage years was 32 years.

Transfer

After Doe Maar went down to its own success and all the screaming girls (of which I was not one, snob as I was), the career through which I really took Vrienten to my heart began. That of film composer. He has an impressive oeuvre to his name with the music for Abeltje, Pete Bell, but also Discovery of Heaven and Sonny Boy.

His finest score is also the music for one of the most extraordinary events in Dutch film history: the recovery of Sam Wood's lost film Beyond the Rocks. Eye Filmmuseum found the classic film starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino in considerably affected form in their archives.

Where my contemporaries had posters of Henny on the wall, I had a poster of Rudolph Valentino in my adolescent room. I was fascinated by the side-splitting film star, his grounded, tragic and preventable death at a young age, and all the suicides it caused. What a delight to finally see him, years later, on the big screen. At then still Muziekcentrum Vredenburg was the festive premiere with Vrienten's live score.

Real movie love in Beyond the Rocks

The film is a delightfully romantic one in which a daughter of impoverished nobility (Gloria Swanson) must marry an old millionaire. Upon first meeting a young nobleman (Valentino), desire splashes off the screen. The marriage does not last, the old millionaire sacrifices himself for true love, that of Swanson and Valentino, in their only role together.

Vrienten had created a romantic, nay, lyrical composition for it, with Arabic and more traditional Western influences. Of particular note were the ambient sounds, which allowed the film to become a lot more dynamic. Horse feet, rippling water, that's what I remember. The film had its first premiere in 1922. The second in 2005, with still the intertitles, but mostly the dreamy soundtrack to suck you into the story.