The film also features the famous carillon of the Garrison Church at Potsdam playing "Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit" ("Always Be True and Faithful") as well as an orchestral version of the song.
The original melody was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for Papageno's aria "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen" from The Magic Flute.
In the German Reich and subsequently the Weimar Republic, the lyrics of "Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit" symbolized Prussian virtues: "Use always fidelity and honesty / Up to your cold grave / And stray not one inch / From the ways of the Lord".
[13] Singer Lucie Mannheim was favored by UFA producer Erich Pommer for the part of Lola, with support from leading man Emil Jannings, but Sternberg vetoed her as insufficiently glamorous for a major production.
[14] Sternberg first saw 29-year-old Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich at a music revue called the Zwei Krawatten (Two Neckties), which was produced by dramatist Georg Kaiser.
"[15] After arriving at Berlin's UFA studios, Sternberg declined an offer to direct a film about Grigori Rasputin, the Russian spiritual advisor to Czar Nicholas II's family.
The rise of Lola Lola and fall of Professor Immanuel Rath in reel [sic] life is paralleled in the real life by the rise of Marlene Dietrich and the fall of Emil Jannings..."[10][24]The Blue Angel was scheduled for its Berlin premiere on 1 April 1930, but UFA owner and industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, unhappy with socialist Heinrich Mann's association with the production, blocked release.
Production manager Pommer defended the film, and Mann issued a statement distancing his anti-bourgeois critique from Sternberg's more sympathetic portrayal of professor Immanuel Rath in his movie version.
Hugenberg ultimately relented on grounds of financial expediency, still convinced that Sternberg had concealed within The Blue Angel "a parody of the German bourgeoisie.
"[28][29] Dietrich, at Sternberg's insistence, was brought to Hollywood under contract to Paramount, where the studio would film and release Morocco in 1930 before The Blue Angel would appear in American theatres in 1931.
[30] The Blue Angel, ostensibly a story of the downfall of a respectable middle-age academic at the hands of a pretty young cabaret singer, is Sternberg's "most brutal and least humorous" film of his œuvre.
[31][32] The harshness of the narrative "transcends the trivial genre of bourgeois male corrupted by bohemian female" and the complexity of Sternberg's character development rejects "the old stereotype of the seductress" who ruthlessly cuckolds her men.
[33] Sarris outlines Sternberg's "complex interplay" between Lola and the professor: "The Blue Angel achieved its most electrifying effects through careful grading and construction.
The difference in delivery is not related to the old sterotype of the seductress finally showing her true colors, but rather to a psychological development in Dietrich's Lola from mere sensual passivity to a more forceful fatalism about the nature of her desires.