Music review – The Realm of Silence

Paul Dessau: Music for silent films

The “100 Years of Film Music” series was issued by BMG/RCA Victor Red Seal across twelve CDs in 1995-96. This series is impressively eclectic, and it makes a rather strange cross-section of film music. Five of these CDs are devoted to silent film music of various kinds. Original music from the era includes Paul Hindemith’s complete score for Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921), Hans Erdmann’s score for Nosferatu (1922), extracts from Chaplin’s music for his silents (1921-36), and Paul Dessau’s music for various short films (1926-28). (Among these recordings, the Gillian B. Anderson arrangement of Erdmann’s score is perhaps the most unique in being unavailable elsewhere. Her edition is closer to Erdmann’s original orchestration than the edition that accompanies the film on any home media release.) Additionally, there is one set of modern scores for silent films in this series by Karl-Ernst Sasse, composed for two Lubitsch films in the 1980s (about which I will dedicate a post in the future). The series also includes a recording of Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony (1933), a piece inspired by cinema but never used to accompany films of the era. Altogether, a very curious blend of the old and new, the real and the imaginary.

All of which brings me to Paul Dessau (1894-1979). This prolific composer is most famous for his operas and large-scale works written in the post-war period, where he worked in East Germany. However, he began his career in the 1920s as a cinema musician – first in Hamburg, then in Berlin. In Berlin, a relative of his owned the Alhambra Theatre and recruited Dessau to work as part of the cinema orchestra there. From being a violinist, he swiftly became an arranger and composer of music for silent films. The process of composition was amazingly rapid. The afternoon before new material was shown in the cinema, Dessau would watch the film(s) and make notes of the timings of the action on screen. That evening, he composed the music and gave this material for the copyists to write out the parts for the small orchestra (usually 12-15 musicians). The next day, Dessau would lead the orchestra in rehearsal in the morning, then in live performances for the public that afternoon and/or evening. This hectic pace of music-making stood Dessau in good stead. By the sound era, he had made a name for himself as an important new composer – but continued his role for the cinema. In the early 1930s, he contributed music to the soundtracks of Arnold Fanck films, and later in the decade to the dramas of Max Ophüls. He also arranged music for films by Lotte Reiniger and the operetta films of Richard Tauber, moving freely between avant-garde modernism and popular operetta.

But how much of his silent film music survives? I wrote recently about his scores for Saxophon-Susi (1928) and Song (1928), lamenting that neither was extant and regretting the lack of any information about their style or content. In the wake of these pieces, Donald Sosin recommended that I chase down the CD of Dessau’s music on the “100 Years of Film Music” series. This CD features Dessau’s music for four short Disney cartoons from 1926 and one half-feature length animation by Władysław Starewicz from 1928. The edition features Hans-E. Zimmer (no, not that Hans Zimmer) conducting the RIAS Sinfonietta, and it is marketed as a “world premiere recording”. In order to properly gauge how this music worked, I needed to find the films. Thankfully, I found that the Starewicz film had already been restored with Dessau’s music and broadcast by ARTE in 2004 – and a video was available online (after a little searching). The Disney films posed more of a problem. I found three in decent quality online and set about synching the music to their images. (This quickly revealed that the music was recorded without the timings of the films available or in mind.) After much fiddling and repeated exporting to new video files, I was able to sit back and watch everything through…

So to our first set of films. These are part of Walt Disney’s “Alice Comedies” series, mixing (mostly) animations with (occasional) live action. The lead cartoon character is ostensibly Alice (played in these films by Margie Gay, one of several children to don this role), though really the adventures are dominated by the character of the cat Julius. (Julius deliberately echoed the design of Felix the Cat, designed by Disney’s rival animators Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan.)

In Alice in the Wooly West (1926; US; Walt Disney), Julius fights the outlaw Pete, a bear who robs stagecoaches and harangues the local population. The film is utterly charming, filled with beautiful touches. The designs might seem relatively simple, but the animation is a riot of brilliant details. Further, it’s incredibly witty about the limitations and possibilities of its medium. Characters can climb nimbly into the air, sidestep across space, crawl across dimensions, remove and interact with their own skins, be blown apart piecemeal and reconfigure themselves… Dessau’s music interacts with this world in wonderful ways. Engaging with the (by 1926 already long-familiar) Western genre, Dessau summons a familiar soundscape of military marches (both British and American) and whip-cracking percussive effects. But he renders these musical elements unfamiliar through his harmonies and orchestration. The usual brassiness of a band or orchestra is thinned for a theatre ensemble, reduced to odd combinations, or rendered spiky and weird by odd rhythms and changes of pitch. Musical pastiche and parody are perfect accompaniments for the film’s playful mobilization of cowboy tropes. When Julius has defeated his foe, Alice arrives and calls him her “hero”. Dessau accompanies this moment with the first bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which immediately lurches into a manically rapid flourish and fanfare for the film’s end. There is no loyalty to tunes for too long, nor to their attachments of nation or ideology. Melodies are summoned as material to be whipped into new shapes, then jettisoned. It’s a score as quick on its feet as the film.

Alice the Fire Fighter (1926; US; Walt Disney), as the title implies, concerns Julius and Alice battling a fire in a tall hotel building. Dessau fills the film with scurrying motifs and mechanical rhythms. There is a bell and sleigh bells to synchronize with (some of) the fire bells and engines on screen, but the orchestra itself takes on the numerous repetitive rhythms that match the identical (and identically-animated) ranks of horses, cats, and engines of the fire brigade. These motifs are also anxious, high-pitched, restless forms that scurry along in accord with the urgency of the action. Yet there are moments of pure delight, when both film and music deliver delicious little gags that act as vignettes within the action. My favourite is the moment when the little dog rescues his upright piano from the burning hotel. At first we hear a tense refrain for woodwind, with occasional dim clashes of cymbals, as he pushes it out the door and over the porch. A mouse on the top floor waves to him for help. The pianist on screen plays his piano and the notes appear in the air, the scale spelled out like stepping-stones from the window to the piano. Dessau, of course, uses the piano in the orchestra to spell out an ascending scale; then, as the mice neatly run down the notes, a descending scale. But even this moment has an odd tension in it. Dessau’s scale runs are harmonically uncomforting, ending in an anxious trill (at the top) and a low sharp (at the bottom). The strands of music throughout the score are thin, shrill, weird. It makes you notice the weirdness of the film, the curious minimalism of the line drawing, the wit and precision of the characters. Indeed, I feel that it’s an impressively tense piece of music for so slight a film. It’s endlessly moving, picking up the next idea – a kind of perpetual self-invention. So many of the motifs last barely more than a bar or two – such as the delicious rustic march, all jingling and banging, that accompanies the fire brigade’s initial effort to extinguish the fire – and later reappears as Julius rescues the lady cat. It’s such an irresistible little motif but lasts only a few seconds. And for the cats’ climactic embrace there is an amazingly long-running crescendo in the strings, followed by a final burst for brass of “Hoch soll er leben” (a traditional German celebratory tune). It’s all over in a flash, but what a brilliant flash it is.

Alice Helps the Romance (1926; US; Walt Disney) concerns Julius’s efforts to woo a girl and defeat his rival in love. It begins with a delightful passage for clarinet and banjo, as Julius strums away on screen, then preens himself to impress his lady friend. But this light-hearted insouciance doesn’t last, and the music quickly turns acerbic and ironic. Julius is outsmarted by his rival and finds himself rejected and alone. As in Buster Keaton’s Hard Luck (1921), our hero in Alice Helps the Romance repeatedly tries to kill himself, each time via different means. As Julius wanders dejectedly in a state of aggrieved loneliness, mocked by birds and thwarted in his suicide, Dessau provides some incredible little passages of anxious woodwind instruments circling one another. It’s appropriate for a film that has such bleak elements to it. A solution to Julius’s heartbreak is presented when he hires a small gang of youthful roughs to surprise his rival when he is with the girl. The gang of kittens approaches the rival while he is snuggled up with the girl. They stop and bellow “Papa!” in chorus. Dessau renders the syllables of “Papa” into a throaty, rough-edged brass call. This moment perfectly echoes the scene in Act 3 of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911), when a disguised Annina claims that Ochs is her husband and the father of her numerous children. A small crowd of the latter flock around Ochs, crying out “Papa! Papa!” in the same ascending, two-note phrase used by Dessau. The moment works perfectly in the film, the orchestration giving its humour an aggressive edge. But it’s also a delightful citation of “high”, adult culture in the context of this knockabout cartoon for children.

Finally, there is also Alice’s Monkey Business (1926; US; Walt Disney), but alas I could not find any copy of this film to watch with the music. (At least one source states that the film is lost.) Swirling woodwind, plodding marches, scraping strings, filigrees of flutes, scampering piano, rambunctious brass – it’s a weird jungle of sound. Listened to without images, you really get a sense of how intricate this music is – and how well it conjures a narrative. I do hope the film survives somewhere…

So to the longer film: L’Horloge magique (1928; Fr.; Władysław Starewicz). Produced by Louis Nalpas (the man who oversaw Abel Gance’s early feature films), this 40-minute film was the creation of Władysław Starewicz. Born in Russia to Polish parents, Starewicz (also spelled variously Starevich, Starewitsch, Starevitch) produced dozens of animated films from the 1910s into the 1960s – working initially in Russia, then (after the Revolution) mainly in France.

The framing story of L’Horloge magique shows Bombastus, the inventor of an elaborate mechanical clock, and the young Yolande, who dreamily watches the story its figures tell… In a medieval kingdom, the King seeks a knight to defeat a dragon and prove himself worthy of his daughter, the Princess. When the knight Betrand kills the dragon, he appears to win favour – only for the sudden apparition of the Black Knight to send the Princess into a torpid spell. The King’s advisors concoct elaborate schemes to bring the Princess back to health, and the knights set out to battle the Black Knight. As the bodies of the failed knights pile up, the Princess falls for the Minstrel who sings to her as she recovers. The jester informs both Betrand and the King that the princess is busy with the Minstrel. Betrand seeks out the Black Knight, who is revealed to be a fire-eyed figure of Death. At the climactic moment of their fight, a terrified Yolande breaks the clock. Distraught, at night she dreams of a fairy realm, where Sylphe (in the woods) and Ondin (in the water) are rivals in the natural world. Yolande dreams of the enchanted forest, where the trees berate her for wounding the plants and insects as she walks. Shrinking to miniature size, Yolande flees the plants who come to life. A giant appears and wounds Yolande, who is found by Ondin – while Sylphe finds the discarded Betrand and his horse. Between the two, they revive the knight and Yolande, who are guided to one another by the flowers and mushrooms. When Yolande (“this daughter of Eve”) is tempted by a giant apple, she is attacked by a serpent – and rescued by Betrand. In the real world, Yolande stirs in her sleep. FIN.

L’Horloge magique is a quite unbelievably impressive blend of live action, puppetry, and stop-motion animation. This delightful, weird, disturbing, charming film is filled with amazing moments and startling images. Though my focus here is the music, I must at least record that the film itself made quite an impression on me. Aside from the elaborateness of the worlds it creates (the medieval world around the castle, then the fairy world in the wild), it is magnificently directed. To pick just one device Starewicz uses, I loved the way the film recreates the effect of a moving camera, pushing closer to the action. Since this, too, is achieved by stop motion, the result is startingly rapid. These moments are almost like crash-zooms into the middle of the scene. My favourite such moment being after the prospective knights are introduced. Starewicz ends the scene with one of these sudden movements into the scene, accompanied by a fade to black – timed so that it seems we are disappearing into the dark maw of the palace, whose gate has (with equal suddenness) just been opened. This is the first instance of the moving camera and it’s incredibly startling, even discomforting.

Dessau’s music makes the perfect accompaniment to all these aspects. Passages of slow, anxious strings introduce us to the outer world of Bombastus and Yolande. It’s like the music is feeling its way into the narrative, just as we are being drawn towards the story-within-a-story. Only when the mechanism of the magic clock – the first use of stop motion – comes to life does the piano, followed by woodwind and percussion, join the strings. Just as the magic world of the toys comes to life, so does the orchestra. Yet the soundworld here never relaxes, never seeks to comfort us.

So many details in the harmonies and orchestration behave in ways you don’t expect. Even Bertrand, the valiant knight, gets an oddly sparse introduction. And his killing of the dragon is followed not by fanfare or bombast, but by silence for the Princess’s applause, and an odd, descending motif for solo violin. The music seems to warn us that nothing is resolved, that nothing will – or should – go the way we expect. Lo and behold, the Black Knight bursts through the palace doors. His appearance is as impressively weird and sudden in the score as on screen. A blast of sound, densely orchestrated to resemble the gust of an organ.

Very often, Dessau’s music keeps an ironic distance from the action. This score seems faintly distrusting of the film, as though it would rather observe from the sidelines. (One can imagine Dessau being akin to the ironic jester who appears in L’Horloge magique.) Dessau divides his already small orchestra into chamber textures, deploying the full volume of his forces sparingly. This is as he did for the Disney films, but here he pushes his method further, pursuing more eerie effects. In Yolande’s dream (the second half of the film), the flute and strings suggest an aura of bucolic magic – but their uneasy chromatism captures the strangeness of the world on screen. Sylphe and Ondin are sinister sprites whose motives we never quite trust. Is violence ever far away? This is a world of walking trees, writhing beetles, crushable butterflies.

But it’s also very beautiful. Listen how the music slows, and woodwind and strings climb into strange, high registers – as when Sylphe mourns the death of a beetle, examining its remains with pity and fellow feeling. And there are moments of intense excitement, as when Ondin and Sylphe rush headlong at one another, the whole orchestra coalescing into a torrent of repeated motifs. Then there’s the outrageously beautiful sequence of living flowers. Dessau uses a gorgeous solo violin in a passage as deliriously seductive as the flowers, which offer their perfume “filled with love” to intoxicate and inspire Yolande. Starewicz uses dreamy, swirling, multiple superimpositions, just as Dessau uses a dreamy halo of strings.

The film’s finale begins with a stunning image of the serpent uncoiling itself against the sky to strike Yolande, whereupon Dessau’s music races along to the rescue with Betrand. But it’s in the union of the couple that Dessau is at his most sharp and surprising. As the couple sit on the giant apple together, Starewicz cuts to an intertitle: “Immorality”! It’s such a startling line, followed by a cut to Sylphe and Ondin winking and looking shocked and awkward. Dessau brings in the wheezy chords of a harmonium, introducing what might be a religious ceremony – or even a religious condemnation. But the slow chords of the harmonium are interrupted by a decidedly irreligious volley from the orchestra. This single phrase, at once banal and catchy – a kind of dah-dah, dah, dah-dah! – sounds like the start of some swinging, music-hall style number. The tone is wonderfully odd, at once sinister and silly. It matches the film perfectly, since the “lovers” – in live action form – are barely older than children. Yolande and Betrand greedily bite into a chunk of bread, which they share with the horse. Betrand has tinsel-silver hair and talks with his mouthful, motioning to the kissing sprites. It’s a childish fantasy, an innocent end to a frightening tale. The last shot of the film is Yolande stirring in her sleep. Her finger drowsily taps out something on her chest, as though she’s spelling out the rhythm of Dessau’s music.

In sum, I found this music – with these films – exceedingly engaging and rewarding. The DVD editions of Disney’s “Alice” films thus far have often been marketed (understandably) at children, including a recent release in France. But Dessau’s music is decidedly adult. It highlights, the wit, the humour, and – above all – the strangeness of these films. The fact that Dessau’s soundworld for Disney is so close to his soundworld for Starewicz demonstrates a curious continuity between the films. These are odd, unstable little worlds on screen – liable to break out in violent fragmentation or mend in magical resolution.

In their tone and playfulness, their mixture of original and recycled music, Dessau’s music reminded me most of Karl-Ernst Sasse’s music available elsewhere in the BMG/RCA “100 Years of Film Music” series. Like Dessau, Sasse became a stalwart of East German music, though Sasse worked primarily for television – including many televised versions of silent German films. It’s pleasing to think of the legacy of a film composer of the 1920s re-emerging in a new context in the late 1970s-80s. I will have more to say on Sasse in due course, but for now it’s worth observing the relative obscurity of their music for silent films. Though I enjoyed the challenge of synching Dessau’s music with the Disney films, I deeply that I had to do it at all. And while the ARTE broadcast of L’Horloge magique evidences an excellent restoration, this version with Dessau’s music has not (to my knowledge) been issued on DVD.

Moreover, hearing this music makes me even more keen to hear Dessau’s scores for silent feature films. As I wrote in my earlier piece (linked above), reviewers in 1928 praised the wit and inventiveness of Dessau’s score for Saxophon-Susi. I wonder how Dessau handled the longer timeframe, and how he handled the melody of the film’s titular song. Moreover, what material from this or his other silent film scores survives? Where might the music be located? For the 1995 recording under discussion here, Wolfgang Gottschalk is credited with the “restoration of [the] scores”, but the process of restoration is not described at all. How much work was needed to make these scores performable? How close does this music sound to what was heard in the 1920s? And is there more material by Dessau from this period and this genre? As ever, if anyone knows more information, do get in touch…

Paul Cuff

My thanks to Donald Sosin for alerting me to the recording of Dessau’s film music.

Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire] (1929; USSR; Fridrikh Ermler)

This week’s film has been sat on my shelf for a few years, and I decided to watch it because of a passing reference in a book I was reading. This was the final volume of Sergei Prokofiev’s diaries, which cover the years 1907-1933. I will certainly be writing a post about these amazing books, since they contain many fascinating references to films and filmgoing in this period. Prokofiev was a keen filmgoer, but very rarely notes the exact titles of what he has seen. An exception is Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire], which the composer worried was too provincial a film to be shown outside Russia. Though this comment is hardly an endorsement, it reminded me that the Flicker Alley DVD/Blu-ray edition of the film remained in its wrapper. A few days later, I unleashed it from its cellophane and put it to work…

During the Great War, non-commissioned officer Filimonov (Fyodor Nikitin) suffered severe shellshock and lost his memory. A decade later, he lives in isolation in the countryside near the old front line, knowing neither his own name nor what has happened to his country since 1917. One day he catches a glimpse of his wife (Liudmila Semionova) on a passing train. This triggers a partial return of his memory, which is further restored by other reminders of his wartime trauma. At last remembering his name, he decides to leave the country for the city and find his home. Journeying back to (what was St Petersburg but is now) Leningrad, Filimonov is overwhelmed by the material and (especially) socio-political changes of the world he knew. Bewildered and alone, he finds help from a former Red Army soldier (Yakov Gudkin) whose life he had saved during the war. At a new factory, Filimonov slowly embraces the Soviet way of life – and re-encounters his wife, who had long thought him dead. Though she has remarried a pompous cultural worker (Valerii Solovtsov), she is clearly unhappy – and Filimonov looks forward optimistically to the future.

Though Fragment of an Empire is a work of propaganda for the state, it focuses its themes through a remarkable portrait of one man’s subjective trauma. Fyodor Nikitin is the heart of the film, and his performance is one of the most astonishing in Soviet cinema of this era. I found his vulnerability and tenderness (especially in the early portions of the film) absolutely heartbreaking, just as his bouts of violent hysteria are genuinely frightening to watch. When he is in the factory, more and more confounded by the attitude and organization of the workers, he repeatedly screams: “Who is the master?!” Caught in a medium close-up, his arm raised above and behind his head, his face contorted with insane confusion, Nikitin is simply terrifying: at once contained by the frame and threatening to smash it to pieces. (God how I want to see this on a big screen!) I’m not surprised to read that Nikitin seemed to become genuinely unhinged on set, with Ermler supposedly having to threaten him with a pistol to coerce him back under direction. I can hardly remember so vivid a performance of emotional trauma, nor one that – even at its most furious – is always somehow sympathetic. Even when he is screaming and raging, this man is pitiable, vulnerable. He is surely one of the most human, and humane, figures in early Soviet cinema.

Of course, Nikitin is placed in the middle of an absolutely extraordinary series of scenes and images. The early scenes in which we glimpse Filimonov’s returning memories contain some amazing moments. I love the images of the frontline at night. Spotlight beams crisscross the black expanse of no-man’s-land, and two soldiers from opposing sides slowly approach one another. It’s an image of startling, surreal intensity. The richness of the film’s restored image – those impenetrable blacks, those searing highlights – makes such moments all the more effective. Of course, the famous (and famously censored) sequence of the gasmask-adorned crucifix is just as strange and unsettling, but it is part of a rich, dreamlike landscape of monstrous images. The way the enemy later appears with the train, likewise silhouetted in the harsh beams of spotlights, is just as nightmarish. And the scene in which the wounded soldier suckles from the dog, and the desperately poignant close-ups of man and beast, are simply astonishing. The war appears as a series of terrifying vignettes cut into the darkness, a darkness both real and metaphorical. These scenes are flashes of memory, of trauma, from a history that is too vast and too overwhelming to remember – or to see – in its totality.

Elsewhere in the opening half hour of the film, Filimonov’s involuntary flashbacks are dazzling – quite literally dazzling, since the rapid cutting between evocative images is a shock for our senses, too. I love the sewing machine than turns into a machinegun, and the way Filimonov seems to generate the very montage of the film with his manic turning of the wheel. But I think that when this sequence eventually morphs from a subjective memory to an outright lesson in propaganda (cutting between the two officers from either side demanding their men fire on the two figures), the sequence loses its edge. Setting out to emphasize the inhumanity of the officers on both sides, it loses rather than gains emotional depth. And while the cutting between spaces and people is complex, it doesn’t have the same poetic motivation as the earlier memory flashes: it has become an exercise in intellectual montage. Compared to the similar sequence of the laughing gas in Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929), in which there is likewise a scene of officers threatening their own men, Ermler is less hallucinatory, less strange. By the end of Dovzhenko’s sequence, we seem to have lost touch with a continuous reality altogether. Unlike the growing nightmarishness of the gas sequence in Arsenal, Ermler’s combat sequence becomes all too comprehensible.

Likewise, the scene in which Filimonov demands, screaming, to know who the “master” is ends with a long montage sequence that tries to answer his question. We see a kind of cross-section of Soviet Russia, its workers and fighters and factories etc. It is impressive for its leaps between similar images (wheels, cogs, hands etc) but it really doesn’t have an argument. It’s a kind of statement of might that just gets more insistent, not more complex or convincing. When it ends and the worker asks Filimonov (and, by extension, us) “Understand?”, we cannot answer: there is nothing to understand. The rapid montage hasn’t made an argument or an effort to answer our question, it’s simply given us a slap. Filimonov – the focus slowly pulling from the background of the factory to his face in the foreground – is breathing heavily and dishevelled, but he starts to grin. Though the film would have us believe he has now finally woken up to the marvels of his new life in this new reality, he resembles a man who has not so much found his sanity as fully embraced his insanity. His grin turns into a laugh, and he hurls himself at his comrades, kissing and hugging them like… well, like a madman. Everyone is so nice to him, and he looks so ecstatically happy, that the scene works – but the pleasure it gives in showing Filimonov released from his torment is (for us, a century later) tinged with a different kind of emotion.

This sense of ambiguity is part of the film’s fascination. While Ermler offers some superb sequences and images, the film is often so convinced of its own effectiveness as propaganda that it simply overlooks the possibility that we might think differently. Our sympathies – especially as viewers nearly a century later – are liable to wander from the official line. Filimonov’s questioning of the Soviet world might encourage us to question it too. And the more he becomes convinced by this new world, the more he becomes a different person. His final line, which is also the final line of the film, is delivered straight to camera: “We still have a lot of work to do, comrades”. Immediately following the violent altercation between Filimonov’s ex-wife and her husband, there is an implication that personal change must accompany social change. But with Filimonov himself, this change is also a loss. The way he now appears before us – his beard neatly trimmed, his clothes neatly worn, his hat neatly fashionable – makes him a different man than the one who initially went in search of his wife. He resembles the other workers, the men and women he had found so alien and threatening, and he now echoes the way they speak. Yes, he has grown up, he has awakened, he is no longer hysterical. But there is a nagging sense that something else has happened. It is as if Filimonov has been uncannily replaced. This new Filimonov is a sinister doppelganger of the man we used to know. His last line is both an encouragement and a threat.

Part of this weird emotional effect is due to the original music by Vladimir Deshevov, as transcribed for piano in this recording by Daan van den Hurk. There are some superb sequences of sound and image interacting, often in ways you don’t expect. Take the early flashback sequence in which we see the Russian soldier praying before the crucifix. Visually, the image of Christ wearing a gasmask is jarring and surreal. Illuminated against the dark night sky, this figure of compassion becomes one of threat. But the soldier prays anyway, and Deshevov’s gorgeous, slow chorale throughout the start of the sequence gives a powerful sense of pathos and pity. If the image of the tank crushing both crucifix and soldier ends the scene with a grim punchline (demonstrating both the lack of mercy in war and a lack of religious authority to protect), the preceding music deepens the empathy we feel. As throughout, the score provides a degree of humanity that the images either cannot quite achieve or deliberately do not wish to achieve.

When Filimonov emerges from the tram onto the streets of Leningrad, his absolute disorientation is made the subject of bursts of rapid montage, mobile camerawork, and a delirious repetition of images. Deshevov’s music is like a kind of panic attack in sound, with its repeated, threatening, bustling, grandiose, rising progressions. The sequence is the first of many times that the film seeks to show off what has been achieved by the Bolsheviks while Filimonov has been away. But what the music does is make this very act of showing off almost terrifying. It is too upbeat, its tempo too rapid, to offer anything in the way of comfort or consolation. It is alienating rather than accommodating. This music makes you feel pity for Filimonov’s confusion, the confusion of a man as yet unconverted (and unconvinced) by Soviet Russia. The effect of alienation becomes ours as much as his.

There are later iterations of this kind of “look what we have achieved!” montage. They culminate in the above-mentioned sequence in which the worker demonstrates (via the grand montage) where the “master” is. The dense chromaticism of the music becomes almost unbearably tense, and resolves not in a complex transformation but in a sudden full stop (accompanied by the cut to black that ends the montage). There then follows a passage of scampering, major-key jollity, interjected with an almost religiose chorale motif, that is as weirdly unsettling as the preceding chromatic tension. It’s a brilliantly odd, unexpected way of ending this scene of conversion.

The fact Deshevov’s score seems subtler, wilier, than the film made me curious about the origins of the music and the man. Deshevov (1889-1955) was the same generation as his more famous compatriot Prokofiev, but unlike the latter he remained in Russia throughout the Revolution. Like Myaskovsky and Prokofiev (and their younger compatriots Popov and Shostakovich), Deshevov became part of the mainstay of Soviet composers who worked under the increasingly strict guidelines meted out by Stalin. He would compose much orchestral music (including several ballets), as well as chamber work and piano music. Ermler’s commission to write an original orchestral score for Fragment of an Empire was a rare instance of collaboration between a major director and composer in this period of Soviet cinema. Ermler was hugely impressed by the result. “I am afraid that people will go to listen to the music, not to watch the film”, the director told Deshevov in 1929. “So be it! I am delighted.” Yet the music was barely discussed at the time and remained seldom heard since, especially because copies of the film itself were dispersed, dismantled, and/or destroyed.

The present restoration of Fragment of an Empire was completed in 2018 after a collaborative project by the EYE Filmmuseum, Gosfilmofond of Russia, the Cinémathèque Suisse, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. From what I can glean, the new restoration was presented with Deshevov’s orchestral score for the first time in October 2018 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Per the programme notes for this performance, the score was restored using “the set of orchestral parts retained in the theatre’s library” by composer Matvei Sobolev. Deshevov’s score was performed again at Pordenone in October 2019 with Günter A. Buchwald conducting the Orchestra San Marco, Pordenone. The essay for this festival screening details the history of how Ermler commissioned Deshevov and the subsequent neglect of the music. (Sadly, this essay does not clarify if the 2019 performance used the same musical edition prepared by Sobolev in 2018 – but my assumption is that it did.)

Yet the Flicker Alley release from 2019 confuses this picture. The blurb on the back of the DVD/Blu-ray box states: “The film is accompanied by a choice of two musical scores: a brilliant new score composed and performed by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius, and an adaptation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano score performed by Daan van den Hurk.” It’s curious, but I suppose understandable, that the modern score takes precedence over the original. But why refer to the latter as the “original piano score”? Isn’t this a piano transcription of the original orchestral score? Flicker Alley make it no clearer within the booklet for their release, since the credit section therein refers to “Vladimir Deshevov’s original score” being “adapted and performed by” van den Hurk. Van den Hurk’s own statement in the booklet refers to Deshevov’s other compositions for solo piano and the film score being “a worthy piano concert piece”. But on the very next page, Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius refer to van den Hurk’s work as “a piano transcription of the original score”. This, surely, is closer to the mark. But neither here nor anywhere in the Flicker Alley release is it mentioned that Deshevov’s music was written for and performed by an orchestra in 1929. Nor is there any acknowledgement that this orchestral score had already been restored and performed with the 2018 restoration of the film. (Even the audio commentary soundtrack on the Flicker Alley release, I note, uses the modern score as its background music, not Deshevov’s – further evidence of how his score is subtly deprioritized on this release.)

So what are we listening to on the Flicker Alley soundtrack? Since the wording is so vague – deliberately so, it seems to me – throughout the release, I’m not even sure if van den Hurk’s work was a transcription of Deshevov’s orchestral score or based on a piano reduction prepared by the composer or another contemporary musician. Even if it was based on a piano version by Deshevov, this does not entitle it to be called or understood as the “original score”. Some context is required here with these terms. For example, Deshevov’s contemporary Prokofiev began most of his compositions on the piano, even if they were to end up as orchestral works. When he was working on ballets, he would often suspend work on finishing orchestration to produce a piano transcription for the sake of his stage performers. In advance of their productions, Prokofiev’s collaborators would need a sense of the overall structure (and timespan) of the music in order to build the choreography, prepare the staging, and begin rehearsals. Several of these transcriptions exist, but even if some or all of this music for piano predates the final orchestrated version, this does not mean they should be understood or received as the “original” scores. In the case of Deshevov’s music from 1929, he may well have written some of the score for piano before orchestrating it. But to advertise this as the “original score” would be to entirely misunderstand the nature of composition and performance practice. The orchestral version is the original score, no matter if it was the end result of a complex process of drafting, redrafting, and instrumenting. But all this can only be supposition, since Flicker Alley do not offer any details about this process of “adaptation” – and never once admit that Deshevov’s score for Fragment of an Empire was written for orchestra.

Why should we care about this? Because finding out information about silent cinema, especially silent film music, is already difficult enough. Original materials and resources are difficult to find and difficult to interpret, so it is vital to be honest and transparent about all aspects of restoration. I try always to bear in mind (and be honest about) the factors that have shaped the way I see silent films, especially on home media. All too often, however, marketing muddies the waters. It directly impacts how silent films are received by new audiences and new scholars. Of all the information available online or elsewhere, it is the DVD blurb that gets endlessly repeated. When the Flicker Alley edition of Fragment of an Empire won a well-deserved prize among Il Cinema Ritrovato’s DVD Awards in 2020, for example, the release is credited as offering “the recreation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano music from 1929”. This text hasn’t been generated by Chat GPT, but by the human curators of a prestigious festival. What hope have the rest of us if misleading information just gets copied and pasted from the marketing? Confusion, if not outright misinformation, rapidly filters through to writing on the film, which in turn generates more confusion and/or misinformation. So please, please don’t gaslight me.

I regret spending so much time writing about the accompanying text of this release. Not only is it a grand old waste of my time having to write what the liner essays should have said straight up, but it also means I have less space to talk about the music and the film. Let me be clear: the restoration presented by Flicker Alley is visually superb, and regardless of the score I am exceedingly glad to have it. What’s more, I absolutely loved Deshevov’s music, and it makes Ermler’s film all the more complex and compelling. But however good the piano transcription, I would so much rather listen to this score in its original form: for orchestra! Here’s hoping that it will be performed live in the future and, as I never tire of hoping with such things, released on home media.

Paul Cuff

Music for The Thief of Bagdad (1924; US; Raoul Walsh)

Some time ago, I wrote about the music that accompanies different releases of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921). I have long been meaning to do something similar for The Thief of Bagdad (1924). In the aftermath of the festival at (or via) Bonn, I felt like a return to Hollywood, so seize the chance now to turn my eyes – and especially my ears – towards Fairbanks…

First, some context. The original music for The Thief of Bagdad was written by American composer Mortimer Wilson and was commissioned by Fairbanks himself. “Make your score as artistic as you can and don’t feel that you have to jump like a bander-log from one mood to another at the expense of the development of your musical ideas”, he told Wilson (qtd in Vance 2008, 175). The result was a fully original orchestral score, which was performed at the film’s premiere on 18 March 1924 at the Liberty Theatre in New York. Wilson’s music received very good reviews from the critics, but its qualities were not appreciated by Morris Gest. Gest had already planned, in conjunction with Fairbanks, an exceedingly elaborate road show presentation for the film’s initial release. No expense was spared on ballyhoo: a veritable circus of road show variety – stage performers, an “Arabian” band, fancy-dress ushers, decorative incense, magic carpets etc – was duly assembled to exotify each venue booked for the roadshow. To support this cavalcade of orientalist claptrap, Gest wanted a score from a composer with a “big name”. For him, Wilson was not well-known enough as a composer to encourage public interest in the roadshow. Gest therefore employed James C. Bradford to compile a score from existing music – tunes more well-known than those of Wilson, and thus (Gest reasoned) more appealing to audiences. The result was not a success and quickly dropped. It was Wilson’s score that accompanied the film during its roadshow presentation at various major US cities.

However, while The Thief of Bagdad certainly made a big splash with critics, it was not the commercial success Fairbanks (and Gest) hoped. Despite being hailed as a landmark production, it proved less popular with Fairbanks’s own fans. The film was seemingly too ambitious (too long, too fanciful, too everything) for audiences in the US. But it had made its mark on history, and the film survived in enough high-quality 35mm prints to be restored in later decades, and returned to its rightful place in the canon of silent cinema.

But what of Wilson’s score? Despite Gest’s efforts to sideline it in 1924, the music has maintained a notable presence in histories of film music – and has been championed by many writers and practitioners. Composer and conductor Gillian B. Anderson, for example, has called it “one of the best film scores ever written”. Though Anderson also details its merits in more detail in her Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (xxxix-xlii), and the film appears on her website’s directory of original scores, I am unsure if/when she has performed it with orchestra. (Unlike many other scores on her website, it does not include performance details or guidelines for musicians.) Indeed, it is a curious fact that, despite the amount of information on the music and the survival of the music itself, Wilson’s work has remained what you might call a “paper score”.

This music certainly didn’t feature on any of the first home media releases of The Thief of Bagdad. The first DVD of the film was the 1998 edition by Film Preservation Associates. This featured the music cues assembled by Bradford in 1924, performed by Gaylord Carter on the theatre organ. (The recording itself dates from the 1970s, when presumably it accompanied a theatrical re-release of the film on 16mm/35mm. In 1978, Carter also released an extract from this score on an LP of music from silent films. Together with The Thief of Bagdad were extracts from the David Mondoza/William Axt score for Ben-Hur (1925) and the Ernst Luz score for The Temptress (1928). Rarities in themselves!) For all Carter’s personal links to the era, together with his admirable resurrection of historical scores, I often struggle with organ scores – especially for a film this long. And in any case, it’s a theatre organ not an orchestra. That it was recorded over other options evidences the relative ease of accessing and recording a theatre organ, and the preference for Bradford’s readily adaptable cue sheets rather than Wilson’s more complex orchestral score.

The first edition of The Thief of Bagdad that I owned was the 2004 release by Kino. This “deluxe edition” features an “orchestra soundtrack performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. The DVD credits further describe this as a score “compiled by Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall, adapted from the original 1924 cue sheet”. As I observed in my piece on The Three Musketeers, Kino’s marketing inevitably disappoints anyone expecting an “orchestra”: the credit sequence at the end of the DVD reveals that this consists of just five musicians. Kino’s use of the phrase “the original 1924 cue sheet” is also somewhat contentious. The first cue sheet used to accompany the film was the one that (briefly) replaced Wilson’s score after the first performances in 1924. Is the Sauer/Hall score based on this selection (i.e. the one by Bradford)? Even Kino’s “deluxe” edition does not provide any information on this issue. Even if it were Bradford’s selection from 1924, the word “original” seems a little misleading. After all, Bradford’s compilation of library music was a replacement for a truly original score by Wilson – the score that Fairbanks himself had commissioned. All this said, the Sauer/Hall score is perfectly fine. It is well performed and suits the film. But it feels out of scale with the images. As with the Mont Alto Orchestra’s music for The Three Musketeers, it sounds rather meagre next to the huge production values of The Thief of Bagdad. This film needs an orchestra, not an “orchestra”.

My disappointment with the Kino DVD was exacerbated by the fact that I knew that a Carl Davis score existed for this film. First performed in 1984 as part of the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill series of “Thames Silents” restorations, it was recorded for television broadcast and for home media. There was a laserdisc of the Thames Silents edition in 1989, and a VHS in 1991. Given the superior sound quality of laserdiscs, I chased down the laserdisc edition and giddily transferred it to DVD for my personal enjoyment. Davis’s score is compiled from the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, especially from his famous orchestral suite Scheherazade (1888). The music is a perfect choice. After all, the sets, costumes, and overall conception of The Thief of Bagdad owes much to the influence of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and especially to their Scheherazade, which repurposed Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. As ever, Davis rearranges the historical music with extraordinary deftness. While the music maintains its original identity, it also serves the film’s rhythm and mood. As it happens, I love Rimsky-Korsakov’s music anyway, so my first encounter with the Davis score (sat in a tiny booth, squinting at the small television screen as my laserdisc whirred away on the side) was an absolute delight. It’s a glorious compilation, perfectly suiting the dreamy, exotic, fantastic, and balletic qualities of the film. So enamoured of the music was I that I laboriously transferred the soundtrack of my laserdisc to DVD-R, then from DVD-R to my PC, then used editing software on my PC to affix the laserdisc soundtrack to the superior video image from the Kino DVD, just for my own viewing pleasure. This little experiment was the best version of The Thief of Bagdad I had until the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, issued in the US by Cohen Media (in 2013) and in the UK by Eureka/Masters of Cinema (in 2014). This edition finally reunited the Davis score with an excellent transfer of the film.

But soon after this edition was released, it became apparent that a new restoration was in the works – one that was to revive Mortimer’s score from 1924. For this, an entirely new performing edition of the score was prepared in 2015 by Mark Fitz-Gerald. As Fitz-Gerald records in his excellent liner notes for the CD release (discussed below), the surviving music required a good deal of editing and preparation to ensure it matched the restoration of the film. Since Wilson composed the music during the production and allowed room for adjusting the length/order of scenes after the film’s premiere, there was a degree of inconsistency between surviving music and montage. Fitz-Gerald found that there was too much music for some scenes and not enough for others – as well as plenty of notational errors in various instrumental parts. These are common issues to the reconstruction of silent film scores, and there are many examples which necessitate very elaborate editing or additional composition. Nevertheless, Wilson left enough clues (and more than enough cues) for his score to be readily edited into its current working form. Fitz-Gerald’s edition of the score premiered with the film at the Pordenone festival in October 2016. Subsequently, the score was recorded in Frankfurt in April 2019 and then broadcast on ARTE later that year, with Fitz-Gerald conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Highlights from this recording were released on CD in 2022. This CD contains 75 minutes of music, which the liner notes inform us represents the “complete” score, minus the repeats of cues that make up the remaining 75 minutes of the film’s timespan.

I had to listen to Wilson’s score a couple of times before it properly sank in. I suspect this was because I was very used to Davis’s music. Though both are full, symphonic soundworlds, rich without being dense, there is a definite difference in tone. Wilson is less rapt, less intense, less filled with grand, sweeping gestures. One might say that Wilson is less inclined to being showy or flash, which Rimsky-Korsakov’s detractors would certainly argue is the case with some of his music. (Though few would argue that he isn’t one of the greatest of all orchestrators.) Davis is also working with music that is already well-known, saturated with memorable melodies – melodies that I knew incredibly well even before hearing his score for The Thief of Bagdad. Wilson’s melodies have gone virtually unheard in a century, and they are decidedly less emphatic than Rimsky-Korsakov’s – but no less worthy of being seen alongside this film. And Fitz-Gerald notes the echoes of other composers like Puccini, Reger, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner in Wilson’s score. (He even compares parts of the soundworld to that of Alban Berg, which is perhaps over-selling it. A score doesn’t need to be, or to sound, “modernist” in order to be relevant or interesting.) But there is never direct quotation, just these echoes – in the shape of melodies, or the texture of sounds.

As well as the difference in musical/historical contexts for these scores, Wilson’s original music is surely conceived with a different objective in mind. In Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov is conjuring an entire picture from scratch, using the orchestra to form an impression in the listener’s imagination; whereas Wilson is accompanying an already-imagined world. If Wilson is less intense, perhaps this is because he isn’t striving to do everything: half the drama is already there on screen, so he is happy to be less emphatic. Just as the city walls seem to hover over those polished black floors, or the minarets hang before those dreamy picture-book skies, so Wilson’s music floats over the images. Everything works in tandem with the action, but the music has its own tempo, its own sense of mood. While there are plenty of examples of percussive effects for particular moments (gongs, weapons, jewels, clapping hands, magical apparitions etc.), the score itself is never in a rush to match every movement on screen. Wilson maintains a very pleasing balance between fidelity and independence. His music seems to have just the right tempo, both for individual scenes and for the film as a whole. It flows with the drama, seamlessly negotiating each sequence – picking out individual moments to highlight, but always with a wider sense of forward momentum. It certainly exudes the same warmth, geniality, and feeling as the drama.

Such qualities are immediately clear in Wilson’s opening theme, spelt out over the opening title. This theme is a slow, singing melody: wistful, yearning, gentle. If it lacks the absolute immediacy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opening theme on the solo violin, used by Davis for the film’s prologue, it possesses a kind of calm that really works. This is music that’s never in a rush to impress. Like the film, it takes its time to unfold. Wilson’s main theme is heard for the first time within the drama when Ahmed enters the mosque and we see the Holy Man speak. The immediate sense of peace that Wilson conjures, a kind of sonic balm, is perfect. From the bustle of the streets, we enter a different kind of space – physical and emotional.

Later, when Ahmed first sees the Princess, the music grows into a slow, dreamy ecstasy. Like the opening theme, subsequently associated with the Holy Man, Wilson produces a drawn-out, singing melody – this time brought out in the low strings. It’s like a romantic version of the spiritual theme. In Davis’s score, the scene is more musically ambiguous. The theme that we will hear fully developed, expanded in orchestration and in volume at the end of the film’s first part, when Ahmed sets out on his quest, is here heard for the first time in tentative form. Over quiet, tremolo strings, solo oboe and then clarinet start to spell out the theme – but are soon interrupted in the scene when the Princess’s guards return. Davis’s score recognizes (in its orchestration) the intimacy of the scene, but (in its melody) hints at the dramatic consequences of this first contact between Ahmed and the Princess.

I have spent the best part of three mornings listening to the Davis and Wilson scores side-by-side, and I love them both. For sheer richness, variety, and moments of piercing intensity, Davis’s is hard to beat. (How I wish I had heard this score performed live!) But Wilson’s score has a tremendous cumulative impact: everything about it simply works. It’s beautifully organized, orchestrated, and fits the film like a glove. The restoration of Wilson’s score is reason to celebrate.

Added to this are the qualities of the Photoplay Productions restoration of The Thief of Bagdad. While the off-air copy from ARTE that I have watched does not do the astonishing imagery justice, it immediately signals its difference from earlier transfers of the film. Firstly, it contains the original credit sequence. The version presented both on the Kino DVD and the Cohen/MoC Blu-ray has a different (less elaborate) font for the main title, then dissolves straight to the image of the Holy Man and child in the desert:

In the Photoplay version, the more elaborate title is followed by full credits of cast and crew, then the desert prologue scene:

But the major difference is that the image in the Photoplay restoration is darker, the colours more saturated; it is as though the whole film has had a bath in some enriching elixir. I suspect that many viewers might worry the shadows are too dark. Having never seen an original tinted print from 1924, I cannot say how it compares with a contemporary copy – nor can I say how it compares to a contemporary projection of the film. What I can say is that it makes the previous transfers look anaemic, as though they have been over-cleaned. This is especially obvious in the beautiful transition from day to night via a dissolve. In the Cohen version, the tinting dissolves almost to monochrome for night:

In the Photoplay version, the tinting dissolves to deep blue:

As you can see from the following captures, the overall difference in colour and contrast makes a big difference. In the images below, stills from the Cohen Blu-ray are on the left, images from the ARTE broadcast of the Photoplay version on the right:

I simply don’t know which is more “authentic”, but I must say I’m a sucker for the shadowy saturation of the Photoplay version. I also note that many compositions in the Photoplay restoration are less cropped at the top, left, and bottom of the frame. (The takes and editing appear to be exactly the same in Cohen/Photoplay versions, so I don’t think this is an instance of each copy deriving from a different negative.) This, combined with the title font and longer credit sequence, suggests a different, and dare I say superior, generation print being used by Photoplay. It really does look gorgeous.

But will we ever see it on home media? And will Wilson’s score ever get a chance to accompany it? There is certainly reason enough culturally, and surely room enough commercially, for both the Davis/Cohen release and the Wilson/Photoplay restoration to co-exist. Please, someone make it so!

Paul Cuff

References

Gillian B. Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988).

Mark Fitz-Gerald, liner notes for Mortimer Wilson: The Thief of Bagdad, First Hand Records FHR126, 2022, compact disc.

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

Nina Petrowna: From silence to sound (1929-30)

This is my third piece devoted to Die Wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929). Having previously talked about the beauties of this production and about its contemporary novelization, this week I discuss the scores created for the film’s exhibition in Berlin, Paris, and London in 1929-30.

The film premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, in April 1929. The music for this event was arranged by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, a prolific composer of scores during the silent era – and beyond. He entered the industry after the Great War, initially working as a kind of tax inspector for cinemas. But he was also a trained musician, having studied with Max Reger in his youth, and eventually switched from film admin to film accompaniment. He gained experience acting as a conductor for cinema orchestras, as well as accompanying films at the piano. In 1922, he was commissioned to write his first film score – for Manfred Noa’s Nathan der Weise. He had clearly found his métier. Across the rest of the decade, Schmidt-Gentner created, adapted, compiled, and conducted nearly a hundred scores for silent films released in Germany. He was clearly both very versatile and very efficient at what he did: working fast was a key attribute to any composer in his position. The majority of his scores would doubtless have been compilations, drawing on various libraries of repertory music, as well as the latest popular melodies. By 1929 Schmidt-Gentner was Ufa’s chief arranger and his work accompanied many of their most prestigious productions – which included Nina Petrowna. Sadly, his score for this film has either been lost or else lingers in limbo somewhere in the archives. I say “archives”, but I have no idea what archives might be responsible. Of all Schmidt-Gentner’s scores, I am not sure any have been fully restored for modern performance. I am unsure, in the most literal sense, where his music has gone!

Thankfully, there are many detailed press reports of the premiere of Nina Petrowna, so we can glean some sense of what it was like. Before the film began, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto (1878) was played as an overture. (We even know the soloist who performed this piece at the film’s premiere: Andreas Weißgerber. Weißgerber was a popular concert violinist, so a notable a guest performer for Ufa’s concert.) Presumably much of the score itself was likewise music compiled from existing sources, though the reviews do not make this clear. For the opening cavalry parade, we are told that the orchestral march involved the use of a small group of musicians hidden behind the screen/in the wings. When the cavalry marched past, the music was initially performed by these hidden players; then, as the film showed the cavalry more closely, the main orchestra took up the music. For the scenes around the barracks and military club, various quick “Russian” marches were used, while elegant waltzes characterized the scenes at the “Aquarium” club. Though some reviewers accused Schmidt-Gentner of being heavy-handed (and sometimes simply too loud!), his score for Nina Petrowna used chamber sonorities for the lovers’ scenes: a string quartet with celesta accompanied their meeting in the club, for example. The one piece of original music we know to have been used in the film was for Nina’s favourite waltz, which is described as a melancholy “valse Boston” – the melody of which recurred throughout the film as a kind of leitmotif.

This waltz is the one part of the score does survive – thanks, in part, to Ufa’s own marketing campaign. Schmidt-Gentner’s melody was initially referred to as “Die Stunden, die nicht weiderkehren”, but for commercial purposes it was given words by Fritz Rotter and became the song “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’”. The main lyrics are:

Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / weil es keine Treue giebt. / Schwör mir nicht: du bist auf ewig mein. / Keine Liebe kann für immer sein. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt.

A crude translation of this might be:

One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other. / At some point we’ll say goodbye to each other, / Because there’s no such thing as fidelity. / Don’t swear that you are mine forever. / No love can last forever. / One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other.

Note the German use of “man”, i.e. the third person singular, which might refer to oneself or to a slightly more abstract/general “we”. The song might therefore be a personal narrative or else a more general one. Its address sits interestingly between the personal and impersonal, as well as between tenses. It uses the present tense, but the “Einmal” (literally, “one time” – or even “at some point”/“eventually”) also suggests that it might refer to future events. (In German, the present tense can also express the future when combined with a time element.) All of which is to say that it has a tone that might apply to any listener, anywhere – that, and the gorgeous melancholy of the melody, ensured that the song was a hit success. Even if Schmidt-Gentner’s score was not performed widely outside Berlin cinemas (and it is unclear to what extent the score was distributed with the film for its silent release), the song ensured that its main original theme could circulate widely.

Another reason for the survival of this part of Schmidt-Gentner’s silent score is, ironically, the coming of sound. Ufa was already in the process of converting its major productions to sound, and Nina Petrowna was subsequently reissued with a recorded music-and-effects track in 1930. (I am unsure whether any copies of this version survive. Certainly, I can find no archival holdings on publicly accessible databases.) But even for its initial release in silent format, Ufa’s publicity marketed the film in relation to its theme song. In 1929-30, several recordings were made to capitalize on the popular success of the film – and presumably to help sell its initial release in cinemas. These vinyl releases featured contemporary bands like Dajos Béla’s Tanz-Orchester or popular singers like Wagnerian tenor Franz Völker and the ubiquitous Richard Tauber (famous for his roles in Lehár operettas). The speed at which such recordings could be licensed and made is impressive. The Derby company, for example, got the “Karkoff-Orchester” (their own scratch band) to record an orchestral arrangement of the waltz, which was released in May 1929, when the film was in the first month of its general release. More broadly, these discs point to the changing context for the marketing and consumption of film music. Before Ufa had even released its first talkie, the company’s silent pictures were already being sold in relation to recorded sound. On one level, the strategy clearly worked: the sheer number of recordings spawned by “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’” (always credited on discs to Ufa’s film) indicates a popular hit. Indeed, the song continued to generate recordings throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first. (For example, Aglaja Camphausen’s recent rendition is particularly lovely.)

Nina Petrowna was one of Germany’s biggest commercial hits of the 1928-29 season, and Schmidt-Gentner’s score received very good reviews at the time of the premiere. Given this success, it is ironic that the music now most associated with Nina Petrowna was written by the French composer Maurice Jaubert. This orchestral score accompanied the film’s “exclusive” run at the Salle Marivaux in Paris, from 25 August 1929. Jaubert had already worked as an arranger, compiling selections from the works of Offenbach to accompany Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926) at the Moulin Rouge theatre in Paris. Jaubert subsequently prepared the perforated music rolls of Jean Grémillon’s mechanical piano score for his documentary Tour au large (1927, lost). His music for Nina Petrowna thus represents his first original film score, though it should be noted that it is not entirely his own work. Jaubert also relied on musical collaboration: some scenes were scored by Jacques Brillouin and Marcel Delannoy, while another recurring theme is taken from Erik Satie’s “De l’enfance de Pantagruel” (the first number of Trois petites pièces montées (1920)). Brillouin and Delannoy had compiled the orchestral score that accompanied Grémillon’s Maldone (1928), which included music written by Jaubert.

As I wrote in my earlier piece on the film, Jaubert’s music is superb. Though Schmidt-Gentner’s score was written for a large symphony orchestra, and Jaubert’s for a chamber orchestra, they share several qualities: both make use of lighter sonorities and a central waltz motif that recurs throughout the film. Schmidt-Gentner’s music seemed to have relied on a more “Russian” milieu, though his waltz was a “Boston” – and thus another kind of popular cultural import. (The contemporary recordings make the waltz sound very much part of the soundworld of the 1920s dancehall rather than pre-war Russian.) Jaubert’s music, however, is superbly attuned to the mood and rhythm of the film. The flowing camerawork and long takes aid the ease with which the music seems to glide along with the film. But even though Jaubert uses slower tempi and extended passages (complete with repeats), he knows when to match key moments. Important sounds on screen, for example, are matched in the orchestra. Listen to the exquisite way Jaubert turns the chiming clock into music—high strings, piano, percussion—in a way that interrupts the waltz theme, but also sends us (tonally) somewhere oddly private and dreamy. (This melody has to be both memorable and moving, since it recurs in the film in vital scenes of union and separation for the central couple.) Or the lovely scene when the pianist in the orchestra must synchronize to the incompetent Michael’s efforts at the piano on screen. But the most dramatic is when the orchestra suddenly falls silent at the dramatic revelation in the final scene.

Given its importance in the history of Jaubert’s career, it is surprising that I haven’t been able to find any contemporary French reviews of Nina Petrowna that mention his name. I have found an advertisement for the film in the French press of the time, which marketed its exhibition with explicit reference to live music: “You will hear the best orchestra and you will see Brigitte Helm in…” (see image below). The same page is littered with adverts for sound films and synchronized scores, suggesting something of the climate in which Nina Petrowna was released. (Three months after the live exhibition of Nina Petrowna with “the best orchestra”, the Salle Marivaux premiered André Hugon’s Les Trois masques (1929) – the first all-talking production made in France. No longer was a live orchestra required.)

This same context highlights the release of Nina Petrowna in the UK. The film was distributed under the title The Wonderful Lie, premiering in London in June 1929. This presentation opened a special run of silent films accompanied by a full orchestra at the London Hippodrome. The Wonderful Lie, and its specially arranged score by Louis Levy, got rave reviews. It was championed especially by critics who hated the influx of talkies, which was also how the film was advertised – as the swansong of silent cinema.

Like Schmidt-Gentner, Levy had been working as an arranger of cinema music since the 1910s and would have a prosperous career in later decades as the supervisor of numerous sound film scores. I can find very little information on the contents of Levy’s score for The Wonderful Lie. It was doubtless a work of compilation, likely drawing on a familiar repertoire of music. But there was also at least one piece of original music that was used, which has survived. This was the song “Nina”, with music by Cecil Rayners and words by Herbert James. I can find no evidence that Rayners’ “Nina” was performed with a vocal soloist during exhibition. As with Schmidt-Gentner’s “Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’”, the song more likely functioned as a way of promoting the film. An advertisement in The Era (10 July 1929), for example, offers “The Beautiful Theme Number in the New Film Production of ‘THE WONDERFUL LIE’ now showing at the London Hippodrome Song”. Interested parties could buy the theme as arranged for full orchestra, small orchestra, or piano. Was the song performed at screenings outside the London Hippodrome? And what other kinds of music were heard with the film around the UK? These questions could just as readily be asked of the film’s distribution in Germany and France – and the answers would be as numerous and varied as the landscape of exhibition practice at the time.

In summary, the scores of Schmidt-Gentner, Jaubert, and James offer an interesting case study of how music might differentiate the experience of a film across national contexts – as well as extend the life of a film beyond its cinematic exhibition. Though Schmidt-Gentner and Jaubert are important figures in film music of this period, their reputations are widely divergent. Jaubert is celebrated for his music for sound films of the 1930s, not to mention his early death on active service in 1940. His music has been recorded many times and his work is known outside France – and, I suspect, beyond specialist circles. Schmidt-Gentner may be a familiar name in Germany, and his melodies may still occasionally be heard, but his scores from the silent era have not received the same level of treatment; his musical legacy is thus highly restricted. This is perhaps one reason why it was Jaubert’s score for Nina Petrowna that was restored and recorded in the 1980s, not that of Schmidt-Gentner. That said, Jaubert’s score has not been heard since it was broadcast with the film on the Franco-German channel ARTE and on Swiss television in 2000. The same restored print that was broadcast that year was digitized by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in 2014 and shown in various venues, but never with Jaubert’s music. I can only hope that this beautiful film and score are one day reunited and released on Blu-ray. (If so, I bagsy doing the audio commentary!) Likewise, I hope that the score by Schmidt-Gentner one day resurfaces – together with more of the dozens and dozens of others he created in the silent era. Fingers crossed…

Paul Cuff

Ciné-concert: Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance at la Seine Musicale (4-5 July 2024)

La Seine Musicale stands on the Île Seguin, some few minutes’ walk from the last stop on line 14 of the Paris metro. On a warm Thursday afternoon, I find myself among a band of spectators trooping across the bridge towards the concert hall. The hot sun makes us sweat convincingly for the first security check. Tickets scanned, we file through. It is half past five. Several lines lead towards covered checkpoints. Bags are inspected, bodies are searched. We proceed to the doors, where our tickets are scanned once more. Inside, there is a buzz of expectation. I overhear conversations in French, English, German. Further down the lobby, I see a giant projection of the trailer for tonight’s premiere. I catch the words “definitive”, “monumental”, “historic”, “complete”. Above the doors to the auditorium, the same video loops on LCD screens.

The screening is supposed to start at six o’clock, but five minutes beforehand queues still struggle through the three tiers of security outside. Inside, I take a programme booklet and search for my seat. Buying tickets online was not easy. The seating plan was like a nightmarish game of Tetris. With no sense of where each block lay in relation to the screen, in desperation I opted for “gold” tickets. Inside the concert hall, I find with immense relief that my view is superb. Dead centre, two ranks below the projection booth, three ranks above the sound mixing station. (Seemingly, the orchestra is being augmented through speakers to ensure level volume throughout the auditorium.)

I sit and read the programme. It promises me a kind of accumulative bliss. Sixteen years of work. 1000 boxes of material examined. 300 kilometres of celluloid sorted. A score of 148 cues from 104 works by 48 composers, spanning 200 years of music. (It is as if the sheer number of pieces cited, and the breadth of periods plundered, were proof of artistic worth.) Even the performance space is advertised in terms of gigantism. This is to be a ciné-concert “on a giant screen”. Giant? I look up. The screen is big, but it’s the wrong format. It is 16:9, like a giant television. The sides are not curtained or masked. How will they produce the triptych? The hall fills up. Last-minute arrivals scurry in. I catch a glimpse of Georges Mourier. He has chosen to sit very close to the screen. (Does he know something?) I switch my phone to flight mode and put it away. By the time the lights go down, it must be at least a quarter past six. But what matter a few minutes’ delay compared to sixteen years of preparation? This is Napoléon.

I have indulged in the above preamble because I had been anticipating this premiere for several years. With its much-delayed completion date, the Cinémathèque française restoration of Napoléon seemed always to be on the horizon. Now that it has at last arrived, the marketing generated by its release has swamped the film in superlatives. I have seen Napoléon projected with live orchestra four times before, in London (2004, 2013, 2016) and in Amsterdam (2014), but this Paris premiere outstripped them all in terms of sheer ballyhoo.

So, what does the new restoration offer? For a start, it looks stunning. The “giant screen” promised me did indeed present the single-screen material in superb quality. Though there was far too much light spill from the orchestra on stage, and no mask/curtains to define the edges of the frame, the image still revealed great depth and detail. Throughout, the photography is captivatingly beautiful. I was struck anew by the sharpness of Gance’s compositions in depth, by the landscapes across winter, spring, and summer, by the brilliance of the close-ups. I fell in love all over again with those numerous shots in which characters stare directly into the camera, making eye contact with us nearly a century later. The young Napoleon’s tears; the smallpox scars on Robespierre’s face; the adult Napoleon’s flashing eyes amid the gleaming slashes of rain in Toulon; the sultry soft-focus of Josephine at the Victims’ Ball. The tinting looked quite strong, but the visual quality was such that – for the most part – the images could take it. (I reserve judgement until I’ve seen the film without such persistent light spill on the screen.) In terms of speed, I was rarely disturbed by the framerate of 18fps throughout the entire film. (As I noted in my earlier post, the 2016 edition released by the BFI uses 18fps for the prologue but 20fps for the rest of the film.) Aside from a few shots that looked palpably too slow (for example, Salicetti and Pozzo di Borgo in their Paris garret), the film looked very fluid and natural in motion. Though some sequences did seem to drag a little for me, this was entirely due to the choice of music (more on this later).

The Cinémathèque française restoration is notable for containing about an hour of material not found in the BFI edition. The longest single section of new material comes at the start of the Toulon sequence, with Violine and Tristan witnessing civil unrest. It provides a welcome fleshing-out of their characters, which were much more present in the longer versions of the film in 1927. (Indeed, in the 1923 scenario that covered all six of Gance’s planned cycle, they were the main characters alongside Napoleon.) Not only are the scenes important for the sake of character, but they also have some superb camerawork: multiple superimpositions of Violine observing the horror, plus handheld (i.e. cuirass-mounted) shots of the scenes in the streets. Elsewhere, there were many new scenes of brief duration – together with numerous small changes across the entire film: new shots, different shots, titles in different places, new titles, cut titles. I welcome it all and greedily ate up every addition. Though most of the contents of this new restoration will be familiar to anyone who has seen the BFI edition, I was continually struck by the fluidity of the montage.

Do these changes fundamentally change or transform our understanding of Napoléon? Not as such. The alterations tend to reinforce, rather than reorient, the material evident in previous restorations. And if the montage is clarified or intensified in many places, there are others when it still feels oddly incomplete. When Napoleon sees Josephine at the Victims’ Ball, for example, the rapid montage of his previous encounters with her includes shots from several scenes that are no longer in the film. Is this a case of Gance not wishing to lose the cadence of his montage, or are there still missing scenes from the new restoration? (There is a similar instance in La Roue, when Sisif’s confession begins with a rapid montage that includes snippets of scenes cut from the 1923 version of the film.)

In another instance, I remain unsure if the additional material in the new restoration helps or hinders the sequence in question. I’m thinking of the end of the Double Tempest, where a new section – almost a kind of epilogue – appears after the concluding titles about Napoleon being “carried to the heights of history”. The additional shots are dominated by Napoleon in close-up, looking around him, a shot that Mourier himself explained (in a 2012 article) originally belonged in the central screen of the triptych version of the sequence. In that version, Gance’s triptych montage used the close-up of Napoleon looking around him to make it seem like he was observing the action on the two side screens. In that context, it made perfect sense. But now, in the latest restoration (which, for unstated reasons, did not attempt to reconstruct the Double Tempest triptych), the shot appears in isolation and looks a little odd. It’s still a compelling image, but it has nothing to interact with on either side, as originally intended. What exacerbates this disconnection between the old and new material is the music that accompanies it. The sequence reaches its climax – in terms of sheer volume, if nothing else – with the slow, loud, dense, chromatic roar of music from Sibelius’s Stormen (1926). (From my seat, I could see the decibel counter reach 89db, the loudest passage of the score thus far.) This cue – an almost unvarying succession of waves and troughs – ends at the point the sequence stops in previous restorations. This is then followed by Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik (1785): swift, lucid, succinct, melodic. There was no obvious link between the two musical pieces, which made the new material seem divorced from the rest of the sequence. Even if the film knew what it was doing (and I can find no information to say if this sequence is truly “complete”), the score didn’t.

The music. The role of Simon Cloquet-Lafollye’s score is central to this issue of aesthetic coherence. His musical adaptation is the major difference between the new restoration and previous ones, which featured scores by Carl Davis (1980/2016), Carmine Coppola (1981), and Marius Constant (1992). I will doubtless find myself writing more about this in the future, when I’ve been able to view the new version on DVD/Blu-ray. But based on the live screening, several features strike me as significant.

As (re)stated in the concert programme, Cloquet-Lafollye’s aim was to produce “a homogenous, coherent piece, in perfect harmonic synchronization with the rhythm imposed by the images”, a “score totally new and hitherto unheard that takes its meaning solely from the integrity of the images” (28-29). But these ambitions were only intermittently realized, and sometimes entirely abandoned. Rhythmically, aesthetically, and even culturally, the music was frequently divorced from what was happening on screen. My impression was of blocks of sound floating over the images, occasionally synchronizing, then drifting away – like weather systems interacting with the world beneath it. To me, this seemed symptomatic of the way Cloquet-Lafollye tended to use whole movements of repertory works rather than a more elaborate montage of shorter segments. Using blocks of music in this way also made the transition from one work to the other more obvious, and sometimes clunky. This is most obvious when, for the same sequence, Cloquet-Lafollye follows a piece from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century with something from the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. It’s not just a question of shifting from more adventurous (even dissonant) tonality to classical textures, but often a difference in density and volume. In part one, Gaubert (the “Vif et léger” from his Concert en fa majeur, 1934) is followed by Mendelssohn (Symphony No. 3, 1842), Sibelius is followed by Mozart (per above); in part two, Mahler (Symphony No. 6, 1906) is followed by Mozart (Ave Verum Corpus, 1791). The music itself was all good, sometimes even great, but in many sections sound and image remained only passingly acquainted. (This is sometimes heightened by the fact that, by my count, thirteen of the 104 works used in Cloquet-Lafollye’s compilation postdate 1927.)

In the film’s prologue, for example, the snowball fight was often well synchronized – though its climax was mistimed (at least in the live performance). But the geography lesson, the scene with the eagle, the start of the pillow fight, and the return of the eagle in the final scene, all failed to find a match in the music. The score reflected neither the precise rhythm of scenes, nor the broader dramatic shape of the prologue. Cloquet-Lafollye ends the prologue with music from Benjamin Godard’s Symphonie gothique (1874). This slow, resigned piece of music accompanies one of the great emotional highpoints of the film: the return of Napoleon’s eagle. In the concert hall, I was astonished that this glorious moment was not treated with any special attention by the score. Why this piece for that scene? Of course, these reservations are no doubt informed by personal taste – and my familiarity with Davis’s score for Napoléon. But there are many examples of significant dramatic moments on screen that cry out for musical acknowledgement, and which Cloquet-Lafollye’s choices ignore. Too often, the score is working in a different register and/or at a different tempo to the film.

All this said, there were sequences where the choices did, ultimately, gel with the image. In the final section of part one, the Battle of Toulon can sometimes drag – and I was wondering if the slower framerate (and extra footage) of the new restoration would exacerbate this. (Certainly, some friends at the screening thought it did.) But here, Cloquet-Lafollye’s movement-based structure did, for me, help structure the often-confusing events of this long section into an effective whole.

In particular, one passage worked both theatrically and cinematically. As the storm and battle reaches a climax on screen, on stage extra brass players began trooping from the wings to join the orchestra. It was a premonition of musical might, realized a few moments later in the form of “Siegfrieds Trauermusik” from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1874). I confess I was initially deeply unsure of this choice. (It is, after all, very famous and has its own specific operatic/dramatic context.) As often with Cloquet-Lafollye’s selections, this piece was initially too slow for the images on screen and the vision of hailstones on drums (a clear invitation for a musical response) went without musical comment. Only gradually did the music coalesce with images: the immense crescendo, the switch from minor to major key, and climactic thundering of orchestral timbre, snare drums included, was irresistible. I’d never heard this piece performed live, and it was simply thrilling. (On the decibel reader, Wagner hit 91db – the loudest piece in the entire score. Perhaps the programme notes could have included this in its list of numerical achievements? “More decibels than any previous restoration!”)

But, as elsewhere, Cloquet-Lafollye followed this immensely dense, loud, surging late romantic music with a piece from an earlier era: the “Marcia funebre” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (1804). As well as not fitting the rhythm of the scenes, this music undercut the gradual shift from mourning to the vision of Napoleon asleep but triumphant. In these final shots, Gance mobilizes several recurrent visual leitmotifs to reaffirm the place of Toulon in the course of Bonaparte’s destiny: the eagle lands on a tree branch nearby, echoing its earlier appearance on the mast of the ship that rescues Bonaparte after the Double Tempest; the morning sun rises above the sleeping general, blazing ever brighter at the top of the frame’s circular masking; the gathered flags are caught in a sudden gust of wind and flutter as brilliantly as Liberty’s superimposed pennants in the Cordeliers sequence or the wind-lashed waves of the Double Tempest; and, in the lower left of the frame, a gun-carriage wheel replicates the last image of the young Bonaparte at Brienne. These images cry out for a musical statement to acknowledge Napoleon’s destiny, but Cloquet-Lafollye just lets the funeral march play out in full – a slow, quiet, trudge to mark the end of the film’s first part. As much as I enjoyed the movement-based structure of the score for Toulon, this didn’t feel the right finale.

These issues of tone and tempo effect comedic scenes as well as dramatic ones. In part two, the Victims’ Ball begins with a title announcing: “The Reaction”. The opening shots – gruff guards, prison bars, bloody handprints – are designed to echo the earlier scenes in the Terror. Convinced of the gravitas of the scene, the audience is unprepared for what happens next: after returning to the establishing shot, the camera slowly pulls backwards to reveal that the “victims” in the foreground are in fact dancing. This carefully prepared joke is lost in Cloquet-Lafollye’s score, which begins the sequence with light, graceful dance music (from the ballet of Mozart’s Idomeneo (1780)). The music gives away the punchline while the film is still establishing the set-up.

Part of me wondered if these elements of disconnection stem from Cloquet-Lafollye’s working method. Per their programme notes, Frédéric Bonnaud and Michel Orier confirm that the score was constructed from tracks taken from existing recordings. Cloquet-Lafollye initially submitted “a montage of recorded music” (17) to the musical team, which suggests he did not begin his work from paper scores or working through passages on the piano. Might this process discourage a more hands-on, score-based construction?

One other point about the score is the inclusion of a single piece from Arthur Honegger’s original music for the film, created for Paris Opéra premiere in April 1927. His name was absent from the musical table of contents issued in the recent Table Ronde publication on Napoléon, so it was a pleasant surprise to see his name in the concert programme. This sole piece, “Les Ombres” for the ghosts of the Convention sequence in part two, was eerie and effective – and distinctive. It is a nice, if brief, acknowledgement of Honegger’s work – though I am puzzled as to why its inclusion was not mentioned until the programmes were issued on the day of the concert. (Cloquet-Lafollye’s essay mentions Honegger only to reiterate that both he and Gance were dissatisfied with the music at the premiere.)

On a similar note, I wonder if Cloquet-Lafollye was familiar with Carl Davis’s score. There are two scenes where the former seems to echo the latter. The first is in Toulon, where Cloquet-Lafollye uses the same traditional melody – “The British Grenadiers” – to contrast with “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” during the build-up to the battle. (In the programme notes, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” is not credited as “traditional”, but to Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg (1813) – though I would need to relisten to the score to discern how closely it follows Beethoven’s version.) The second similarity occurs in one of the few scenes credited as an original piece by Cloquet-Lafollye: “Bureau de Robespierre”. Here, he cites the same popular melodies for the hurdy-gurdy as Davis, and even orchestrates the scene where Robespierre signs death warrants the same way as his predecessor: the hurdy-gurdy accompanied by a low drone-like chord in the orchestra, with strokes of the bell as each warrant is signed. A curious coincidence. (I look forward to being able to listen to these scenes again to compare the scores.)

By far the best section of the music (and the film performance as a whole) was the performance of “La Marseillaise” in part one. I think this was precisely because the sequence forced Cloquet-Lafollye to stick to the rhythm of events on screen, moment by moment, beat by beat. There was also the tremendous theatricality of seeing the choir silently troop onto stage in the concert hall, switch on small lamps above their sheet music, and wait for their cue. The tenor Julien Dran launched into the opening lines, synchronizing his performance with that of Roget de Lisle (Harry Krimer) on screen. When the choir joins in, their first attempt is delightfully disjointed and out of tune. This makes their final, united rendition all the more satisfying and moving. Here, too, the montage of the new restoration evidences the stunning precision with which Gance visualizes “La Marseillaise” on screen: each line and word of the anthem is carried across multiple close-ups of different faces in a tour-de-force of rapid editing. The long-dead faces on screen were suddenly alive – the emotion on their faces and the song on their lips revivified in the theatre. I had never heard “La Marseillaise” performed live, and in the concert hall I wept throughout this rendition. (Even recalling it – writing about it – is oddly powerful.) It was one of the most moving experiences I have had in the cinema. But seeing how well this sequence worked – images and music in perfect harmony – makes me regret even more the way other sections were managed. Considering that Cloquet-Lafollye’s score draws on 200 years of western classical music for its material, and that it has had several years to be assembled, I was disheartened to find so many scenes which lacked a sustained rhythmic, tonal, and cultural synchronicity with the film.

Polyvision. All of which brings me to the film’s finale. I wrote earlier that the screen size (and lack of masking) made me wonder how the triptych would be handled in the Paris concert hall. Since there was no rearrangement of the screen or space for the second evening’s projection, I was even more puzzled. How would they fit the three images on screen?

Eventually, I got my answer. When Napoleon reaches the Army of Italy and confronts his generals, something peculiar started happening to the image: it started shrinking. This was not a sudden change of size. Rather, like a form of water torture, the image slowly, slowly, got smaller and smaller on the screen. To those who had never seen Napoléon before, I cannot image what they thought was happening; did they belief that this gradual diminishment was Gance’s intention? As the image continued to shrink, someone in the audience started shouting. I couldn’t make out what he said, but something along the lines of “Projectionist!” Was he shouting because he didn’t know what was happening, or because he knew what should be happening? I would have started shouting myself, but I was struck dumb with disappointment. More than anything, it was the agonizing slowness of the image wasting away that made me want to sink into the ground rather than face what I realized was coming.

When the image had shrunk enough (making me feel like I was fifty rows further back in the auditorium), the two additional images of Gance’s triptych joined the first. This was the first time I’ve seen Napoléon projected live when the audience didn’t spontaneously applaud this moment. Why would they applaud here, when the revelation was rendered so anticlimactic? Those who hadn’t seen the film before must have been baffled; those who had seen the film before were seething. If the organizers had announced in advance that this was going to happen, it would still have been bad but at least those who had never seen the film would know it wasn’t the way Gance wanted it to be seen. As it was, nothing was said – and the consequences of this decision unfolded like a slow-motion disaster. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so disappointed in my life. Every time I’ve seen the triptych projected as intended, I’ve been almost physically overwhelmed by the power of it. (In Amsterdam in 2014, before a triptych forty metres wide and ten metres high, I thought my heart was about to burst, so violently was it beating.) This time, I was taken utterly out of the film. I could hardly bear being in the concert hall.

All this was exacerbated by the choice of music. Gance’s vision of the assembly of Napoleon’s army, the beating of drums, the shouts of command, the immense gathering of military and moral force, and the revelation of the triptych, is one of the great crescendos in cinema – and the transition from single to triple screen is a sudden and sensational revelation. But Cloquet-Lafollye accompanies these scenes with “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1899): slow, restrained, stately music that takes several minutes to swell to its climax. Rhythmically, it is virtually the antithesis of the action on screen. Culturally, too, I thought it was utterly absurd to see Napoleon reviewing the French army to the music of his enemies – the very enemies we saw him fighting in part one. Furthermore, “Nimrod” isn’t just any piece of British orchestral music, but almost a cliché of Englishness – and of a certain period of Englishness, a century away from the scenes on screen. This was followed by the opening of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which was at least swifter – but only rarely synchronized in any meaningful or effective way with the images of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. (Chorus and hurdy-gurdy aside, Cloquet-Lafollye’s score does not respond to musicmaking – bells, drums, bugles – within the film; in the finale, the drumroll of the morning reveille on screen goes unechoed in his orchestra on stage.)

In the final few minutes, Napoleon’s “destruction and creation of worlds” bursts across three simultaneous screens: lateral and consecutive montage combine; shot scales collide; spatial and temporal context are intermingled. Finally, the screens are tinted blue, white, and red – just as Gance simultaneously rewinds, fast-forwards, and suspends time. After this incalculable horde of images flies across their breadth, each of the three screens bears an identical close-up of rushing water. This is an image we first saw during the Double Tempest when Bonaparte sets out to confront his destiny – there, the water churns in the path of his vessel, borne by a sail fashioned from a huge tricolour; now, the screen itself has become a flag: the fluttering surge of the ocean is the spirit of the Revolution and of the cinema. The triptych holds this form just long enough for the spectator to lose any sense of the world beyond it, then vanishes with heart-wrenching suddenness. The elation of flight is followed by the sensation of falling to earth.

But what music does Cloquet-Lafollye chose for this visual apocalypse, this lightning-fast surge of images? During the last passage of the Mahler, I saw the choir troop back onto the stage to join the orchestra. Was this to be another performance of “La Marseillaise”? No. As the Army of Italy marches into history, the choir and orchestra on stage began their rendition of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus – music of the utmost slowness and serenity, of absolute calm and peace. It is perhaps the most ill-conceived choice of music I have ever seen in a silent film score. I’ve sat through far, far worse scores, but none has ever disappointed me as much as this single choice of music. When the choir started singing, I honestly thought it must be a mistake, a joke – even that I was dreaming, the kind of absurd anxiety dream where something impossibly awful is happening and there is nothing you can do to stop it. While Gance was busy reinventing time and space, hurling cinema into the future, my ears were being bathed in shapeless placidity. Instead of being bound up in the rush of images, I was sat in my seat as my heart sank through the floor.

How was I meant to feel? What intention lay behind this choice of music? Why this sea of calm tranquillity, this gentle hymn to God, this sense of exquisite grace and harmony? On screen, Gance explicitly compares Napoleon to Satan in the film’s final minutes – the “tempter” who offers the “promised land” to his followers; and our knowledge that this hero is already doomed to corruption and to failure is suspended in the rush of promise that history might, could, should have been different, that the fire of the Revolution might yet inspire other, better goals. Yet from the Paris stage on Friday night, Mozart’s hymn to God carried serenely, blissfully, indifferently over the fissuring, rupturing, exploding imagery on screen – beyond the last plunge into darkness, beyond Gance’s signature on screen, until – having reached the end of its own, utterly independent itinerary – it faded gently into silence. I did not understand. I still do not understand. I sat in bewilderment then as I write in bewilderment now. In combination with the shrunken triptych, this musical finale seemed like the ineptest imaginable rendering of Gance’s aesthetic intentions. (In the lobby afterwards, an acquaintance who was very familiar with the film put it more bluntly: “What a fucking disgrace.”) Roll credits.

Summary. But how to summarize this Parisian ciné-concert of Napoléon? I am still digesting the experience. I wouldn’t have missed this premiere for the world, but aspects of the presentation deeply upset me. Part of my disappointment is doubtless due to the intensity of the marketing around the release of the Cinémathèque française restoration. In my review of the Table Ronde publication that coincides with this release, I expressed reservations about the language with which the restoration has been described, as well as the misleading equivalencies made with previous versions of the film. The same aspects are repeated in the programme notes for the screening, which reproduces the essays by Costa Gavras, Georges Mourier, and Simon Cloquet-Lafollye. The new pieces by Frédéric Bonnaud and Michel Orier (“Comme une symphonie de lumières”) and Thierry Jousse (“Abel Gance et la musique”) are in much the same vein.

In the programme, only the last line of credits cites a precise length for the version we are supposedly watching: “Grande Version (négatif Apollo) / 11,582m”. This length is a metric equivalent of the 38,000ft positive print that Kevin Brownlow (in 1983) records Gance sent to MGM in late 1927. (As opposed to the 9600m negative print that Mourier, in 2012, cites as being assembled for international export at the same time in 1927.) The total amount of footage in the MGM positive included the material used for all three screens of both the Double Tempest and Entry into Italy triptychs, plus (Brownlow assumes) alterative single screen material for these same sequences. The total projected length of the print is given as 29,000ft (a length of such neatness that it suggests approximation). At 18fps, this 29,000ft (8839m) would indeed equate to the 425 minutes of the Cinémathèque française restoration. But are its contents (or two-part structure) the same? There is still no information on how Mourier et al. distinguished the contents of the “Grande Version” from that of the (longer) Apollo version. (Or, indeed, how to distinguish the contents of the “Grande Version” from the contemporaneous 9600m version.) Without more clarification, I’m unsure if the figure of 11,582m in the programme notes truly represents what we are watching. Any differences between the 1927 and 2024 iterations of the “Grande Version” would not matter were it not for the fact that every single press piece and publication relating to the film insists that the two are one and the same thing. Finding even the most basic information about runtimes and framerates is hard enough amid the perorations of marketing.

None of this should obscure the fact that this restoration really does look very good indeed – absolutely beautiful, in fact. And I must reaffirm that Cloquet-Lafollye’s score is not all bad, and sometimes effective – but I simply cannot understand the finale. Even if the image hadn’t shrunk in size in the concert hall, the music would have baffled me. In combination with the botched triptych, it was simply crushing. I still struggle to comprehend how it can have been allowed to take place at the premiere of such a major (not to mention expensive) restoration. Some of the friends with me in Paris had at least seen Napoléon in London or Amsterdam, so knew what it should look (and, ideally, sound) like. But I felt devastated for those experiencing the film for the first time. Only a proper projection of the triptych, as Gance intended, on three screens, will do. I can scarcely believe that the organizers booked a venue in which the outstanding feature of their new restoration could not be adequately presented. I am sure that arranging the forces involved in this concert was both hideously expensive and exhaustingly complex. But why would you go to all that trouble when the film can’t be shown properly? I remain dumbfounded.

One aspect of the Paris concert that I cannot criticize is the musical performance. Throughout both nights, the musicians on stage provided a remarkably sustained, even heroic accompaniment. Frank Strobel conducted the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for part one (Thursday) and the Orchestre National de France for part two (Friday), together with the Chœur de Radio France (both nights), with immense skill. I have admired his work for silent films over many years, including the premiere of La Roue in Berlin in 2019, and I can hardly imagine a better live performance being given of this score. The audience offered regular applause throughout the film, which was richly deserved. Indeed, there was a great deal of communal enjoyment throughout the concert that I found infectious. (This was evident even beyond the musical performance. There is no music during any of the opening credits, so the Paris audience amused itself by applauding each successive screen of text. This got increasingly ironic, and there were even some laughs when the “special thanks to Netflix” credit appeared.)

If I left the concert hall on Friday night with a heavy heart, it was because of an overwhelming sense of a missed opportunity. This was a long-awaited and much-heralded premiere, and I had so wanted it to be perfect. The restoration is a ravishing visual achievement, offering (thus far) the most convincing montage of this monstrously complex film. But I remain unconvinced by the new score. Given its stated remit of precise synchronization, too much of it washes over the images – and sometimes directly contradicts the film’s tone and tempo. Its soundworld is neither that of the film’s period setting, nor that of the film’s production. In either direction, something more appropriate could surely have been achieved. Bernd Thewes’s rendition of the Paul Fosse/Arthur Honegger score for La Roue is a wonderful model of musical reconstruction, offering a soundworld that is both historically informed, aesthetically coherent, and emotionally engaging. Alternatively, Carl Davis’s score for Napoléon is a model of musical imagination: respecting both historical and cinematic dimensions, it is sensitive, intelligent, witty, and in perfect synch with the film’s every mood and move. I cannot say the same of Cloquet-Lafollye’s work. So while I offer my utmost and enthusiastic praise for the work that went into the Cinémathèque française restoration, I resist the idea that this presentation of Napoléon is “definitive”.

Paul Cuff

Music for La Roue (1923; Fr.; Abel Gance)

Gance’s La Roue is a film that has obsessed for me for nearly twenty years. The seeds were sown in December 2004, when I first saw Napoléon. On the return train from London, I began reading Kevin Brownlow’s history of the film. It was the first book I ever read about Gance, and I immediately wanted to know more about the epic production that had preceded Napoléon—and pioneered many of the techniques that Gance perfected in his masterpiece of 1927. Back then, La Roue was a very very difficult film to see—as was virtually all of Gance’s silent work. (Much of it still is.) I tracked down various copies—from a three-hour version released on laserdisc in Japan, to a five-hour restoration assembled by Marie Epstein—before a DVD was released by Flicker Alley in 2008. This version was both wonderful and disappointing. Despite the inevitable claims of this being “the longest version of the film shown since 1923”, it wasn’t: it was shorter than Marie Epstein’s 1980 restoration. But it did have material that the latter lacked. By now irredeemably obsessed, I collated the two copies together with the laserdisc version. Using various synopses and the novelization written by Ricciotto Canudo in 1923, I assembled a homemade version of 6h15m and compiled a score for my own viewing pleasure.

Thankfully, a professional restoration was in the offing. In the 2010s, a huge project led by François Ede and the Cinémathèque française was busy restoring the film to a version of 7 hours. Ede’s work is simply extraordinary, and his essay in the booklet that accompanies the 2019 Blu-ray edition of the film is the finest set of liner notes I have ever encountered. Anyone interested in the film’s making, unmaking, and restoration should read it to find out this unbelievably complex story. What was particularly exciting was the fact that this new version was accompanied by Bernd Thewes’s reconstruction of the musical score compiled in 1922-23 by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger. I was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of this restoration at the Konzerthaus Berlin in September 2019. There, I experienced La Roue on a huge screen with Frank Strobel conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin in live concert. It was one of the great cinematic experiences of my life. In this piece, I offer some reflections on the reconstructed score and its relation to the film. Though what follows is based on numerous relistenings to the score via the soundtrack of the Blu-ray, I will always refer back to my initial experience of the film the context of its live presentation in 2019. This circumstance was the way Gance wanted the film shown, and my understanding of the effectiveness of the music on that day was at once aural, physical, and emotional…

The score: Music history, film history

La Roue was premiered across three weekly screenings in December 1922 at the Gaumont-Palace, Paris. The Gaumont-Palace was a grand, prestigious venue and had its own orchestra, directed by Paul Fosse. Between 1911 and 1928, Fosse arranged music for over 1500 silent films shown at the Gaumont-Palace. Two huge volumes of handwritten cue sheets survive, each one detailing which pieces of music were used. Though the details are not always precise, these documents offer an extraordinary picture of the music used for accompaniment at the Gaumont-Palace. Among the cue lists can be found those for La Roue. After the premiere in December 1922, the film was slightly reduced in length (from 10,730m to 10,495m) and restructured from six “chapters” into four “episodes” for its general release in February 1923. Fosse’s cue sheet accords with this four-part version, and his notations were an invaluable guide for the team reconstructing the film. Since all the music used for this version of the film was listed, it also allowed the opportunity to reconstruct the score as presented in 1923.

For La Roue, Fosse collaborated with his friend Arthur Honegger to compile and arrange what originally amounted to over eight hours of music. They presumably also consulted Gance, but one of the great missing links in this history is the exact nature of the decision-making process that led to the score’s assembly. While many film histories assume that the score for La Roue was wall-to-wall Honegger, Fosse’s cue sheets reveal that Honegger is one of 56 composers whose music is used. Honegger wrote the film’s overture and five pieces for specific sequences: six cues among a total of 117, i.e. just 5% of the score. Even with the five pieces used in the film, two are simply repetitions of music from the overture. And though this overture survives, all three of Honegger’s pieces of “special” music—“musique accident”, “disques”, “catastrophe”—are lost and had to be recreated on the basis of his other work.

The musical adaptation and arrangement for the 2019 restoration was by composer Bernd Thewes. Though Thewes had worked on other silent film scores (some of which I have discussed in earlier posts), La Roue was to be a challenge of very different proportions. As well as the detective work in finding the sheet music for numerous (often very obscure) cues, Thewes had to orchestrate and arrange the entire score into a coherent whole. Some of the music proved untraceable, just as there were missing parts of the film to negotiate. Even regardless of these obstacles, I think his work is masterful. The reconstructed music for La Roue is one of the great achievements in the history of film restoration.

The score: Music and montage

Right from the start, the score provides a complex, often intimate, accompaniment to the images. Having listened many times to Honegger’s “overture” from La Roue (the only piece from the 1923 score to have been previously recorded), I was astonished to see how well each section and theme fitted the opening credits and build-up of images before the first main sequence. Its mix of soft and abrasive tones, its juddering rhythms and calm interludes, its patches of light and dark—all of it made perfect sense with the restored montage. The music added depth to the images, just as the images made the structure of the “overture” make sense: indeed, the credits are themselves a visual overture that introduce not just the characters/performers of the film but also the visual motifs (rails, wheels, signals) of the drama.

Then, for the train crash itself, the orchestra thunders into music from Jean Roger-Ducasse’s Orphée (1913). At the Konzerthaus in 2019, I sat sweating in my seat at the sheer sonic weight of Roger-Ducasse’s pounding rhythms. On screen, a third train threatens to plough into the wreckage of the two derailed trains: Gance cuts between the crash site, the oncoming train, the signalmen, and Sisif. As the montage quickens, the music builds into an immense crescendo. In the 2019 screening, I could hear people around me quite literally gasping with tension as the sequence tightened; and, when it ended in the avoidance of further disaster, a woman behind me let out a great breath in relief. The visual montage is already a remarkable instance of quick cutting between multiple spaces, but the addition of the music multiplied its effectiveness. In the theatre, you could feel the tension: Gance’s silent world was given weight and pressure through music, through the sound of the orchestra in the air, the sensation of music vibrating through the floor and seats. Truly, there is nothing like seeing a silent film with a live orchestra.

Part of what was striking about the musical-visual whole was the aesthetic complexity of the experience. Just as Roger-Ducasse’s music utilizes the full range of orchestral timbre—from deep brass to glistening percussion,—so Gance’s utilizes a wide range of colour elements across his montage. The effectiveness of this was enhanced by the restoration. Ede’s team decided to reproduce the visual quality of what the “monochrome” black-and-white sections of the film would have had on screen in 1923: i.e. not pure black-and-white but subtly warm monochrome (like a very faint wash of ochre). This choice allowed the range of other colours a warmer base level with which to interact: it made the complex stencil-colouring (for individual areas of the frame) less garish, while not lessening their presence. Seen across the opening crash sequence, the impact of these various forms of colour is amazing: there are vibrant reds, subtler reds, yellows, ambers, washes of ochre, sudden splashes of stencilled red and yellow and green. The image changes its tone just as the music changes its texture.

The Fosse/Honegger score also does well to provide both consistency and variety in its musical accompaniment. It’s noteworthy, for example, that Honegger’s music doesn’t dominate all the sequences of rapid montage. I’ve already mentioned Roger-Ducasse’s music over the opening train crash, but the later scenes of impending disaster and fury feature music by Ferruccio Volpatti, Alfred Bruneau, and Gabriel Dupont. Among these, I particularly enjoyed the use of Volpatti’s Vers la gloire [n.d.]. Bernd Thewes’s orchestration of this (utterly obscure) piece is superb: listen to that pulsing, mechanical rhythm, the punching brass beats, the hyperventilating woodwind, the rising strings. It sounds like the orchestra has been put on some dangerous autopilot setting—or else possessed by a machine: it’s all rhythm, a mechanism racing at full-pelt, held in perfect synchronism while hurtling toward to dissolution. Again, in the theatre, this was a simply thrilling sequence to watch.

While many scholarly accounts of La Roue have (understandably) emphasized its sequences of rapid montage, the film is also concerned with duration in all its senses (one might say, at all tempi). The film was, after all, originally over eight hours long—effectively the length of several substantial feature films. This is a very protracted drama, not some kind of ceaseless collage. What makes the rapid sequences so effective is the fact that they occur within the context of a much longer, slower narrative. Great stretches of brooding melodrama suddenly condense and erupt in violent passages of lightning-quick editing. The music reflects these contrasts in tempo.

Like most scores from the silent era, the Fosse/Honegger score for La Roue often floats over the images—occupying space and time without directly mimicking the images. For the most part, this is an inevitability because 111 of the 117 musical cues were not written for the film but selected from music in the repertory (and, specifically, Fosse’s in-house music library at the Gaumont-Palace). Thus, part of the pleasure is just in watching in a kind of trance as the rich strains of late romantic music, some familiar pieces but most unfamiliar, move like weather systems over the imagery. L.-H. Burel’s cinematography is as rich, textured, and evocative as any you’ll ever see; seeing it while listening to Massenet or Sibelius, Schmitt or Debussy only enhances the aesthetic pleasure. The music invites an emotional engagement with even the simplest or most abstract views: organized sound makes (I think) the spectator more receptive to the drama, more ready to be moved, more ready to feel what’s happening. Part of the nature of late romantic symphonic music is the fact that it often takes is sweet time to develop, to explore an idea, to unravel a theme. The same can be said of the film: it moves across time in great sweeps, long paragraphs; it reflects back on itself, summons memories of earlier episodes, shifts tempo, broods, slows, comes to a halt, only to move on again…

The score: Matches and misalliances

On a purely musical level, Thewes’s reconstruction of the Fosse/Honegger score is an unmitigated pleasure for me. As I have written before, I have been a lifelong sucker for late romantic music—especially obscurities that offer the additional pleasure of my having to scour the earth for recordings. The Fosse/Honegger compilation is a treasure-trove of music that was known and played in the 1920s but has now fallen entirely from the repertoire. There is simply nowhere else that I can go to hear the orchestral works of Georges Hüe, Félix Fourdrain, or Georges Sporck. Indeed, even more major figures like Vincent d’Indy or Gustave Charpentier are rarities in concert halls today—especially outside France. I first saw the Fosse/Honegger cue sheet several years before the 2019 restoration was completed, and my own exploration of the music that I could find available was already a revelation. It was through La Roue that I came to love the work of d’Indy and Charpentier, as well as the more obscure (but no less interesting) work of composers like Guy Ropartz, Benjamin Godard, Roger-Ducasse, and Alfred Bruneau. Straddling two centuries, their music represents the overlapping worlds of late romanticism and experimental modernism in sound. In the wake of seeing the restoration in 2019, the score has become a further springboard to hear more. (Happily, the music of Gabriel Dupont, for example, has now been recorded together with Dupont’s other symphonic works and released on CD (Outhere/Fuga Libera, 2019). So too has the work of Fernand de La Tombelle (Outhere/Bru Zane, 2019).)

Obscure or not, the music takes on a wonderfully definite role when used in the film. Take, for example, the lengthy sequence of Sisif’s confession to Hersan at the end of Part 1. It begins with Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)—a familiar piece whose frequent use in silent films scores I even discussed in an earlier piece on The Three Musketeers (1921). In La Roue, Saint-Saëns’s uneasy opening section for strings alone introduces Sisif’s angsty exchange with Norma and then Hersan (the close-up of Sisif turning toward the camera times perfectly with the measure for lowest strings); the passage with solo violin over pizzicato strings then coincides with Elie’s playing of the violin as Norma watches from the window. I’ve heard this piece used so many times, but never has the solo violin section been so well used for events on screen: Elie’s playing picks up the sounds coming from the orchestra. But it’s the next piece of music, the first movement from Philipp Scharwenka’s Fantaisie dramatique (1900), that really make the sequence. The angry brass chords with which it opens announces the darkness of Sisif’s confession. The tempo is slow to start, but this musical pace actually heightens the intensity of the first flashback sequence (related via a rapid montage of the film’s opening scenes): the minor-key intensity of the piece is the perfect mood music, creating an emotional through-line that traverses the screen’s sudden plunging through time. The subtle shifts to lighter passages accompany other, happier, memories of Norma and her life with Sisif at home—followed by more brassy interjections that swing the music back into growling depths of anger and desire. And it’s also the skill of Thewes as an orchestrator that allows the next piece—a “lied” by Gaston Schindler (originally for piano and violin)—to segue so convincingly from Scharwenka’s piece and into Ropartz’s Les Landes, the piece that concludes Part 1. Diverse pieces, from the well-known to the obscure, are made to work with and enhance the images.

So what doesn’t work? Well, there are some notable scenes where the music weirdly detaches itself from the drama in a way that feels oddly ineffective. One of these is the scene in Part 2 in which Sisif is partially blinded by an accident while repairing a steam valve on his train. The music is “L’Epreuve”, by Charles Pons (1870-1957), and it is a mildly dreamy, slow piece—a charming, if not very memorable work of late romantic loveliness. So why is it being used in a scene of drama and tragedy? It could of course be a question of historical taste, but there is one other possibility. At the premiere of La Roue in December 1922, the orchestral score was augmented by numerous sound effects produced via mechanical means. The critic Emile Vuillermoz reported that the audience heard “real jets of steam” synchronized with at least one scene in the film (Comœdia, 31 December 1922). Was the audible drama for Sisif’s blinding originally provided by this use of sound? If so, it would make sense that the music played by the orchestra would be quiet: this way, the sound effect could be heard more effectively. Sadly, the reports from 1922-23 do not make this issue any clearer, and I can find no record of what sound effects were used in what sequences (or in which subsequent screenings). This issue is also apparent in the moment (in Part 1) when Elie and Norma are interrupted from their mutual daydreaming by the sound of a train’s steam-powered whistle. The musical cue ends precisely before the film cuts to the source of the aural interruption (and then rapidly cuts to an even closer shot of the shrilling steam). This is a sound effect rendered entirely visual: the music does not resume until the film cuts back to the interior scene of Elie and Norma. The effect is very odd, since it is silence that does the interrupting rather than sound. I presume that, at least at the 1922 premiere, this moment was accompanied by a sound effect that reproduced the visual cue. While the silent interruption is weirdly effective, we should bear in mind that this may not have been the original way the moment worked.

Talking of silence, there is another moment in the film that struck me as not working as originally intended. At the end of Part 3, Elie is hanging by his fingertips to the side of a cliff. Norma and Sisif (and Tobie, Sisif’s dog) are racing to the rescue. But, just as Norma arrives, Elie’s grip loosens. There is an astonishing sequence of rapid montage, which accelerates to the rate of one frame per shot—the filmstrip’s maximum unitary velocity—as Elie’s memories of Norma flash across the screen. This was the first time in film history that such a technique had been used like this, and it remains dazzling. Gance’s film invites us to share the subjective vision of his character, his last moments of consciousness, before he plunges into the abyss. But somehow, the awful suddenness of the fall isn’t as awful or as sudden in the restored score. Fosse’s original cue sheet states that there should be “a silence for the fall”. But the reconstructed score does not give us a silence here; instead, the music overlaps the climactic burst of rapid montage and the sight of Elie plummeting into the ravine. Though it is timed reasonably well with a small crescendo in the music, there is no equivalent burst of speed, fury, or anger in this section of Dupont’s Le Chant de la destinée. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to simply cut the music short—even mid-bar—for this moment? I can imagine it could more potently create the sense of a life being cut short, of our expectations of Elie’s rescue being so swiftly ended. (From memory, I think I was more disappointed by this moment in the live 2019 performance than when reviewing the scene on Blu-ray at home. Perhaps that’s because the tension generated in a live, continuous experience was all the greater when I felt the tension dissipate.) It’s not that the sequence doesn’t work (it does), but that it could have worked better.

The score: Missing music

There are sections of the Fosse/Honegger compilation that could not be reconstructed with historical precision because the music has proved untraceable. I have already mentioned Honegger’s missing “special” pieces (“musique accident”, “disques”, “catastrophe”) that had to be recreated from surviving music. Additionally, a piece called “Cher passé” by a composer cited only as “Abriès” was impossible to identify or find. While Abriès’s music was only used in one scene, a more substantial loss was Pons’s Symphonie humaine. Sections of this music were used in two sequences: firstly, in a scene in Part 1 prior to Sisif’s confession; secondly in the scene in Part 3 where Elie witnesses Hersan’s rape of Norma. (Thewes replaces these with portions of another work used elsewhere in the score: Scharwenka’s Fantaisie dramatique.) I was curious about the fate of Pons’s piece, so I did some digging. It turns out to have quite a revealing history: revealing not just about how music can disappear, but the way in which it could be recycled during the lifetime of its composer.

Intriguingly, Pons’s “symphony” appears to have started life as the score for another film! In November 1916, the Gaumont-Palace presented Henri Pouctal’s La Flambée, which was based on a play by Henry Kistemaeckers. Among the music used, the contemporary reviews mention Godard’s Scènes poétiques, d’Indy’s prelude to L’Etranger, Paul Dukas’ overture to Polyeucte, and Pons’ Symphonie humaine. All four of these pieces were subsequently used in the Fosse/Honegger score for La Roue. But Pons’ Symphonie humaine is cited as being a piece specially composed for Pouctal’s La Flambée in 1916. The music “underlines by its harmonic intensity the scene of the spy’s death and the tragic scene of reconciliation between Colonel de Felt and his wife” (Le Film, 18 November 1916). Other reviews also mention the superb way that Pons had captured the emotional rhythm and tone of the sequences in the film (L’Œuvre, 10 November 1916; La Liberté, 11 November 1916). The press reports also reveal that Pons himself came to compose for the cinema via his work at the Opéra Comique and his incidental music for Georges Clemenceau’s drama Voile du Bonheur (1901). Clearly, there was good employment to be had for a young composer writing new orchestral music for various forms of live accompaniment in Paris.

This is all rather interesting: in 1922-23, Fosse reused the entirety of the music assembled for Pouctal’s La Flambée at the Gaumont-Palace in 1916. But the reuse of Pons’ symphony was not limited to cinematic presentations. After the end of the silent era, this work later appeared on concert and radio programmes. In February 1936, for example, Radio-Paris broadcast a programme that included Pons’ Symphonie humaine, which is described as a “musical commentary in three episodes” from Kistemaeckers’s drama (Le Peuple, 20 February 1936). The same station broadcast another performance of the symphony in April that year (Le Matin, 29 April 1936), and in 1937 Grenoble radio broadcast a concert with several works by Pons, including the Symphonie humaine (L’Intransigeant, 9 June 1937).

Conclusion: Miracles musical and visual

Part 4 is my favourite portion of La Roue, and in the 2019 restoration I think it’s a perfect miracle of musical and visual collaboration. (I have just rewatched the last half hour of the film and find myself in floods of tears.) This part is called “La symphonie blanche” (“Symphony in white”) and the whole last movement is a kind of late romantic tone poem of darkness giving way to light, of death and transfiguration.

I’ve written about this part of La Roue in detail elsewhere, but I did so before I had seen the film with its reconstructed score. By the time of the live performance in 2019, I’d seen many different versions of La Roue in many different circumstances, on every format from VHS to 35mm, on tiny screens and cinema screens. None of that prepared me for the effect that the film had on me in the cinema with live orchestra. There are many miraculous moments in “La symphonie blanche”, all of which are made more miraculous by the music.

This final part of the film is its strangest. Dramatically, it contains the least potential of any episode of La Roue. Hersan has died, Elie has died. Minor characters have been left behind. Only two of the film’s four main characters are still alive, and the sole source of tension is whether Sisif will welcome Norma back into his life. Despite these potential limitations, Gance proceeds to draw out his increasingly strange resolution for nearly two hours—and the music finds ways of articulating the strange emotional journey of the film’s protagonists.

Only in the second half of Part 4 do Sisif and Norma even encounter one another directly. After Sisif has planted the cross at the site of Elie’s death, Norma silently follows him back to his cabin and, at night, appears trembling in the doorway in a swirl of ice and snow. She enters and finds herself alone by the unlit hearth. The music here is from Albert Roussel’s first symphony, known as “Poème de la forêt”. The movement here has the perfect thematic link to the wintry scene: the “Fôret d’hiver”, which magically sparkles and warms as Norma lights the fire—the tinting shifting from blue to orange as the fire is lit. The next cue—Camille Chevillard’s Ballade symphonique (1889)—likewise gradually seems to warm to life: there is a lovely, winding theme for the strings that feeds through Norma’s first scenes in daylight in the cabin. But it also shifts into an angry climax (accompanying Sisif’s fury on discovering that he has an intruder), before calming for Sisif’s slow acceptance. (Here the score switches to the calm mood of “Dans les bois” from Godard’s Scènes poétiques (1878).)

There follows one of my favourite scenes in the film, when Sisif gently strokes Norma’s hair as she sleeps (the first time he has touched her in years). The scene is given an absolutely beautiful accompaniment: Henri Duparc’s Aux étoiles (1874). Just as Norma wakes to her father’s touch, a solo violin line rises out of the gentle glow of the orchestral adagio… it’s an exquisite moment, surely one of the most tender in Gance’s entire filmography. The next cue—the “Carillon” from Fernand de La Tombelle’s Impressions matinales (1892)—accompanies the “transformation” of Sisif’s interior space with increasingly bright orchestral textures, as well as a lovely bell-like pealing in the brass.

But just as we think that the score is beginning to lift some of the narrative weight that has preceded it, the lightened atmosphere is broken by the next piece if music, taken from Honegger’s overture to La Roue. The visual cue is a cutaway to the ascent of the funicular railway and the music returns us to the opening montage of wheels in motion. It is a sinister, mechanical march—pulsing, threatening. Sisif and Norma have not yet spoken to each other, not yet openly acknowledged their mutual presence; the score’s sudden shift to this troubled musical world of the Prologue indicates that all is not well—that there are issues yet to be resolved in the drama. The transition is made more effective by being followed by a passage from Roger-Ducasse’s Orphée—the same eerie soundworldthat accompanied the nighttime part of the crash sequence (when Sisif first found Norma). This is used for their “first words” to each other. The music becomes lighter, just as the snow outside and the newly-painted white interior of the cabin are bright spaces. This is suddenly interrupted by another musical reminiscence: to more music from Roger-Ducasse, repeated from the end of the Prologue, as Sisif ruminates on the past. (The original piece of Honegger here is lost; Thewes chose the Roger-Ducasse piece as a strong substitute that also recalled the earlier scenes of the accident and the children’s game that recreated the crash with toy trains. It works brilliantly, again disrupting the optimistic atmosphere of the previous cue.) The brutal blast of brassy, percussive sound that disrupts the gentle texture of the scene dissolves back to lightness in the strings.

The score next uses Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lins” (from his piano preludes of 1909-13), a deliciously light, ungraspable texture. (Just see how it seems to rhyme with the soft fronds of the pampas grass that Sisif gathers in his arms to decorate the cabin.) From this point, Gance allows his characters time to experience something close to contentment with one another, just as he offers the film’s audience time to fall in synch with the quiet tempo of dramatic domesticity. We see the arrival of the guides, who as part of their seasonal fete begin a dance up to the highest meadow on the mountainside, overlooked by Sisif’s cabin. Here, the score switches to a popular mode: a folk-like dance from Marcel Samuel’s-Rousseau’s Noël Bénichon (1908). The use of this, and a later cue on a similar theme, is perhaps the score’s most joyful, happy cue. After so many hours of tension and anger and fear, finally the mood is one of release. Pent-up angst has become a kind of dance. (And another form of the wheel, as the dancers outside circle round a tree.)

There is a far subtler, more lyrical lilt to the next music cue: from the ballet music of Georges Hüe’s opera Le Miracle (1910). This is the only music by Hüe that I’ve ever heard, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Listen to the way the simple, yearning melody becomes stranger and more captivating as it’s passed between high strings, woodwind/harp, then back to the lower strings. The scene it accompanies is one of my favourites in the film. When a local girl asks Norma to join the dance of the guides, Norma reacts with girlish glee. She tells Sisif, asking if it’s alright to leave him for a while, then rushes over to the girl with her answer. After a slight pause, as if not sure how to show or offer her affection, Norma kisses the girl—then returns to apply “a touch of powder”.

(A passing note: one of the inspirations for Gance’s theme of unrequited love was Kipling’s novel The Light that Failed (1891). The novel centres on Dick, a youth who falls for Maisie, a fellow orphan; after a successful career as a war artist, Dick reencounters Maisie in later life—who still rejects his love; Dick then descends into bitterness, blindness, and eventual death on a remote battlefield. Discussing The Light that Failed with Kipling when Gance visited the author in 1919 (just before beginning work on La Roue), the filmmaker startled Kipling by telling him that Maisie was a lesbian—identifying the truth about Flo Garrard, the real-life inspiration for Kipling’s character, long before modern biographers confirmed her sexuality. Is Norma’s kiss in this scene in La Roue—the only kiss that she willingly gives to someone outside her family in the entire film—an echo of this theme? The film offers us few clear indications of Norma’s romantic desires. She might willingly fall into the incestuous fantasy of Elie’s imagination, but it is his fantasy, not hers. What are her real wants and needs? In this context, you can see how her one kiss with another woman carries great significance.)

Now, as well as powdering her face, Norma childishly ties a huge bow in her hair. (It recalls the bow in her hair for the very first time we see her in the film, as a child.) In the mirror she sees a wrinkle and finds a grey hair. Her whole body droops in visceral recognition that she is no longer a girl. She slowly pulls the ribbon from her hair then (in a miraculous moment of performance) shivers herself back to life—shaking the doubt from her body and smiling once more. This half-second of time is tremendously moving precisely because it takes place within the context of such a long narrative—and reminds us that Norma has a life that will extend beyond the film’s timeframe.

She goes over to Sisif to say goodbye. He senses in her the nervous tremor that has inhabited her since Elie’s death. “Tu n’es donc pas gaie aujourd’hui?” he asks. She replies: “Je ne suis pas gaie papa… je suis heureuse! Ce n’est pas la même chose… C’est plus doux et plus triste!” The distinction between “gaie” and “heureuse” is difficult to render in English, but the “sweeter and sadder” qualities of happiness are made evident in the tone of Gance’s ultimate scenes—and in the exquisite music here by Hüe.

Just as Norma shook off her melancholy, so now the film seems to shake of its melancholy. For here it shows us the dance of the guides, which ascends higher and higher up the mountain until it reaches the plateau below the summit of Mont Blanc. Gance shot all these exteriors on location, and they are truly extraordinary scenes.

The music that accompanies this sequence is a selection of folk dances, arranged and orchestrated by Julien Tiersot in his Danses populaires françaises (c.1903). First, a jaunty “Branle de Savoie” and “farandole” (as Sisif waves goodbye to Norma from the window; he has hardly smiled in the whole film, but now grins with almost childish innocence), then two “danses provençales”. The last of these is a quite gloriously catchy melody, perhaps the most memorable of the film. The first time I heard it (live in 2019), I had the uncanny feeling that I had encountered it before. I don’t think I can have done, since this particular set of dances by Tiersot has never (to my knowledge) been recorded. But the piece is a folk tune; whether or not it has been used in some piece I have heard before, the melody is so instantly memorable that it sounds familiar. During the recording sessions in September 2019, there was some discussion among the musicians about this piece. The conductor Frank Strobel felt that going from this piece (the folksiest melody in the entire score) to the next (the ethereally sublime final scene from Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1912)) was too abrupt and startling a transition. But it absolutely works with the film. The “danse Provençale” is purposefully simple and joyful—it’s a release of tension, and a way for Norma to find her way back into the rhythm of everyday life (which she has been denied for so long in the narrative). And the pace of the music and dancers is also deliberately at odds with Sisif’s own ailing body. He listens to the distant sounds of the dance, but his body falls out of rhythm with its meter. Put next to the image of Sisif’s vitality visibly fading, the suddenness of the music’s end—a kind of boisterous full stop—is a shock.

Then comes the piece by Debussy, which begins with some of the strangest and most eerie orchestral music he ever wrote. Unearthly strings, unsettled harmonies, chromatic shifting. Is it formlessness seeking form, or form seeking formlessness? On screen, Sisif’s body untenses and he wearily lowers the pipe from his mouth—tracing, as he does so, the smallest circles with its stem. Finally, he slumps in his chair, but does not fall. We see smoke rings from Sisif’s pipe dissolve in the air; outside, clouds encircle the peaks and Norma dances in a giant ronde on the snow-covered plateau beneath Mont Blanc.

Debussy’s music here originally served as incidental accompaniment to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. The music that conveys Sisif into the snowy blankness of eternity was that which (in the play’s final scene) lifted Sébastien into the heavens. The martyr’s liberated spirit cries out: “I come, I rise up. I have wings. / All is white.” In Gance’s film, intertitles tell us that Sisif’s soul possesses “adumbral wings” that caress Norma as they ascend. The image is visualized as the shadow of clouds passing over the dancers circling in the snow. It is an uncannily beautiful scene, accompanied by uncannily beautiful music. The final close-up of Sisif is a freeze-frame, his face arrested at the moment of death; in repeating and extending this static image uncannily forward through time, Gance makes manifest the cinematic afterlife of Séverin-Mars, who died before the film premiered. The last movement within La Roue is Tobie, who sits up and barks into the silence; Sisif’s inert form continues to face the snowy nothingness through the window frame—then, likewise, the cinematic frame through which we view him dissolves onto the blank image of a pale curtain. The music reaches its climax, the final chord booming out over the last title: FIN.

These last scenes of La Roue are as moving as anything Gance realized, and possess a kind of ecstatic calm found nowhere else in his films. The music is as sad, serene, and piercingly beautiful as the images on screen. If you haven’t already, please go and find a way to watch the restoration. (The Blu-ray may be very difficult to obtain, but you can always try watching it on the Criterion Collection channel.) It’s a truly miraculous film.

Paul Cuff

Further reading

Paul Cuff, “Interpretation and restoration: Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922)”, Film History 23.2 (2011): 223-41.

Paul Cuff, “The Cinema as Time Machine: Temporality and Duration in the Films of Abel Gance”, Aniki 4.2 (2017): 353-74. [Available online.]

Paul Cuff, “Words Radiating Images: Visualizing Text in Abel Gance’s La Roue”, Literature/Film Quarterly 46.3 (2018) [online].

François Ede, “La Roue, Cahiers d’une restauration.” Booklet notes for La Roue, DVD/Blu-ray. Paris: Pathé, 2020.

Jürg Stenzl, Musik für über 1500 Stummfilme/Music for more than 1500 silent films. Das Inventar der Filmmusik im Pariser Gaumont-Palace (1911-1928) von Paul Fosse (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2017).

Silent images into music: Louis Aubert’s Cinéma, six tableaux symphoniques (1956)

Recently, I wrote about Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony (1933), a remarkable musical evocation of stars from the silent and early sound era. This week is a kind of sequel, devoted to another obscure late nineteenth/early twentieth-century French composer. Louis Aubert (1887-1968) was (like Koechlin) a pupil of Fauré, was well respected by Ravel (whose Valses nobles et sentimentales he premiered as a performer), and made his name as a composer with the fairytale opera La forêt bleue (1911). Though he produced numerous works for piano and for orchestra, his work is rarely heard today. Indeed, there is only one modern recording of some of his orchestral works—and it was through this CD (released by Marco Polo in 1994) that I discovered Aubert in the first place. I found it at a local Oxfam for £2.99 and wasn’t going to turn down the chance to encounter another interesting obscurity.

What really sold me on it was the fact that one of the works on the CD was called “Cinéma”, six tableaux symphoniques. Very much like Koechlin’s symphony, this suite offers six portraits of various stars/aspects of cinema. (The recording with which I’m familiar is only available in six separate videos on youtube, so I have included links to each movement below.) Unlike Koechlin’s symphony, however, Aubert’s music was originally designed with a narrative purpose. In 1953, Aubert wrote a score to accompany a ballet called Cinéma, performed at the Paris Opéra in March 1953. This offered (according to the CD liner notes) a series of “episodes” from film history, from the Lumière brothers to the last Chaplin films “by way of Westerns and stories of vamps”. I’m intrigued by the sound of all this, though I can find only one image from the performance—depicting Disney characters (see below)—to suggest anything about what it was like on stage. I also presume that the ballet consisted of many more musical numbers than are selected for the “six tableaux symphoniques” that is the only version of the score that appears to have been published (and certainly the only portion to be recorded). Nevertheless, the music is a marvellous curiosity…

Douglas Fairbanks et Mary Pickford. Here is Fairbanks—listen to that fanfare! Drums and brass announce his name. The strings snap into a march rhythm (off we go: one-two! one-two! one-two!). but then the rhythm slows, fades. Harp and strings glide towards a sweeter, softer timbre. Mary Pickford swirls into view. But there is skittishness here as well as elegance. The music is lively as much as graceful. There is a kind of precision amid the haze of glamour, strong outlines amid the shimmer of sound. A drumbeat enters the fray, then cymbals and snare bustle in. Doug has bustled in, caught Mary unawares. His music sweeps hers away. He’s busy doing tricks, showing off. The music cuts and thrusts, leaps, jumps—and lands triumphantly on the downbeat.

Rudolf Valentino. After a boisterous introduction, a sinuous saxophone melody unwinds across a busy pizzicato rhythm in the strings. It’s a superb image the music conjures: a kind of rapidity amid a vast, unchanging landscape. Surely this is the image of a desert, of Valentino in The Sheik, riding across an immensity of sand. But it’s also nothing quite like the film itself. It’s a memory, a mistaken recollection. And the music develops this simple idea, building slowly in volume. (More like the famous first shot of Omar Sharif’s character in Lawrence of Arabia than a scene in The Sheik.) Then figure disappears, riding off into the distance. Fade to black.

Charlot et les Nymphes Hollywoodiennes. Here is Charlot! Bubbly, jaunty rhythms. There’s a jazzy swagger, rich twists of sound. A violin solo breezily dances over the brassy orchestra. The drums are played with brushes: a pleasing, rustling soundscape. Then all is wistful, dreamy. A solo violin dreams over gentle strings, over warm breaths of woodwind, over a muted trumpet call.

Walt Disney. Almost at once, the music is mickey-mousing across the soundscape. But the orchestration is also weirdly threatening. It’s as if Aubert is recalling the sorcerer’s apprentice section of Fantasia, threatening to take Mickey on a perilous journey. And there he goes, marching off—the percussion jangling, as though with keys in hand, walking edgily towards a great door that he must open, behind which is the unknown…

Charlot amoureux. Another facet of Charlot. Wistful, dreaming, languorous. A private world, an inner world. (One can imagine the Tramp falling in love, comically, tragically, delightfully.) But reality intervenes. A blast of sound, then an awkward silence. Quietened, tremolo strings swirl under an ominous brass refrain. It is love lost, abandoned, proved false, proved insubstantial, unobtainable, unrequited.

Valse finale. Hollywood bustles in. The orchestra sweeps itself into a waltz. It’s grand, if a little undefined. Here is glamour in sound, showing itself off for our appreciation. It makes me think of Carl Davis’s glorious theme for the television series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980). But, as so often, Davis has the genius to make his melody instantly memorable—conjuring in the space of two bars an entire world, mood, and feeling. Aubert’s waltz is both less memorable but more orchestrally substantial (it is, crudely, louder, written for larger forces). So it’s at once dreamy and unwieldy, a kind of too-crowded dancefloor. You can’t see the stars for the wealth of movement, of swishing figure, of gleaming jewels. (Glockenspiel and triangle chime and jingle.) The music swirls and swaggers to its inevitable conclusion: THE END.

Aubert’s score is (I think) less musically inventive—less outlandishly exotic in tone and texture—than Koechlin’s Seven Stars’ Symphony. The CD linter notes (by Michel Fleury) argue that Aubert’s music is (like Koechlin’s) more interested in creating mood pieces than in recreating specific scenes from films. But I wonder how true this is. After all, the music accompanied specific dramatic action on the stage. Listening to it, I can more readily imagine it accompanying images/action than I can the majority of Koechlin’s score. I could even see the music working well as silent film accompaniment, and I wonder if the original ballet mimicked this very strategy in the theatre. As with Koechlin, I want to know what kind of experiences Aubert had with the cinematic subjects he depicts in music. Did he go to the cinema in the silent era? If so, what kind of music did he hear there? I’d also ask similar questions about the ballet of 1953: what kind of a history of film did this present, and what inspired it? (And what did the spectators think of it, especially those who knew the silent era firsthand?) Many questions, to which I currently have no answers. But I’d be intrigued to find out more, and may (in time) do a little more digging to find out. In the meantime, we have Aubert’s music, which is well worth your time. Once again, go listen!

Paul Cuff

The King of Kings (1927; US; Cecil B. DeMille)

In the summer of 1926, Cecil B. DeMille embarked on what was considered to be an enormously risky project: an epic treatment of the life of Jesus Christ. There had been plenty of Christs seen on screen in early cinema. In France, films about the Passion produced some of the longest productions thus far assembled. Pathé’s La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (Lucien Nonguet/Ferdinand Zecca, 1903) was nearly 45 minutes, while Gaumont’s La Vie du Christ (Alice Guy, 1906) was over 30 minutes. These early Christian narrative films were also boasted elaborate forms of cinematic spectacle. When Pathé remade their La Vie et la Passion in 1907, Segundo de Chomón took charge of the elaborate stencil- and hand-colouring of Zecca’s film for exhibition. Thus, long-form narrative and colour effects were always part of the history of silent biblical productions. But the context for DeMille’s film—to be made on the largest possible scale, complete with Technicolor sequences—was rather different. In the US in the 1920s, there had been much controversy about the depiction of Christ on screen. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) had famously been obliged to include Christ only in the form of an occasional limb or edge-of-frame glow. Were censors, critics, and audiences ready for a modern dramatic interpretation of the Passion? And was DeMille the man to handle the project?

It turned out that he was, and that they were. For a start, DeMille tried to inoculate his production against religious concerns about Hollywood by having Mass performed every morning on set, as well as offering daily prayers via various religious leaders. He also imposed a “morality clause” in the contract of Dorothy Cummings, who played Jesus’s mother. And H.B. Warner, who played Jesus, was segregated from the rest of the cast to preserve his aura of otherness—and presumably to stop him socializing in ways that would not be becoming for someone playing his role. DeMille’s screenplay—by Jeanie MacPherson—was also built around incidents relayed in the New Testament, and the film’s intertitles are dominated by biblical citation. In sum, DeMille did everything in his power to make sure his production would offer a sincere and sanctioned depiction of its subject—and (as ever) his publicity department made sure that people knew about it.

When the film was released in April 1927, The King of Kings still caused a degree of controversy: depictions of Christ were (and, of course, still are) a sensitive issue for many spectators. But though the film encountered censorship in various territories, it was a resounding critical and commercial success. An early review in The Film Daily (20 April 1927) took the lead in what was to be an avalanche of glowing reviews:

There can be said nothing but praise for the reverence and appreciation with which the beautiful story here has been developed. DeMille has been successful in striking a tempo that is remarkable for the peaceful and benign influence it wields on the spectator. […] The spiritual fibre of innumerable numbers throughout the world are being stirred to their very core. […] [DeMille] has shown a supreme courage and a vast daring. He has been brave enough to show The Christ on the screen. […] The King of Kings is tremendous from every standpoint. It is the finest piece of screen craftsmanship ever turned out by DeMille.

Writing in Photoplay (June 1927), Frederick James Smith followed suit:

Here is Cecil B. DeMille’s finest motion picture effort. He has taken the most difficult and exalted theme in the world’s history—the story of Jesus Christ—and transcribed it intelligently and ably to the screen. / De Mille has had a variegated career. He has wandered, with an eye to the box office, up bypaths into ladies’ boudoirs and baths, he has been accused of garishness, bad taste and a hundred and one other faults, he frequently has been false and artificial. One of his first efforts, The Whispering Chorus [1918], stood until this as his best work. / The King of Kings, however, reveals a shrewd, discerning and skilful technician, a director with a fine sense of drama, and, indeed, a man with an understanding of the spiritual. / The King of Kings is the best telling of the Christ story the screen has ever revealed. […] You are going to be amazed at the complete sincerity of DeMille’s direction. Nothing is studied. There is no aiming at theatrical appeal. DeMille has followed the New Testament literally and with fidelity. He has taken no liberties. […] The King of Kings is a tremendous motion picture, one that, through its sincerity, is going to win thousands of new picture goers. DeMille deserves unstinted praise. He ventured where few would dare to venture, he threw a vast fortune into the balance and he carried through without deviating. Congratulations, Mr. DeMille.

And in Picture Play (August 1927), Norbert Lusk saw the film not just as a triumph for DeMille but for cinema itself:

The King of Kings is Cecil B. DeMille’s masterpiece, and is among the greatest of all pictures. It is a sincere and reverent visualization of the last three years in the life of Christ, produced on a scale of tasteful magnificence, finely acted by the scores in it, and possessed of moments of poignant beauty and unapproachable drama. This is a picture that will never become outmoded. […] Until you see The King of Kings you will not have seen all that the screen is capable of today.

I begin my piece with this context because I feel that what follows would otherwise do an injustice to DeMille’s film. Following the historical high praise, my own reaction will seem distinctly—perhaps unfairly—negative. Over the recent Easter weekend, I was looking for something culturally appropriate to watch. (I’m in no way religious, but sometimes it’s nice to feel “seasonal”.) I chose The King of Kings because I’d had the gorgeous French Blu-ray edition produced by Lobster say on my shelf for a long time—unopened. I don’t think I’d actually seen the film all the way through before, and frankly I couldn’t make it all the way through in one go this time. Rarely have I been so intellectually bored when watching a film of my own free choice.

It started so promisingly. A two-strip Technicolor cabal of harlots and decadents, lounging around in lurid pink robes. High drama, high kitsch. Mary Magdalene is Judas’s former lover and wants to know where he is. Discovering that Judas is in league with a carpenter named Jesus, Mary starts issuing instructions to her servants: “Bring me my richest perfumes! […] Harness my zebras!” (I think “Harness my zebras” is the most fabulous intertitle I’ve seen for quite some time.) So off she rides in her zebra-pulled carriage to find Jesus and Judas…

Thus ended my dramatic involvement with the film. From this point on, I was increasingly restless. I can only presume that DeMille started his epic with this sequence precisely to lure in a wider audience. Want debauchery, colour, spectacle? Here it is! Now we have your attention, we segue to the real story… Alas, Demille’s Te Deum for God was tedium for me. By the halfway point, I was experiencing such crippling mental boredom that I had to stop. I wanted to rant and rage, or run madly into the night, to vent my frustration. After a break (and a more sedate session to finish the film), I have been trying to ponder why my reaction was so strong. Why was I so totally detached from the drama? What this a problem with the film or with me?

Firstly, the film’s high productions values and superb photography were part of the problem for me. It felt akin to being confronted by one of my local Jehovah’s Witnesses. Doing their rounds, they always dress in their most immaculate suits. Their clothing is never showy, it’s merely tasteful. It’s not a uniform as such, but it defines them, limits them. It’s an invariable combination of immaculate suits, dustless shoes, neatly combed hair, and a tone of voice that is both calm and exceedingly well-rehearsed. This polished smoothness of sound and image is never meant to impress, as such. Rather, the aesthetic is meant to soothe, to calm, to convince. When they open their mouths, the reassurance of middleclass, middlebrow, middle-manager-esque measuredness acts as a kind of anaesthetic for what they’re trying to sell you. As it happens, I’m very bad at telling people that I have no interest in what they have to say, so when confronted by these gleamingly bland, affable people on my doorstep I tend to let them babble away untroubled. (Unlike the Blu-ray of DeMille’s film, I cannot simply press “stop”.) A year or so ago, one of them spoke so long on their chosen topic that their reasonableness eventually gave way to something far more striking: I got conspiracy theories, scatological metaphors, and brutish fundamentalism. I stood, fascinating and appalled, as the man’s charm slowly unravelled and revealed a kind of ideological black hole.

I say all this because my experience stood at my front door, helplessly confronted with two impeccably well-presented religious salespeople spouting sententious homilies, is very much like my experience of watching The King of Kings. The film feels the need to dress in its very best clothes to impress you with its message. If a film’s this good-looking, surely the content must be solid? But it’s precisely the contrast between the well-dressedness of the picture and the dramatic paucity of its every move that annoyed me. You could tell how much money had been spent on everything, on how much time had been spent dressing actors and picking props.

Take the way the Roman soldiers are depicted: they all hang around in full body armour and immaculately plumed helmets, which they seem to wear even when sleeping. They’re all too well groomed, too well fed, too well rehearsed. Or look at the flock of sheep that flees the temple merchants, or the lamb that Jesus fondles later in that sequence. I could almost hear DeMille shouting: “Look at the sheep! Each one hand picked for maximum pictorial beauty! Just feel the quality of these fleeces. You know how much each one would be worth on the market? Let me tell you how much I paid for them…!” The trouble is, everyone on screen is too well attired, too well made up. Every piece of furniture is too well designed, too well finished. Even rags or scraps or fragments of woods are too well fashioned, too well placed. Cripples are too pretty, lunatics too cute. Nothing bears the weight or texture of reality, nor does its fantasy go beyond a kind of bland pictorialism. It’s an illustrated children’s Bible, referencing only the most familiar tropes of Christian iconography or art. Neither aesthetically or dramatically does DeMille offer anything that either wasn’t already a cliché by 1927 or has become one since then—perhaps thanks to this very film. Everything from his sanitized, Aryanized Christ—blonde, bearded, blue-eyed—to his impeccably desexed Mary (Mother of) feels so wearingly familiar, I found it almost impossible to enjoy anything on screen.

What’s more, the drama moves at a slow pace. (Is this what The Film Daily critic meant when he said that the film’s tempo is “remarkable for the peaceful and benign influence it wields on the spectator”?) The film is 155 minutes long, but that’s not the issue. The problem is that every incident is so painstakingly relayed, and so laboriously earnest in citing (literal) chapter and verse, that the drama gets sucked out of every situation. Nothing in this film has bite, or tension, or excitement. The children who are subject to the first instances of Christ’s on-screen miracles are irritating for their cuteness, as is the length of time it takes for their inevitable curing. Soon after, the cleansing of the “seven deadly sins” from Mary Magdalene is already long and absurd without one of the apostles turning to another and explaining to them (and us) what’s going on. Yes, the multiple superimpositions are technically marvellous, but the personifications of the “sins” are ludicrously crude.

By the time we get to the climax of Judas’s betrayal, I’d grown infinitely weary of DeMille’s painstakingly earnest treatment. Just see how, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas goes in to identity Jesus with a kiss. DeMille milks this scene ad infinitum. Judas approaches slowly, moves to Jesus slowly, hovers at his side slowly, moves even closer slowly, leans in slowly, kisses him slowly, reacts slowly, moves away slowly. Poor Jesus has to stand stock still, staring straight ahead, for an eternity—like us, waiting for Judas to bloody well get on with it. The scene is so laboured, its contrivance so drawn out… (Even writing about this scene is tedious—I just want it to be over with!) We come to this scene, as we do to every incident, already knowing exactly what to expect, so to drag it out like this is dramatically absurd. Do something unexpected, Cecil! Surprise me! It’s even more of a shame, since the hand-coloured flames in combination with blue tinting make the Garden of Gethsemane sequence visually extraordinary. Why couldn’t the drama do anything to match it?

Part of the issue is that the film seems to imagine it’s offering us something with profound insight into universal moral truths, but I found it simplistic and superficial. No matter how much backstory the film gives us, I simply cannot believe in Judas as a real human being with real concerns or motives—and thus I cannot believe in the reality of his divided loyalties, his betrayal, or his remorse. Just as all the various Marys on screen are not real women at all, just walking illustrations from a crude book of dogma. And none of this is helped by the way the film uses endless biblical citations as dramatic punchlines to scenes. It ends up smacking the viewer as a kind of narrative (not to mention moral) smugness. This is a film that feels superior to (all but one of) its characters.

If the above makes it sound like I got nothing from the film, this is not quite true. Amid the pomp and platitudes, H.B. Warner gives a very restrained and (within the film’s own terms) rewarding performance as Jesus. He manages to be dignified and sympathetic even when the film around him is not. Both the role itself and the screenplay allow Warner little room for psychological or emotional complexity. He is caring, or sad, or knowing-yet-forgiving. He’s also miraculous, in a way that is oddly unimpressive. When DeMille’s Christ waves his hand to heal the sick, there’s no suspense, no emotion. The effects (like the soldier’s vanishing wound in the Garden of Gethsemane) take place too smoothly, or too swiftly. They’re so miraculously effortless that they are no longer miraculous. (And no-one in the film ever pauses to question the motivation or context of these miracles: like absolutely everything else in the film, they are meant to be received without a scintilla of scepticism.) Given all this, Warner’s eyes are often the source of the only real emotion in the film—even if these emotions (pity, love, resignation) lack any kind of human context. Jesus as a character is merely Christ the symbol. He might walk around and interact with people, but a real human being—as an individual with a human consciousness or a personal history or a complex inner life—he is not. Warner does his best within the many limitations put upon him.

If DeMille cast a very un-Jewish-looking Jesus, he did cast two actual Jewish actors in prominent roles. The father and son actors Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut were Austrian emigres who had come to the US at the start of the decade. In The King of Kings, they respectively play Caiaphas (the High Priest of Israel) and Judas. The former has the less nuanced character: he’s all bearded malevolence and unrepentant scheming. But as Judas, Joseph Schildkraut has more work to do. It’s a shame that the script’s effort to give him some kind of backstory makes his character less interesting than he might otherwise be. DeMille makes Judas a power-hungry schemer, eager to gain influence (and affluence) once he has installed Jesus as king. Making a villain more villainous does not make him a more interesting character. Joseph Schildkraut’s performance is as mannered as his character is simplistic. Ne’er has a man been seen to so shiftily fondle his cummerbund in villainous contemplation. In the Last Supper scene, the breaking of the bread is a cue for more scurrilous shifting on Schildkraut’s part. He resembles a schoolboy faced with unpalatable food (I’ve been there), who must pretend to eat his portion while secretly depositing it onto the floor. We are presumably meant to take against him from the outside for being dark-haired and clean shaven. Once things get serious, Judas’s hair becomes tangled—as if this could in any way make his character arc more convincing.

Of course, casting the two main villains in the film as Jews is not exactly sensitive. DeMille is also nasty to both the Schildkrauts at the end. Judas, per the tradition, hangs himself. Though we don’t see him do so, we see his swinging body tumble into the abyss, courtesy of the clunky earthquake that intervenes during the crucifixion. Meanwhile, Caiaphas falls on his knees at the temple: “Lord God Jehovah, visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel—I alone am guilty!” For once, there’s no biblical citation. DeMille is at least more courteous here than in the similar scene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which (in)famously takes the opportunity (via Caiaphas’s dialogue) to pass the blame onto the entire Jewish people forevermore. DeMille wants to have it both ways: cast Jews as the villains yet insert an excusatory note. The note is meant to excuse the Jews, but it’s also an excuse for DeMille. Like Pilate, he washes his hands.

The rest of the cast is uniformly uninteresting. Among the disciples, only Peter (Ernest Torrence) stands out, though not for good reasons. His alternately comedic and sincere characterization hits every note so squarely and obviously, I immediately took against him. I know it’s part of the New Testament story, but the way Peter is told that he will deny Jesus three times, then refutes this, then is proven wrong, then acts repentantly, is the perfect example of how the film fails to deliver any novelty, any friction or doubt, in its adaptation. What is meant to be the tragic fulfilment of Jesus’s prediction comes across as almost comedic on screen, such is Torrence’s eye-bulging doubletake. It’s a kind of visual “D’oh!” Likewise, the film’s laborious setting-up of the moment, and equally laborious explication of the punchline, is another instance of dramatic smugness. But at least I can remember Peter. The rest of the disciples are virtually indistinguishable. They have no personality, no inner lives, no function beyond the affirmation of what we already know. (In the liner notes of the Blu-ray, Lobster include a wonderful advert for the film in which the whole cast appear to swarm around the central figure of DeMille. Such is the size of font and layout of the design that it looks like the “King of Kings” is DeMille himself!)

If the adults are too often piously bland, the children are worse. I would like to restate how irritating I found the children in this film. They’re part of the ingratiating way the film seeks our sympathy, the way it hopes to humanize the story. Thus, the soon-to-be New Testament author Mark is a picture-book pretty child equipped with an enormous crop of curly blond hair—a cliché of fresh-faced cuteness that instantly made me take against him. Not only does he introduce us to Jesus via another child (a blind boy, who is likewise fair-haired), but he’s there right to the end. It’s he who encourages Simon of Cyrene to take up the burden of Jesus’s cross in the penultimate sequence. This is another of DeMille’s biblical amendments, since the scriptures state that it was the Romans that “compelled” Simon to carry the cross. Why the amendment? Merely to squeeze our sympathy glands again?

But was I really this annoyed by the film? Did it never affect me? Was I entirely unmoved? Hmm. Well, no. I did find moments moving, but this was often more due to the choice of music. For Lobster’s restoration of The King of Kings, Robert Israel used Hugo Riesenfeld’s orchestral score (as recorded for the synchronized 1928 version of the film) as the basis for his own adaptation. Copying Riesenfeld’s cues from 1928, he expanded the music to fit the longer 1927 version. I will have more to say on the score shortly, but for now I just want to point out how particular pieces of music seemed to make something more of the film—at least, for me. Take the Last Supper sequence. I’ve already said that I find the handling of Judas in this scene clumsy, but at the end of the sequence Riesenfeld introduces music from Wagner’s Parsifal (1882). It’s the opening of the Prelude to Act I: a soundscape of shifting, unresolved harmonic tension that hypnotically ebbs and flows—it’s music of unworldly beauty, of abstract sorrow, of unfulfilled longing. As rendered for Israel’s modern recording, the music is reduced for a smaller orchestra than Wagner intended—but it still sent shivers down my spine. And though the music doesn’t sound like it should in better performances by larger orchestras, and though Riesenfeld cuts and pastes from other sources as the scene proceeds, the effect as a whole is still superb. For once, something unearthly creeps over the picture. But then, inevitably, a voiceless choir comes in at the end of the scene with the melody from “Abide with me”, and the effect is ruined. From late romantic mysticism—all unsettled harmonics and soft, swirling rhythms—the score crashes to earth with resounding cliché.

That said, I did find Israel’s adaption of the Riesenfeld score very impressive. What’s most remarkable is its fleetfooted switching from one piece to another. Rarely does Riesenfeld see out a whole movement from its original context. Rather, he will use a single iteration of a theme, a single phrase, then segue rapidly to another piece. Thus, we sometimes get the “Dresden Amen” theme (usually as orchestrated by Wagner in Parsifal) in the brass, but the entire thing lasts one or two bars. It makes its point, then moves on. Later, we get more from Parsifal—but only a few more bars, just enough to introduce the right mood for the moment. Pontius Pilate gets the anxious, unsettled opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Antar” symphony (1868, rev. 1875/91), but only the opening—again, Riesenfeld moves on to something else to follow the action on screen. Even the way he unleashes music from the finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830)—surely the most extrovertly wild and exciting music of the entire score—he does so only for a few measures during the scourging of Jesus by the Romans. There are even smaller touches, too. I loved, for example, the delicious way that tambourine strikes accompany the silver pieces falling in a pile before Judas.

Sometimes the brevity of the cues works against their effectiveness. Thus, during the crucifixion sequence, Riesenfeld uses music from the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, the “Pathétique”(1893). But he reorchestrates it so that the music is less effective than in the original. The original is an extraordinary unwinding of orchestral timbre, the whole movement slowing and deepening and darkening—occasionally lashing out in fury—until the music peters out in the depths of despair. With Riesenfeld, we get a much steadier tempo and rhythm, and the musical narrative of the movement—from anger to oblivion—is cut short. Equally, the way Riesenfeld chucks in some Verdi (the dies irae from his requiem (1874)) for DeMille’s earthquake feels as clunky an imposition as the earthquake itself.

My other reservation is not about the music but about the 2016 recording for the film’s digital release. I can never fully detach my comments from what is inevitably a kind of snobbery, but nevertheless I really do think that there isan issue of quality at stake. When citing well-known musical themes, it is very easy for scores to sound tired and cliched. What makes or breaks the use of such music is the way they are arranged and performed. For example, several cues used in the Riesenfeld score for The King of Kings are also used in the (anonymous, c.1930) score for Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney. Modern renditions of both scores were arranged and recorded almost at the same time, in 2016-17, for their respective digital release. But despite sharing some of the same music, the two soundtracks are very different. Bernd Thewes (for Jeanne Ney) orchestrates the score in such a lively and interesting way—and the music is performed and recorded with such immense panache—that the effect is quite different, and more effective.

Of course, Israel’s forces are smaller than Thewes’s: Israel has the Czech Cinema Orchestra, while Thewes has the WDR Funkhausorchester Köln. My search for “The Czech Cinema Orchestra” yielded no results online. There is such a thing as “The Czech Film Orchestra”, however. As I surmised in an earlier post, Czech orchestras are popular with soundtrack composers for their competitive prices. As the homepage of the Czech Film Orchestra states: “We can offer you world-class orchestral recordings for 25% of the cost of a recording in the USA, Canada, or London.” Is the “Czech Cinema Orchestra” a budget version of the Czech Film Orchestra? I presume it’s a scratch band assembled for the 2016 recording. The performance—especially, of the strings—is less well drilled than it could be, and less atmospherically recorded than more budget-enhanced silent film soundtracks I’ve heard. (For examples of the latter, see: just about anything produced in Germany through ARTE, or any soundtrack produced by Carl Davis.)

It’s a shame, as Riesenfeld’s score does a lot of the heavy lifting as far as mood and emotion are concerned in The King of Kings. When the music really needs to land, it often doesn’t. During the resurrection sequence, DeMille’s Technicolor glows with gorgeous lustre—the music needs to do likewise. Yet I don’t think I’ve heard a less convincing rendition of the prelude to Act 3 of Tannhäuser (1845) than the one given here, per Israel’s performance. The string section, in particular, can scarcely keep together for the swirling crescendo that leads to Jesus’s miraculous reappearance. What should be a sonic whirlwind is something of a whimper.

In summary, I’ve not been so irritated by a silent film in a long time. I find DeMille a very frustrating filmmaker, especially when it comes to his religious (or religiose) productions. Oddly, I almost wished he’d do something outrageous with the narrative of The King of Kings to make it more interesting. The only temporal interpolation he offers is at the end, when Jesus appears to loom over the skyscrapers of the modern world, offering his love. But the effect is banal. Compared with other biblical screen worlds of the 1920s (and even those early Passion films of the 1900s), The King of Kings never gripped or surprised me. Neither realistic nor magical, for me the film offers very little that would make me want to sit through the whole thing again—even if I thought I could bare it. I can see how audiences at the time might have found themselves drawn to its reverent portrayal, and I can appreciate the effort that has gone into its look. The photography is superb, the lighting lovely, the Technicolor gorgeous. But a film can look like a million dollars and still feel impoverished.

Paul Cuff

Silent images into music: Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony, op. 132 (1933)

I adore the soundworld of late romantic music. I have lived and continue to live in this lush, exotic, expressive, excessive, experimental realm—I spend hours every week immersed in music well-known and music forgotten. I love the great composers, but I also love the lesser-knowns. The latter appeal to my obsessive side: they are people I can hunt down through footnotes, through asides, through the marketplace outlets and only-available-as-offair-broadcast-mp3 sharers of the world. Give me your Austro-German oddities, your Scandinavian obscurities. Give me your tone poems on bizarre themes, your operas about abstract ideas, your itinerant harmonies and luxuriously strange orchestration, your dozens of weird symphonies, your books of diverse chamber works. Give me your Schrekers, your Braunfels, your Schulhoffs and Schmidts (and Schmitts!), your Atterbergs and your Langgaards. Francophone? No problem! Give me an obscure French composer of orchestral music who was born (approximately) in the latter half of the nineteenth century and died (sometime) in the interwar years and I’ll be a happy man. D’Indy? It’s a done deal! Magnard? Yes please! Rabaud? You bet! Pierné? Seconds please! I love the music of all these composers (and many more besides). What I love especially is when this music overlaps with the world of silent cinema, either in my imagination or in that of the original composer’s intentions. The instruments and rhythms of popular music of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s bleeds into the legacy of orchestral music from the nineteenth century—and the fusion produces fantastic things. And of course I delight in original silent music scores written in the era, since it introduces me to any number of more obscure composers. So you can imagine my joy when I came across the music of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) and, in particular, a symphony he wrote that was inspired by silent cinema…

The Seven Stars’ Symphony, op. 132 (1933)

Koechlin wrote this “symphony” in 1933, when sound had conquered cinema. The stars he recalls in music thus straddle the divide between these two eras. He’s recalling the silent screen as well as acknowledging the coming of sound. Across seven movements, we get sonic pictures—or recollections—or seven stars of the screen. This is not a symphony in the classical sense, since there is no overarching unity of form or design to the work. Rather, it is a series of tone poems that conjure a musical-cinematic universe. Just as Koechlin uses one medium to evoke another, so must I use prose to try and capture his music. (Of course, you can listen to the symphony here.) I make no pretence at real analysis, offering only an impression of Koechlin’s impressions:

I. Douglas Fairbanks (en souvenir du voleur de Bagdad). We step into a harmonic world of the orient. The movement instructs us to recall The Thief of Bagdad. But as soon as we begin, we’re lost. This is not the film of 1924: it’s a dream of the film. Woodwind tiptoes up weird scales. Slow-motion strings unwind in the stratosphere. Weird curlicues perform oriental turns. Melodies bubble up and die away. There is no drama, only glittering stepping stones towards sonic dissolution. It’s six minutes of spellbinding strangeness. Nine years had passed between the film’s premiere in Hollywood and Koechlin’s score being written. A distant memory revived in sound.

II. Lilian Harvey (menuet fugue). A graceful dance, strings shining over warm woodwind. Is Harvey performing a turn on screen? What does Koechlin remember of her? A saxophone line blooms in the orchestra. The music turns chromatically sour for an instant, threatens to unwind the texture. Then this moment of drama dissipates. All ends with a dreamy slide up into silvery nothingness.

III. Greta Garbo (choral Païen). The ondes Martenot spells out something that may or may not be a melody. It’s an unstable base on which to build a movement. Woodwind tread in its path. Strings uncommittedly slide underfoot. If Garbo is here, she is as insubstantial as quicksilver. Here is her unknowability, her ungraspable form on the screen. The image does not flicker. The music is a portrait of the surface of the screen: it’s all sonic sheen, all gleaming illusion. There is no scene, hardly any form—just something slipping away, beyond one’s grasp.

IV. Clara Bow et la joyouse Californie. Bustle! Brass! Light, skipping percussive steps. Here is Clara Bow, or the sonic imprint of her liveliness, her spirit. This is the first time Koechlin’s orchestra has shown real body, something approaching a full, round, sweep of sound. It’s more harmonically traditional. That is, until the whole soundscape dies away. Suddenly there is a skittish rhythm and a reduced texture, a kind of circus-like dance in the distance. (In the background, a glockenspiel adds texture to the downward line of melody, then an upward leap.) Is this California? Are we on the street, a studio lot, or in a fictional world? Of course, this is all a fictional world, at one, two, three, or four removes from reality. The harmonies thin again. It’s like a pair of curtains part, revealing another vista—some way off. A saxophone ripens the melody. Then the melody unpeels into weird, restless harmonies. The whole world threatens to collapse, until the brass and strings gather together and bulldoze forward. The movement ends in a massive affirmation.

V. Merlène Dietrich (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). Oh my word, this is gorgeous orchestration. Dietrich in sound is more worldly than Garbo in sound. The melody unfolds on the woodwind. A repeated refrain moves slowly, turning back on itself, comes on again. If this is Dietrich, she is alone. It’s a kind of hum. (Somewhere deep in the orchestra, pizzicato double basses pick out a regular beat.) The music turns from us, departs, trailing melancholic satisfaction. (Note Koechlin’s misspelling of Dietrich’s name: “Merlène Dietrich” is surely a deliberate marker of the composer. Here is his star, his memory of her.)

VI. Emil Jannings (en souvenir de l’Ange bleu). Growling, brooding brass. A kind of slow stomp in sound. Bitterness, darkness. Depths and weights and plugs of music. Then the strings recall some distant melody, some dim memory of pleasure, of longing that may be satisfied. The movement refers to Der blaue Engel, but not to a scene so much as a mood—a portrait of Jannings’ character as the character might himself feel before he falls asleep. Anger, resignation, memory—fading away.

VII. Charlie Chaplin (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). What begins melodically soon turns chaotic. Entropy enters the rhythms, the harmonies. This is Chaplin in the form of his movement, his sudden bursts of speed, of wit, of evasion. Charlie is skipping, Charlie is running, Charlie is fighting. There are bursts of exquisitely controlled fury, such that threaten to turn atonal—to wrench us into another genre. Then all is sinisterly quiet. Bubbles of noise rise to the surface, burst, and vanish. Where are we? What’s happening on screen, or in our souls? Woodwind try to rescue the mood from eerie, high-stringed harmonies. Where is Charlie? A solo violin rises from the chromatic unease, but only for a bar. Soon the unrest resumes. It’s a kind of sonic starvation, minimalism on the lookout for sustenance. Where are we? Is this winter? Is this the dawning of madness in The Gold Rush? Poverty pulls at the edges of the score, threatening to impinge on this portrait of a comic icon. Eventually, after meandering through various scrapes and scraps of scenes, the solo violin leaps up against outbursts of brass, clattering glockenspiel, sinister fanfares. Some kind of resolution is reached, and it’s hardly a happy one. Has the Tramp died? Is he on his way to heaven? High woodwind detaches itself from the ground. The saxophone freewheels in the mid distance. Odd percussive clashes are far below us. Is this the dream of heaven in The Kid? If so, Koechlin treats it as a slow, surreal scene. The orchestra appears to waken. All is bleary, unsure of itself. The solo violin recalls something, leaves behind the other strings. Finally, a determined little march: woodwind steps, one-two, one-two, one-two; pizzicato strings, one-two, one-two, one-two… To where are we heading? Toward silence. The little march fades into the distance. Is this the end? Just as it seems as though silence is the answer, the whole orchestra rises into an enormous crescendo of sound: an apotheosis that towers over the preceding caesura, as if spelling out an enormous intertitle on screen—“THE END”!

What an absolute delight this music is. The orchestration is as lucid and precise as that of Debussy but anticipates later work by Messiaen. It’s lush and rich yet teeters on the brink of atonality. By turns gossamer light and terrifying dense, soothing and scarifying, evocative and vague, particular and meandering, this score is everything I love about late romantic music.

But how might we understand the relationship between The Seven Stars’ Symphony and the cinema that inspired it? Koechlin is surely more interested in these stars as starting points for music, as representatives of cultural moods and manners. In conception, the symphony reminded me of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Face of Garbo” (in Mythologies, 1957). I don’t just mean in the sense that, in Barthes’s words, “The face of Garbo is an Idea”; but in the way both treat Garbo as an excuse to produce delightfully vague and suggestive evocations using the actress (or rather, the image of the actress) as their starting point. Though Barthes had recently re-encountered Garbo in a revival of Queen Christina (1933) in Paris, he too was surely relying on memories—not just of films, but of images and associations. The distance between star and spectator itself becomes the subject of interrogation. Barthes is not interested in the history or life of the star so much as her symbolic function in (an exceedingly ill-defined conception of) cinematic history:

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.

Koechlin’s music allows the listener to become as “lost” in Garbo-as-sound as one might be “lost” in the image of Garbo-on-screen. Koechlin’s symphony is the product of a kind of fandom: an expression of his encounters with Garbo in film. But it’s also an analysis of that experience: a musical exploration of the idea of cinema. The Seven Stars’ Symphony offers a glimpse of the afterlife of stars within the imagination of contemporary viewers. Images become sounds, cinema becomes music.

As well as these more abstract thoughts, the symphony also makes me want to ask more practical questions. How often did Koechlin visit the cinema, and where did he go? What films did he see in the silent era, and in what circumstances? (I would buy the one and only book on the man to find out more, but it’s been out of print for decades and will currently set you back the best part of £200 to get it. My curiosity can wait.) As so often, the cinematic life of artists who lived through the silent era is frustratingly obscure. How often have I wanted contemporary writers and painters and composers to have left accounts of everything they saw and heard… Of course, Koechlin’s symphony is itself an account of his experiences, even if only the abstract impressions left on him by the cinema. His seven studies are mood pieces, fleeting glimpses of life and stillness and movement on screen, of rhythms that might have been seen or heard or felt at the cinema. Koechlin’s extraordinary orchestration offers us a way to explore cinematic impressions through sound, to let the transmuted forms of one medium live again in another. By any measure, with or without a filmic context, The Seven Stars’ Symphony is a glorious sonic experience. Go listen to it.

Paul Cuff

Music for The Three Musketeers (1921; US; Fred Niblo)

Last year I wrote about the Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers, released for the hundredth anniversary of the film in 2021. Since then, Cohen Media released another version of the film in a Blu-ray package which also includes The Iron Mask (1929; US; Allan Dwan). The Cohen Media release is an entirely separate restoration to that of the Film Preservation Society. Scanned in 4K and transferred at 21fps, the Cohen release looks excellent – but it is presented entirely in monochrome. As I wrote in my previous post on thefilm, The Three Musketeers was designed to be shown with extensive tinting – including use of the Handschiegl colour process to render D’Artagnan’s “buttercup yellow” horse. In recreating these colour elements, the Film Preservation Soceity’s restoration is visually superior. But where the new release is decidedly stronger is in its musical accompaniment, and it is this soundtrack that I want to write about here.

In 1921, Louis F. Gottschalk assembled a score for The Three Musketeers that was performed by an orchestra for the film’s first run. The music survives, but it has not been well treated in its modern realizations. The soundtrack for Kino’s old DVD edition of the film featured the Gottschalk score “performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’”. Sadly, this “orchestra” wasn’t an orchestra at all, but a collection of synthesized MIDI files. Though I have listened to this rendition of Gottschalk’s music, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve heard the real thing. Budget-saving soundtracks will be familiar to anyone who has collected enough home media release of silent cinema over the years. It’s a familiar history of “orchestral scores” not performed by orchestras, of original music being rendered null by synthetic sound or else replaced entirely. I remember struggling to enjoy much about The Three Musketeers when watching the Kino release. The aesthetic effect of this synthetic soundscape is the homogenization of musical rhythm and timbre, and its computerized tones ensure that the acoustics are divorced from human performance. Put bluntly, the assemble of MIDI files is a bland, insipid procession of synthetic sounds that makes me squirm in my seat. Even if Gottschalk’s music were more varied or exciting (and it isn’t really either of these things), this realization renders it null and void on the soundtrack.

The Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray release of The Three Musketeers in 2021 featured a score arranged by Rodney Sauder and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra (a six-piece ensemble). But even if it consists of real musicians playing real music, this “orchestra” cannot produce an orchestral soundscape. My earlier piece discussed how the score frequently lags behind the film’s action, and (above any other factor) struggles to match the scale or richness of the world presented on screen. By contrast, the Cohen Blu-ray features a new orchestral score arranged by Robert Israel and performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra. And yes, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra is an actual orchestra. Despite the claims of the last two home media editions, Israel’s score is the first truly orchestral score this film has received.

Right from the off, the difference is apparent. When the film’s opening titles appear, we get a brassy, boisterous theme—the whole orchestra is up and running. It sets the tone of the film perfectly. It sounds like a period score (i.e. one from the 1920s) while also evoking the kind of music more familiar from this genre in later decades. (One can imagine Errol Flynn arriving on screen just as much as Fairbanks.) The music also captures the tone of Fairbanks’s adventure: excitement, drama, and (above anything else) fun. The period of the film’s setting is soon evoked through baroque turns of phrase and instrumentation. For the domestic scenes with Queen Anne and her staff, a harpsichord forms part of the orchestral texture; then, organ and bell appear for the introduction of Father Joseph. Period, character, and tone are all created and developed with the choice of melody and orchestration.

Israel’s orchestration also makes room for smaller combinations of instruments and soloists. It can alternate between the chamberlike scale that introduces D’Artagnan’s home and father with the brassy fanfare for D’Artagnan himself. There also little gags made musical by Israel’s instrumentation. The little bassoon solo that accompanies the comic figure trying to escape D’Artagnan’s first fight with Rochefort at the inn. Or, when D’Artagnan has just bought his new hat in Paris, the descending glockenspiel scale that signals someone chucking out a bucket of water into the street. The same little gesture occurs again when D’Artagnan trips up on the steps of Bonacieux’s shop. The glockenspiel motif thus becomes one not just of a sight gag, but of D’Artagnan’s social embarrassment.

The greater variety provided by Israel’s orchestral forces means that, even when very familiar pieces are used, you do not get the impression of direct copy-and-paste musical assembly that you sometimes do with smaller ensembles. The melody that accompanies a scene between Queen Anne and King Louis (from Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)) is one that I’ve heard used many times over in silent film scores. (Indeed, I’m sure I’ve heard Israel use it before in his other work.) I’ve heard it reduced for a small ensemble, for a duo with piano, for… well, god knows what else; I’ve heard it well played, poorly played, indifferently recorded, badly recorded. It gets used a lot. What makes it work in Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers is hearing its proper treatment: the violin taking the melody, with strings providing an underlying rhythm, by turns consoling and agitated. The tempo modulates across the scene, quickening as the King interrogates the Queen. The strings sometimes divide into multiple parts, then settle back into their united rhythm. Brass occasionally supports the strings, either to emphasize the return of the main melody, or else to add weight to a particular beat on screen. Even in repeating the same melody, the orchestral timbre provides a shifting soundscape across the scene. What can sound thin and trite when performed by a tiny ensemble has greater depth and gravitas when rendered (as Saint-Saëns originally intended) for orchestra. Give a well-worn theme musical body, greater acoustical depth, and it assumes a kind of grandeur. Put simply, it’s nice to hear a melody written for orchestra actually played by an orchestra.

A real orchestra also makes such a difference to the sense of the film’s scale. Early in the film, D’Artagnan approaches the city that is his destination, and his destiny. There is a title card announcing, simply: “Paris—”. The extended hyphen, which I always like to see, gives us a sense of expectation. It’s as if no more need be said, for Paris is, well… Paris—! This is D’Artagnan’s first experience of Paris, and it’s our first sight of the film’s Paris sets too. It’s a moment and it demands a response from the music. Israel gives us that response. After a few bars of silence that accompanied the previous title and transition, the full orchestra enters at a rapid tempo, responding to the excitement of seeing the city’s grand gates, its tall façade of houses, its bustling streets. This is a proper sense of musical boisterousness for a scene of visual boisterousness. (Compare this with the MIDI score on the old Kino DVD, or the music offered by the Monte Alto Orchestra. Even if the choices of music had been grander, the difference in sonic scale is tremendous. Israel evokes the bustling streets of Paris, the other scores only summon small provincial marketplaces.) Israel’s orchestral forces also have a greater ability to directly reflect sound being produced on screen. Fanfares on screen are accompanied by fanfares in the orchestra. A tambourine struck on screen becomes a tambourine struck in the orchestra. It makes the world on screen more tangible, more directly translated into the sound that occupies the acoustic space of the viewer.

Part of what impressed me was also the subtler shifts of motif within individual sequences. This is music that can shift gear quickly and effectively. Sometimes, only a few bars of a piece are used before segueing to the next. For example, Comte de Rochefort is introduced with a motif from the sinfonia of Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1849). When we first see this character at the inn of Meung, we just have time to register the melody before D’Artagnan enters the scene and the music shifts. Yet the melody recurs later in the film to remind us of this moment: when D’Artagnan sees Rochefort from a window in Paris, there is the theme again—more pronounced, carrying greater orchestral (and narrative) weight. Again, the music shifts gear and moves along… Near the end of the film, for D’Artagnan’s fight with Rochefort and his men, followed by the rooftop escape with Constance, Israel again uses the motif from Luisa Miller, but segues rapidly into Berlioz’s frenetic overture Les Francs-juges (1828). The switching from motif to motif is marvellously assured and effective. It gives the impression of a continuous musical intelligence, even though it is made up of music taken from many different sources and periods.

Many times, I was struck by how Israel’s choices make the drama more… well, dramatic. Take the scene in which Richelieu tries to keep D’Artagnan talking long enough for an assassin to kill him. Richelieu’s line, “If you were about to die, what would you do?”, is invested with real weight by beat of the timpani that underscores the moment. Then the switch to a march motif, complete with snare drum and little flourishes in the brass, makes D’Artagnan’s reply as bold and brassy as it is. The climax, when D’Artagnan makes his daring escape past the Cardinal’s guards, suddenly brings in the whole orchestra swelling into D’Artagnan’s own musical theme. The music makes the moment as thrilling, charming, and satisfying as it ought to be. Switching from motif to motif, this whole sequence worked for me in a way that it never quite did with previous scores.

There is also the pleasure of recognizing pieces of music that arrive out of the blue. For example, in the final court ball sequence, we see live music and dances being played on screen. Israel’s score accompanies the scene with a delightful orchestration of a seventeenth-century melody I recognized as one of Michael Praetorius’s terpsichorean dances (c.1612). (Rechecking my CD liner notes, I find that the melody—a bourrée—originates with Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625). Praetorius collected it as part of his series of 300 dances based on popular contemporary melodies from across Europe, especially France.) There was delight in recognizing the music (a quite fabulously catchy little melody) but delight too in the way Israel’s treats it. His score offers a small-scale, period arrangement of the music, then suddenly alters to bring in brass and strings whenever the scene cuts away to exterior scenes of intrigue.

So, in summary, this is a really excellent score. More than just well selected (i.e. appropriate for what’s happening on screen), Israel’s music is warm, charming, and immediately accessible. It is intelligent and emotive, subtle when it needs to be and obvious when required. Though it matches the action through tempo and instrumentation, there are also some very pleasing moments of synchronization. (I’ve already mentioned some comic touches with the glockenspiel, but a scene that brought particular satisfaction was Rochefort’s final clash with D’Artagnan. This sees a more extensive use of Luisa Millar motif, Rochefort’s theme, and Israel times the brass perfectly with several thrusts of his sword in this last scene. It’s a really lovely touch.) Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers in fact pairs very nicely with the wonderful Carl Davis score for The Iron Mask, which is also on the Blu-ray. The latter was recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic and featured on the 1999 DVD release of the film. It’s curious that the films each have music performed by Czech orchestras (dare I say that rates are cheaper there than in the US?). Occasionally, Israel’s orchestra sounds as though it needed a couple more run-throughs to really gel. (By comparison, the Davis recording—made some quarter-century earlier—sounds not merely professional but polished.) But this is a very minor reservation indeed. Israel’s score sounds much better than many silent soundtracks, and I rejoice at being able to hear it. If only it accompanied the Film Preservation Society’s restoration of the film!

Paul Cuff