Till the End of Time

Recorded at Lottos Club, New York City on July 3, 1945, this ballad topped the US charts for ten weeks and was the best-selling jazz record of 1945. It was also Perry Como's first million seller - the singing barber would rack up a total of 14 #1 songs over the next 14 years.

The song was written by lyricist Buddy Kaye and composer Ted Mossman. The success of the Chopin biopic A Song to Remember earlier in 1945 had made the Polish composer a lucrative musical commodity and Mossman borrowed the melody from Chopin's Polonaise in A flat major. The songwriter pulled a similar trick with "Full Moon and Empty Arms", which was based on Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. In that instance it tied in with the classical piece being used as a musical backdrop to to the film Brief Encounter.

Time magazine did not approve at the time. Their music reviewer wrote in 1947: "Hearing his favorite classics mangled by a dance band, many a music lover has longed to take out after the guilty man, but most lovers of the classics do not know where to look. A 32-year-old Tin Pan Alleyite named Ted Mossman is their man. By setting classics to 4-4 jazz time and adding banal lyrics, Mossman has made more money rewriting masterpieces than the original composers did in writing them. His most successful swipe was Chopin's Polonaise in A Flat, which he turned into 'Till the End of Time.'"