The Warsaw Concerto is a short work for piano and orchestra by Richard Addinsell, written for the 1941 British film Dangerous Moonlight, which is about the Polish struggle against the 1939 invasion by Nazi Germany.
John Huntley explores the reason behind this concept: The associations which individual members of the audience may have in relation to a certain piece of well-known music are quite beyond the control of the director of a film in which it is used….
And so with Dangerous Moonlight it was rightly decided to have a piece of music specially written, that could be used to become associated in the mind of the audience with Poland, air raids in Warsaw, and whatever the director wanted to suggest.
According to Roy Douglas, at that time orchestrator for all of Addinsell's scores: "The film's director had originally wanted to use Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, but this idea was either forbidden by the copyright owners or was far too expensive".
Dangerous Moonlight takes place at the start of World War II and tells the story of a Polish concert pianist and composer, Stefan Radecki (Anton Walbrook) who defends his country by becoming a fighter pilot.
After an air raid in Warsaw by German Luftwaffe, he is discovered by an American reporter, Carol Peters (Sally Gray), practising the piano in a bombed-out building.
[5] Within the context of its story, Dangerous Moonlight is also effective in creating the impression of a larger work written and performed by the film's fictional composer and pianist.
The off-screen piano part was played by Louis Kentner, a fine British musician known for his performances of Franz Liszt, but he had insisted that there be no on-screen credit, for fear that his participation in a popular entertainment would harm his classical reputation.