“Melodrama means music plus drama,” Douglas Sirk has noted, and in his first full-scale melodrama, Schlussakkord, the music of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Handel provide an ingenious aspect of the setting. The story involves a concert conductor and his wife whose unhappy marriage is made more dramatic when the mother of their adopted child hires herself on as a nurse to the family. Sirk critic Jon Halliday writes, “Sirk's first full-blown melodrama shows him intensifying the conventions of the genre: Beethoven, clairvoyants, suicides, courtroom drama all contribute to the emotions in which Sirk ruthlessly implicates his audience... According to Sirk, Schlussakkord marks a definite signpost in his career: his decision to accept an atrociously mawkish story, loaded down with ‘melodrama,' and turn it into something new: 'I got the smell of a tremendous success,' he recalls; the official scriptwriter was so appalled at Sirk's transformation that he insisted on removing his name from the credits. The film went on to be a huge hit...”