This is probably the song played most often at the care home where I work and for that reason I find it unbearably poignant. Part of the reason is: it’s about memory. For the residents in the care home, memory is at once their most precious possession and the one they’re most in danger of losing (a sizeable percentage of the residents have dementia). Mostly the residents have outlived a Significant Other in their life, and are seeing out their days largely alone. Some of them have very happy memories of a life lived according to love, and some have none. Some have pictures on the walls of a Significant Other other but they can’t tell you the person’s name. There’s a longing for the past, but in some cases it’s a past that doesn’t exist anymore. This is a song that fits at the care home because it is so is unashamedly nostalgic.
As for Engelbert, partly because he’s British and we are very sneering and grudging about success, he is hugely under-rated. Very few singers can handle a ballad with the sensitivity he can. For the record, he has a nearly three-octave vocal range, and a gorgeously powerful baritone. There’s now a whole raft of Youtube reaction videos posted by younger listeners discovering him for the first time - and discussing him in really excited terms. This may come as a shock to some, but it may be Engelbert is in real danger of becoming cool again.
There’s a reason The Last Waltz is so popular: it outlines an experience everyone can relate to. The song starts, in the opening verse, by outlining one of those life-defining, Sliding Doors moments:
I wondered should I go or should I stay,
The band had only one more song to play.
And then I saw you out the corner of my eye,
A little girl, alone and so shy.
Of course, we all like to believe when we meet The One it is fated. But this story illustrates the essential arbitrariness of romantic encounters. The meeting here is a kind of accident; it almost doesn’t happen. The fragility of life is thus inscribed into the beginning of the story.
The song’s chorus is awash with nostalgia:
I had the last waltz with you,
Two lonely people together.
I fell in love with you,
The last waltz should last forever.
This is a happy memory, part of the romantic origin story, the Mills and Boon moment. It wasn’t for nothing Engelbert was called the King of Romance. The dance – which the speaker wants to last forever - here becomes a celebration of and a metonym for their new-found love. He is reliving the memory with such intensity, it’s as if he is re-experiencing it. I fell in love with you is sung in a really soaring high pitch as a kind of ecstatic release. This is followed by a majestic swoop to lower pitch, with the last waltz should last forever. There’s a double voice here: the older wiser narrator and the younger experiencing self.
But this is a song that quickly pulls the rug from under the listener’s feet, becoming something much more unsettling:
But the love we had was going strong,
Through the good and bad we get along.
And then the flame of love died in your eye,
My heart was broke in two when you said goodbye.I had the last waltz with you,
Two lonely people together.
I fell in love with you,
The last waltz should last forever.
The pleasurable memories outlined in verse one are here brutally effaced. The memory of the dance changes function: it now symbolises lost love. The meaning of the modal auxiliary should is suddenly brought into renewed focus - it means the same as ‘ought to’ - highlighting a yawning ironic gap between the way life should be and the way it is. The music of the last waltz is now experienced as a cruel and mocking memory, a painful reminder of what the speaker has lost.
The bridge leads to an unforgettable pre-chorus bit:
It's all over now, nothing left to say,
Just my tears and the orchestra playing.La la la la la la la la la,
La la la la la la la la la.
The la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la bit is where the song is at its most seductive. In concert, it becomes a singalong and arm-waving audience participation moment. It evokes the rhythm of the waltz. It’s a way of indulging in a last lingering enjoyment of the waltz, but it’s also a lament. The la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la also becomes a refrain, the bit heard at the end of the song, the outro, if you like, a spooky echo, a fragment of memory.
If this song is nostalgic, it is critically aware, reflective nostalgia. It shows memory as a double-edged sword, facing both backward and forward at the same time. It’s a song that shows life’s rich tapestry, the ways in which joy and despair are contained within each other, two sides of the same coin. But because it’s a song about shifting memory, it’s also, in a sense, a song about ghosts. The song shows how ghosts belong to and haunt an idea of a particular time and space. Care homes are similarly haunted, their corridors filled with the ghosts of lost and forgotten loves.
*I have a personal soft spot for Engelbert because when I covered a concert of his as a reporter for the Leicester Mercury (Leicester is his home town), I got talking to some of the Humperdinckers and one said she had a parrot that sang like Engelbert. We did a story. (Full disclosure: the parrot didn’t really sing like Engelbert, but certainly enjoyed tweeting along to his records in quite an animated fashion.)