Category: Music review

Music for Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

This piece is devoted to the score arranged and orchestrated by Bernd Thewes for the 2016 restoration of Pabst’s Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927). I confess at the outset that I love this score unreservedly. I have relistened to it all the way through a dozen times, and to certain sections of it many times more. No review that I’ve read has gone into much detail about the music, which seems to me a great oversight. This piece tries to make amends for that.

The model for Thewes’s 2016 orchestral score is a piano score from the music collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This anonymous work is not an original composition, but a compilation of existing music. It was likely made in the 1930s when Iris Barry (MoMA’s curator) acquired a copy of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney from the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin. We don’t know the identity of the musician who assembled this piano score, nor does the score identify the pieces of music used within it. While there is recognizable material from familiar composers (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Verdi), much of the music remains obscure—at least to me.

What’s so pleasing about Thewes’s arrangement is that it treats the identifiable and unidentifiable pieces with equal originality. Thewes began work by dubbing the piano music to match the video of the restored film, then orchestrated the score from scratch to produce a coherent sound world that fitted the images. There is a tremendous sense of freedom in this method: the familiar and the unfamiliar are made to sound equally new. Thewes’s choice of instrumentation is key to this sense of playful recreation. To the forces of a symphony orchestra (including piano) are added electric bass, saxophone, Hammond organ, and drum set. Much like the contents of the original piano score, these forces are a blend of the classical and the popular.

One of the pleasures of listening to scores based on musical compilations is recognizing familiar pieces, and hearing how they are (re)arranged to suit the film. Two of the main themes in the film are well-known pieces by well-known composers. The piece associated with the romance between Jeanne (Édith Jéhanne) and Andreas (Uno Henning) is “June”, from Tchaikovsky’s piano suite The Seasons (op. 37a, 1875-76). In Thewes’s score, this piece—a barcarolle—becomes a warm, mellow, melancholy theme taken up by the strings and supported by the Hammond organ. The organ might suggest a matrimonial—if not religious—tone to such a piece; no doubt it does in this score, but I think the distinctive timbre of the Hammond also offers something else. Its use in prog rock and pop music brings in a very different context than a pipe organ would from the context of theatre or church. (When, in later scenes, it is used in combination with an electric base, the Hammond also brings in the context of horror films.) One might say the Hammond organ is a secular counterpart to traditional pipe organs. Its use in the orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s “June” might hint at religious matrimony but it does so only within the context of secular music: a classical melody rendered on a popular instrument. Its timbre also (to my ears) heightens the sense of melancholy. We first hear the piece when Jeanne is staring into the dark, remembering time spent with the absent Andreas; this music is not just an expression of love, but of love lost or love yet to be fulfilled.

Another recurring theme is the music used for the villain of the film, Khalibiev (played by the deliciously repellent Fritz Rasp). For this, the score uses Rachmaninov’s Prelude no. 5 in G minor (from the op. 23 preludes, 1901-03). The orchestration emphasizes the sinister, irregular gait of the music: with the equivalent of the lowest (lefthand) notes from the piano taken by the bassoon and soon strengthened with brass. Later, Thewes allows the piano to join the orchestra, turning the prelude into a kind of concerto. If the “June” motif is an unpretentious, accessible theme for the lovers, the more flamboyant (more overtly “classical”) Rachmaninov prelude reflects the sinister pretensions of Khalibiev, who poses as a kind of exiled Russian aristocrat.

Other familiar pieces in the score are more radically reworked. “The Internationale” anthem (music composed in 1888) is cited several times. This well-worn tune takes on a new dimension thanks to the way Thewes uses Hammond organ, drums, and brass in his score: there’s suddenly a narrative drive to the music, one that makes it more than a recitation of the anthem’s own themes. The melody becomes threatening (for the battle scenes), boisterous (for the Bolshevik courtroom), and celebratory (for the flashback to Jeanne’s first sight of Andreas). The variations in tempo and orchestration transform what can be a slow, turgid piece (designed for the accompaniment of text, after all, not images) into exciting, thrilling music that sounds fresh and alive.

More subtly, in the scene where Andreas is in a bar, plotting with his comrades, the score uses Tchaikovsky’s “Danse russe”, from 12 Morceaux for piano (op. 40, 1878). But the way the tempo is altered (shifting in line with the ebb and flow of conversation and movement on screen) makes the music entirely serve the film. Likewise, immediately after the above scene, excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave (op. 31, 1876) are rearranged to fit the rhythm and content of the images. Its first appearance (for the first shot of the Bolshevik forces gathering for the assault) is only a few bars from the sinister opening of the piece, but Thewes adds cymbals to subtly mimic the splash of horses galloping through the water on screen—and the added rhythm quickens the propulsion of the “march”. A few scenes later, the Marche slave’s next appearance is much in line with the original orchestration (from its finale), but after a couple of bars the organ enters to take up the rhythm: with a few deft touches, a very familiar (and much used) piece of music becomes part of the specific sound world of this score. 

Later in the film comes a piece of music whose transformation particularly struck me when first I heard it. When the newspapers announce the murder of Raymond Ney, the score uses the main theme from Verdi’s overture to La forza del destino (1862/69). It’s a very well-known piece, but in Thewes’s arrangement it took me totally by surprise. For the theme is first spelled out by the organ, supported by drums and brass before the strings enter. After this first iteration (and a fabulous diminuendo that ends in the lowest growlings of the brass), the theme is given over entirely to the organ. It’s the perfect example of making the familiar sound new. There’s more than a hint of prog about this melding of classical repertory with modern instruments (the drum kit and Hammond organ are exemplary of a prog soundscape). It makes the piece doubly new: recontextualizing it to the images of 1927 and to the worlds of both classical and popular music. And, quite simply, it’s fun.

Indeed, I should keep saying just how fun Thewes’s orchestration is throughout. To pick another moment, listen to how we are introduced to the detective agency of Raymond Ney (Adolf E. Licho) in Paris. The score uses Armas Järnefelt’s Præludium (1899-1900), a piece not now familiar for most. (After a lot of digging around trying to identify this piece, I realized that not only had I heard it before but that I actually owned it on CD. I suspect I am among a very small number of people who own a collection of Järnefelt’s work on CD, and an even smaller subset who own more than just the recent release of his music for Stiller’s Sången om den eldröda blomman (1919).) Bearing in mind that Thewes orchestrated this piece from its piano reduction, it’s remarkable how this 2016 arrangement is both similar to and distinct from the original. Thewes’s orchestration makes this charming fanfare sound more baroque than the original (with more emphasis on the bright, shiny timbre of brass). But with the addition of the saxophone, it also melds its tone into the sound world of the rest of the film. Listening to them side-by-side, I find I prefer Thewes’s orchestration to Järnefelt’s own arrangement. (Thewes removes the unnecessary pomp of Järnefelt’s cymbals and glockenspiel for the forte passages.) And the timing of the piece for the action on screen—the growling brass for Gaston’s demand for “Geld! Geld!” , the solo violin for the client’s tearful farewell to both his adulterous wife and his money—is marvellous.

But there is one section of the film that I have listened to even more times, which is when Andreas first arrives in Paris and reunites with Jeanne. This run of scenes—less than ten minutes of screen time—uses pieces of music that I have been unable to identify. Part of their charm for me is exactly this sense of the unknown, and the revelation of how beautifully arranged and orchestrated they are for the film.

The first scene in this section is of Poitra (Hans Jaray) waiting for Andreas outside the train station. The strings spell out the main melody: a simple, sweet, slow sigh. The two men great each other and, as soon as Andreas steps into the taxi, the organ takes up the main theme from the strings. When the car drives away from the station, the drums mark out the underlying beat—as though catching on to the tempo of the traffic. The camera tracks back before the car, and slowly the sense of location becomes the subject of the sequence. For here is the Gare du Nord, filling the width and height of the screen, and traffic filling the foreground. People crisscross the street. The taxi must switch lanes, weave back into view. I find it hard to say what it is about this scene that I find so moving, but I know that the music brings something out of it that is both touching and melancholy. The slow, sweet, sad melody is light music as its most winsomely romantic. I have no idea what piece it is, or who wrote it: but it bears the hallmarks of a popular tune, since it is instantly graspable, hummable, whistleable. It’s a curiously moving experience, too, to find this anonymous melody popping back into one’s head many weeks later (as it did and does into mine), and to be able to rediscover its melodic contours so easily.

The way Thewes’s arrangement handles the tune is also key to its effectiveness. I’m not normally a fan of organ scores for silent films, but I love the use of any keyboard instruments as part of an orchestral texture. For this scene, the texture of the melody is carried by the Hammond organ and—just for the last repetition of the tune—supported by a sweep of undivided strings. Its simplicity as a tune is made doubly effective by the simplicity of its rendering here: all the instruments unite for the final bars, producing a splendid sheen of sound. The presence of the Hammond organ in the midst of this piece gives the music (to my ears) a pleasingly vintage aura, summoning up a past with its warm tones. When I was a child, our neighbour (born, I think, around 1918) had a small Hammond organ at the entrance to his living room. On this, he would accompany himself singing sentimental songs from his youth of the 1930s and 40s. The Hammond organ in Thewes’ score for the melody in this Gare du Nord scene sets me in mind of this kind of popular mode: it is easy on the ear, memorable, sweet, warm. The organ was a widespread instrument in cinemas of the 1920s, and continued to be one of the few surviving aspects of live music in theatres after the arrival of sound. The instrument is thus associated with several generations of cinema sound, and its use here for this piece of (once) popular music is perfectly judged. It’s sentimental in the right way, and makes the texture of the melody more interesting than if scored simply for the sweeping strings. Purely and simply, it’s lovely. And it functions also to underline one of the pleasures of the film: seeing Paris. The sense of nostalgia in the melody also works in relation to the streets we see on screen: we are driving slowly through the past, observing the motions of the people on the street, the slow passage of the cars and trucks. The melody moves as slowly as the taxis, as the camera itself, as it tracks back through the street. It’s perfect.

For the brief scene of Jeanne at her typewriter, dreamily typing Andreas’s name before XXXX-ing it out, we hear a repeat of the melody used earlier in the film that accompanied the lovers’ last embrace in Russia. It’s like the melody is her counterpart to the dreaminess of the tune that greets Andreas at the station. And, like the previous melody, Thewes orchestrates this piece so that it’s a delightfully simplified sweep of sound—the organ this time rounding out the last iteration of the theme (as if repaying the compliment from the previous scene, where the orchestra took over from it at the end).

Next, we cut to Khalibiev and Raymond Ney. Khalibiev is holding a bouquet of flowers, and now Gabrielle (Brigitte Helm) appears. In the score, a delicious combination of piano, harp, and strings sound out a skipping, nervous, innocent melody as she approaches. It’s perfect for Gabrielle, whose naïve trustfulness of Khalibiev almost unnerves the latter. Pabst provides us with an amazing close-up of Gabrielle, staring wide-eyed into the camera. We share Khalibiev’s perspective, gazing at this beautiful face with its gleaming eyes. (Hear how the strings end their phrase with a lovely diminuendo, climbing higher before fading away.) “I’m so happy!” says Gabrielle to Jeanne, and the music has been telling us this already. But beware Khalibiev! The presence of the piano in the orchestration here reminds us of Khalibiev’s own theme, and the way this instrument tends to rumble out from the brass and take it over. And Jeanne’s worried glance at Khalibiev coincides with another melting-away of the main theme in the strings: even when the melodic line is cheerful, the placement of each phrase can carry such subtle shifts in emphasis.

Outside, Poitra is waiting with the car. (Observe here how a cat walks into frame and sits, with perfect timing and placement in the corner of the frame, just before the handheld camera pans left to see the two women emerge from Ney’s building. It’s one of those lovely unplanned moments that comes from filming on location.) The main theme—a four note phrase, with an emphasis, like an excited skip, on the second note—is taken up by the strings. Pabst cuts to a long shot of the whole street. You can see the long flight of steps behind the alley, and the sun throws swathes of light and dark between the buildings. It’s a lovely image, with depth of focus and composition: here again Paris becomes the subject of the scene.

The women get into the back of the cab, which has its roof down to let in the sun. Poitra has with him a little posy of flowers, which he looks at, then throws over his shoulder to Jeanne in the back. The music is so perfectly timed here, swelling in volume in time with Poitra’s gesture. (Again, the melodic content is a simple repetition of material, but the tempo allows the beginning and ending of phrases to make an impact.) The cab sets off and the saxophone takes up the main melody. To me, the saxophone feels delightfully in keeping with both the easy melody and the sense of time and place on screen (and, thus, the emotions of the characters who inhabit it). Pabst’s camera sits facing the two women, each holding their flowers, Gabrielle clutching at Jeanne with her free hand. In the background, the shaded walls and sunlit road flash by. “Are we flying?” asks the enraptured Gabrielle. “Yes, we’re flying—into bliss!”

Listen to the joyful way the music transitions here: brass and drums take over the impetus of the melody, then beat out a faster rhythm. It’s as if the orchestra has warmed up, has broken into a run or a dance. For a few seconds, it’s just the brass and drums, rumbling around in a repeated refrain. It’s like the bumpy road that shakes them around in the cab. It’s the quickened heartbeat of the separated lovers. It’s the excitement of an anticipated meeting. And it’s the premonition of the bustle of the underground club that now appears on screen: for we see Khalibiev descend into the bar where he meets Margot (Hertha von Walther).

Pabst creates a marvellous sense of space here: behind the bar is a huge mirror, reflecting the spiral staircase from above, down which Khalibiev speeds. The orchestra switches to a swinging, brassy, almost tipsy melody. It’s the change in tempo and rhythm, as much as the textural one, that makes the contrast between this scene and that last so effective. The transition between one “cue” and the next itself becomes a chance to switch the orchestration, to emphasize a different texture and mood. Without the score in front of me (and not recognizing the music being used), it’s difficult to know precisely how the original score changes here. Listening to it multiple times, I almost feel that the music for Khalibiev is a kind of parodic distortion of the melody used for Jeanne in the cab. Certainly, it feels as though the first melody—sweet and sentimental—slowly morphs into its boisterous, unbuttoned sequel. The way Thewes orchestrates this shift makes it a perfect match for the images.

In the bar (to a foursquare, oom-pah-oom-pah, beat in the brass), Khalibiev flirts with Margot, orders two liqueurs, and downs his in one. Khalibiev stares at Margot. Pabst gives us a huge close-up of her face, her dark brows and eyes a kind of counterpart to the pale, luminous face and eyes of Gabrielle in the earlier scene. Having been bewildered by Gabrielle, able only to ghost a kiss on her forehead, Khalibiev now grabs Margot and plants a kiss on her brow—then marches back up the stairs, just as the rumbunctious brass rounds off its melody with a flourish.

Andreas is waiting on a bridge by an entrance to the park. (The place we see them visit is the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.) He turns round, waiting anxiously for Jeanne. The organ, too, sounds out an anxious, excited tremolo. (It’s a kind of acoustic equivalent of an impatient tapping of the foot.) As Pabst cuts to a long shot of the road curving round towards Andreas’ position, the organ begins the melody that defines this next sequence: a quick, delightful, tripping tune that expresses the excitement of the lovers’ reunion. It is swiftly joined by the drums (at first very softly, then with a rattling of a tambourine), these added textures bringing out the sense of giddy fun in the music. For Andreas is leaping at the sight of Jeanne’s car, waving his arms and running towards her—and Pabst begins cutting between parallel tracking shots that follow the lovers. The strings join in, filling in the harmony, strengthening the melody. The organ skips along with the rhythm, while the drums spell out an excited beat underneath—brass occasionally rounding-out the theme. I love, simply love, the mix of texture of timbre that this combination produces: the fizz of the drum set, the deep warble and light chirping of the organ, the sweet richness of the strings. It’s almost silly it’s so delightful. And the scene itself is likewise sillily winsome as the characters rush madly toward one another.

But for their actual meeting, everything slows down, stops. The melody of their courtship—Tchaikovsky’s “June”—floats in on woodwind, supported by wistful strings. And despite their energy, the lovers don’t end their respective journeys with a climactic embrace. Instead, Andreas doffs his cap, and they walk side by side, slowly, into the gardens. It’s strangely innocent, as though neither is quite ready to express their desires. The music waylays our expectations, reminds us of the lovers’ troubled past and uncertain future.

After cutting back to the car, to glimpse Poitra alone with Gabrielle, Pabst’s camera finds the lovers atop an artificial grotto in the park. It’s glorious to see across the rooftops of Paris: you can even match the same image to that of today’s skyline (which, thanks to the city’s ban on tall buildings in its centre, remains much the same as it was in 1927). The image of Jeanne and Andreas makes literal the sense of their elated state in each other’s company. They are (quite literally) on high. But it also carries an implied danger of their fall, of their togetherness being precarious. The music here repeats the same material heard in earlier scenes with the lovers (their last embrace in Russia; Jeanne’s daydream at her typewriter). Again, it is dominated by the tone of the saxophone, which floats over the strings. The orchestration is easy on the ear, but the use of the saxophone gives it a feeling not just of light music but of period light music. It’s a nod to the film’s setting and belonging to the 1920s.

Finally, I must finish with a comment on the last scenes in the film, set on a train as Jeanne wrests the incriminating evidence from Khalibiev. By way of prelude, I should note that the eponymous novel (by Ilya Ehrenburg) on which the film is based has the characters zipping about all over Europe on trains. Even if the film eliminates some of this journeying back and forth, there is more than one scene on a train and Thewes’s orchestration contains distinctive elements for these scenes. He includes percussive instruments, but ones that evoke something more than the simple sounds of coaches rumbling over tracks. Before Andreas is arrested, he is alone in a train carriage. He has just spent the night and morning with Jeanne and their new life beckons. In eighteen seconds of screen time, the score makes us sense everything around and within him. The melody is bright and peppy (it’s another piece I don’t recognize), made brighter and peppier by the addition of drums, bell, and triangle to the orchestra. The quick rhythm of the drums and triangle suggests not just the motion of the train but a kind of inner rhythm of the character: you can sense his joy as he sits, almost fidgety with energy, on the seat and smiles. And the fact that the view through the train window is of dappled trees, the light spilling across Andreas’s beaming face, likewise gives a visual sense of brightness and joy; the same sense of brightness and joy given to the music by the rhythm of drums and the sparks of the triangle.

The regular sounding of the bell harks back to the lovers’ morning, spent walking through Paris and at one point entering a church where they—all too briefly—link hands before the altar. It’s not a wedding, but the promise of a union together. Thewes included the bell in the musical climax for this earlier scene, and now it appears in this scene on the train as a reminder: it’s as if Andreas is summoning the sound of bells in his head, and we can hear it.

All this feeds into the final scene of Jeanne and Khalibiev on the train. Just as Jeanne tries to convince Khalibiev to help her, the two locals in their compartment proffer them sausages and bread. It’s a delightfully farcical way to increase the tension. And the score enters into the farcical spirit. The melody used at this point is a chirrupy, almost childish little theme. Thewes lets the woodwind carry this theme, with the rhythm backed up by the drums. The addition of the bell as a regular chime in this scene, as well as making the simple melody more musically interesting, has an ironic function in that it reminds us of the bell’s presence in earlier scenes: the wedding-like vision in the Paris church, Andreas’s private joy in the train carriage. There’s also a sense of a chiming clock, as if to remind us (musically) of impending deadlines: Jeanne must get the information from Khalibiev before it’s too late. Thus, this amusingly rustic tune functions to underline both the comedy of the scene and the dramatic tension underlying it. Like the scene itself, the music is a kind of elaboration of a simple theme, its function to produce tension by slowing things down at the moment when we want things to hurry up. It’s like the two locals come are humming their own tune, heedless of the drama they suspend by their presence.

After the climax, in which Jeanne wrestles with Khalibiev and finds the missing jewel, there is an extended hiatus before we reach the “end”. The film fades to black, but the black screen continues for another forty seconds until the title “ENDE” appears. Why? (This is not, as far as I am aware, a restorative choice, but the original ending as chosen in 1927.) It’s as if the blank space here—temporal, aesthetic—is a kind of inner space for Jeanne to savour her joy. So we sit in the dark, her blissful smile the last image in our mind’s eye, and the orchestra keeps playing; that it does so shows respect, sympathy even, for the black screen. This hiatus is also a chance for the music to wind down, to relax after the tension of the last scene. The music here derives from the same piece used for the earlier scene at the church, so it’s as if the score is reliving the past—and envisioning the future of the lovers. It makes the ending more complex, somehow, more resonant. And, from my point of view, it nicely refocuses our attention back on the score itself. It deserves to have the last say.

Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney is a film I had seen many years ago but never appreciated. Perhaps one reason is the quality of its earlier incarnation on DVD. That version, released in 2001 by Kino, featured a score by Timothy Brock. Revisiting this now, I am reminded how oddly subdued it feels compared to the film—and most especially to the 2016 score. It’s not just the tone of the music but the quality of the performance and recording. Produced for an earlier release (presumably VHS or even laserdisc) in 1992, the Brock score is performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. This group also recorded other Brock scores for Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Sunrise (1927) in the early 1990s. I love Brock’s score for Faust, but the recording for the soundtrack doesn’t do it justice. The Olympia Chamber Orchestra is an irregular ensemble rather than a professional orchestra. Their performance is perfectly adequate, but I can imagine a far sharper, more convincing rendering. (Frankly, the playing—especially the strings—is sometimes a bit ragged. Too often the ensemble sounds out of sync, if not actually out of tune, and the dull recording hardly helps.)

The production values for the new restoration of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney belong to a different league altogether. Recorded in February 2017 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, with Frank Strobel conducting the WDR Funkhausorchester Köln, the soundtrack for the Blu-ray is superb. Both the orchestral performance and the sound recording are exemplary. (I should namecheck the sound engineers listed in the credits: Rolf Lingenberg and Walter Platte.) This is the kind of result you can get when proper resources are fed into a film restoration.

My deepest thanks go to Bernd Thewes for answering my questions on his work on this score. This piece can only be a small expression of how much joy his music has brought me.

Paul Cuff

Das Blumenwunder (1926; Ger.; Max Reichmann)

In 1921, the chemical corporation Badische Anilin und Sodafabrik (BASF) sponsored the production of a new film. BASF had bankrolled several short films with heart-poundingly exciting titles like Die Anwendung und Wirkung neuzeitlicher Luftstickstoffdüngemittel (“The application and effect of modern atmospheric nitrogen fertilizers”, 1921) and Mais-Düngungsversuch mit und ohne Stickstoff (“Maize fertilization trial with and without nitrogen”, 1923). But the film they undertook in 1921 was of a more elaborate scale and length than these earlier experimental/documentary works. At BASF’s studio-cum-laboratory in Ludwigshafen (south-west Germany), various varieties of seed were planted and painstakingly photographed, exposing one frame of celluloid at a time over a series of days, weeks, and months. It would take five years to complete this process. BASF joined forces with the Unterrichts-Film-Gesellschaft (“Film Teaching Society”) and hired an up-and-coming director to shoot additional footage and assemble the resulting material. (BASF were clearly the lead partner in all this: the chemical corporation had produced more films than the film company they engaged.) The director was Max Reichmann, who had worked as a production assistant on four of E.A. Dupont’s films: Der Mann aus Neapel (1921), Kämpfende Welten (1922), Sie und die Drei (1922), and Varieté (1925). At this end of this apprentice period, he directed two feature films—Verkettungen (1924) and Der Kampf gegen Berlin (1925)—before finishing BASF’s plant film. To BASF’s laboratory footage was added a framing narrative and ballet sequences, including some complex dissolves from plant to human movement. More than a film made for publicity or instruction (hardly counting as “cinematic” at all), this creation would be a feature-length spectacle. The stop-motion photography was the main attraction, but the film could now boast the dancers of the Berlin Staatsoper and a specially-composed score by the successful operetta composer Eduard Künneke. The film was premiered at the Piccadilly theatre in February 1926 and created quite a sensation. And what’s more, it still does…

Das Blumenwunder (1926; Ger.; Max Reichmann)

Part One. The orchestra puts its best foot forward, and we leap into the spectacle. A garden, young girls running. They dance, then pick and fight over blossom. The music is rhythmic, boisterous, stylish, skittish, jazzy. But the severing of the flowers marks a chance in tempo, mood.

A ghostly figure appears, dissolving through the wall of foliage at the rear of the scene. She is Flora “protector of the flowers” (Maria Solveg). She explains that the flowers have life, just like the girls: “in blooming and withering they have the same feelings as you”. “Man’s rhythm of life is the pulse, the chasing of blood cells.” Flora takes the arm of a child and places her fingers on the wrist. The orchestra slows, and a trumpet gently marks out the pulse of blood. Then the timpani take over: the pulse moves deeper into the body of the orchestra. The child’s wrist moves slowly towards the camera, until the flesh begins to blur.

The film cuts to a microscopic view of veins, then—as the strings in the orchestra slide and glisten—a shot of blood plasma slipping through tissue. It’s an extraordinary interruption of the infinitesimal, the scientific, the biological, into the wider world of the film. It’s at once disturbing, extraordinary, and magical. The whole screen is filled with the intimate pulsing of life, the cinema with the warm pulse of the orchestra.

We draw back into the human scene. Flora looks up, bids the children watch the clock. We see the hands speed up, race around the dial: hours, then days glide past. “One day in the life of man is a second in the life of a flower”, she says. “The miracle of flowers will bloom before you.” And so they do. As the orchestra swells, flowers grow from the base of the screen to its summit. The buds dip and rise, like fanfaring trumpets. And just as the spectacle seems set to take off, it’s the End of Part One.

Part Two. Tobacco plants lower and raise their leaves, each lowering and raising (we are told) taking place over a 24-hour period. But each 24 hours are seconds on screen. The three plants lift, strain, grow, burgeon before our eyes. It’s a gorgeously surreal chorus line, the orchestra rising in crescendo, pulsing and growing in time to the plants.

Then we see bean sprouts, the downward progress of their roots as the stem wriggles aboveground, turning 90 degrees when the box is turned. Künneke’s music shifts gear, becomes a kind of slow dance. The bean’s shoot coils around a pole, crawling its way clockwise, up and up. Even when a pair of hands tries to rewind it in the other direction, it breaks free of this imposed rhythm and winds clockwise once more. It reaches the top. The orchestra rings out. The beanstalk wiggles. It’s like the plant is taking a bow.

The banana leaf; ferns. The orchestra is also in a kind of slow-motion, reaching for a rhythm as the plants unfurl. But the vine grows quickly, reaching out to each new support: so the strings skittishly feel out a new rhythm. Another shift. The vine starts growing, lifting its heavy burden of spreading leaves. The orchestra slows, introduces a wrenching little melody for the lead violin. Suddenly the plant seems anthropomorphic: look at it stretching out, clasping at the new support, straining its sinews to reach a higher position. “It grows beyond the last support, with nothing more to cling to.” So tells us an intertitle, as if introducing us to its death. And so the next title finishes the thought: “The vines desperately circle alone, vainly seeking support, they languish and die.” But then we realize that the plant is cleverer than that, for it starts to curl and reach back to an earlier support, “where life is still possible”. We’ve seen a kind of thought process, a vegetal exercise in logic and self-preservation. So too in the next shot, where we see a vine drawing the lengths of string supports closer together to make its journey easier. Now vines clasp one another, dancing around the rival spaces: the camera cuts back to a wider shot so we can follow the upward battle for each vine. End of Part Two.

“Musical Interlude”. The music repeats that wrenching little melody, led by the solo violin. It’s slow, sweet, sad. The score is creating a mood, a feeling. With only the dark screen to see, we are now simply listening to the secret life of plants; is the film asking us to imagine our own images with the music, to reflect on what we’ve seen so far? The slow, sad dance winds to a halt.

Part Three. No titles, just the glittering sound of music—glissando strings, harp, gentle woodwind—to set up the next scenes. Flowers unfold, bloom white and green against the black background. Purplish stems sprout tiny blossoms. The music reaches for high, unsettling extremes; now the leaves are dancing, and the music turns rustic, a countrified dance. Here are bluish buds, curtseying, doffing their leaves. New growths wiggle, circle, shimmer, tremble. They seem to grow faster. Fade to black. The music dies.

Greenish shoots from the soil. The pulse of low strings. Solo woodwinds seek out a melody, test out a rhythm. The flowers look sleepy, dopey. It takes them an age to raise their buds. Fade to black, before they quite bloom in full. A strange, solo shoot—and a dissolve to a dancer, flowing white dress, mimicking the growth of the flower. A succession of close-ups, flowers trumpeting toward the lens.

Shoots fall over the side, bud slowly, change shape a dozen times. Flowers nod together, perform collective awakenings. Another solo dance, flower dissolving to dancer, dancer to flower. It’s hypnotically beautiful. A mass of buds, flowers that slowly fill the screen, that grow stranger and more extraordinary as the shot continues. End of Part Three.

Part Four. Flowers that open and shut, that wither, that die. The life of plants, their struggle, their disintegration. Flowers with skirts, which become a troupe of dancers. The dancers are now in slow-motion, performing impossible manoeuvres on their toes, leaping as if weightless. So entranced am I that I don’t question the continuity between flowers and dancers, between stop-motion and slow-motion, between days-between-frames and microseconds-between-frames.

The music slows. There’s that pulse in the timpani. It’s almost funereal, that beat below the strings. The progress of leaves, of petals, of stamen. It’s agonizingly slow, this sped-up motion of the flowers. It’s a ballet created by removing days, weeks, years’ worth of time—and yet time seems to be suspended. The camera manages to track around some flowers, to capture their slowness with an even slower repositioning. Another dancer; combined with the tinting and toning (dark brown tone, turquoise tint), the sheen of his robes becomes surreally bright, surreally three-dimensional. Flowers seem to gesture, and the film cuts to a man gesturing—his movements as rapid as those of the flowers. A sunflower grows, lifts its shoulders, reveals its mane of petals. The orchestra responds. We watch the tiny ripples of its seeds. Poppies grow; a dancer wakes from sleep, reaches out her arms, shows off the veils of her sleeves; so too do the poppies, before their petals unfurl, fall, disappear. End of Part Four.

Prelude to Act Five. The music is more forceful, louder, the beat of timpani and brass spelling out some impending drama. “The song of coming-to-be and passing away.” A dancer appears, that same sheen of turquoise over the rich black-brown of the space behind them. The coming drama is spelt out in his mime: he rises, struggles, dies. The plants’ lives are spelt out in a few seconds each: they wrench themselves up from parental branches, expand to their fullest; they flinch, tremble, curl up, diminish, die. The music offers a fanfare, then a melancholy waltz, then a tender farewell. Each new plant comes before the lens, lives and fades. A multi-headed cactus performs life and death five times, each stem collapsing one after the other, each flower dying one after the other. ENDE

What a treat to discover a film by chance, and to discover it’s a little gem. I first saw mention of this film thanks to the German Wikipedia page on Eduard Künneke, which listed among his film scores Das Blumenwunder (the music for which was later rearranged into orchestral suites). I was delighted to find that a DVD was available, issued by ARTE in the wake of their restoration and broadcast of the film in the 2010s. The music was originally arranged for a smaller ensemble, but the restoration uses Künneke’s later, expanded, version for larger orchestra as its basis. It sounds lovely, full of energy, melody, and deft orchestral touches. It’s light music, but in its best sense: its transparent, generous, captivating. It works wonderfully well with the images, and by the last sections of the film—which function mostly without intertitles—the music takes up all the sense of narrative and emotive expression. As I wrote on my earlier piece on Das Weib des Pharao (1922), the music of Künneke is well worth investigating: he offers a glimpse into the soundworld of the 1920s: light, popular music, infused with elements of jazz and dance. It’s remarkable in itself that two of his scores should have survived and been recorded for issue on home media. Confusingly, both filmportal.de and the German Wikipedia page also list among Künneke’s work a film score for the German-British co-production A Knight in London / Eine Nacht in London (1928), directed by Lupu Pick. However, the two sites differ on their info for the latter film: filmportal.de claims the music was by Künneke, Wikipedia claims the composer was Giuseppe Becce. In either case, the film is unavailable to view and the score—whoever wrote it—is among the many that of the silent era that languishes in obscurity.

Das Blumenwunder was released as a kind of “culture film”, designed to attract critical attention. It certainly did, and not just from film critics. The many reviews (cited in Blankenship, 2010) focused on the revelatory way the film showed the (normally unnoticed or invisible) movement of plants. If some claimed the film belonged in the classroom and not the cinema, others were more generous. Rudolf Arnheim called the film “an uncanny discovery of a new living world in a sphere in which one had of course always admitted life existed but had never been able to see it in action.” The plants, he said, “were suddenly and visibly enrolled in the ranks of living beings. One saw that the same principles applied to everything, the same code of behaviour, the same difficulties, the same desires” (Film as Art, 136). The expressionist writer Oskar Loerke noted in his diary:

Das Blumenwunder […] was a first-class experience. Unbelievable. The film nearly proves the existence of everything supernatural. When one sees the growth and life of plants that have another tempo from that of people, every order becomes imaginable—even slower tempos or faster ones, which are not perceptible to us because of this difference. (qtd in Blankenship)

As Janelle Blankenship explains, the film did well enough to be shown on numerous other occasions by various interested organizations:

[Das] Blumenwunder was promoted by the League of Nations, screened in England at a social meeting of the Anglo-German Academic Bureau at the University of London, University College, and praised by Welsh writer and novelist Berta Ruck, among others. The film was also a ‘special sightseeing attraction’ at an ‘expo-cinema’ during the 1927 horticulture congress in Leipzig, and was screened as a horticultural film at a monthly meeting of the garden club ‘Verein zur Beförderung des Gartenbaues in den königlich preussischen Staaten, Deutsche Gartenbau-Gesellschaft’ in 1926.

Thankfully, the film was also preserved in the archives and the DVD edition presents it in excellent visual and audio quality. (Though I should add that—at least on my machine—a few of the intertitles lack the English subtitles otherwise presented throughout.) The DVD also prefaces the film with some explanatory text: we learn that Das Blumenwunder was originally 1755m (c.65 minutes) but the only copy that was preserved runs to 1664m (60 minutes). What is missing is unclear, but given it’s only a small percentage of the overall runtime we must be grateful that more wasn’t lost. The DVD includes a pdf of the original booklet issued at the premiere. Rather delightfully, the edge of each page is formed of individual frames from the film, showing you a frame-by-frame account of the growth of the flowers.

Das Blumenwunder is a visual delight, as well as a musical delight—and I’ve found myself relistening to the score three times already since watching the film for the first time at the weekend. For me, Das Blumenwunder was a real treat to discover.

Paul Cuff

References

Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: California UP, 2006).

Janelle Blankenship, “Film-Symphonie vom Leben und Sterben der Blumen”: Plant Rhythm and Time-Lapse Vision in Das Blumenwunder”, Intermédialités 16 (2010): 83–103. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7202/1001957ar

Music for October (1928; USSR; Sergei Eisenstein/Grigori Aleksandrov)

Until recently, it was most common to see silent Soviet films via the versions circulated by Mosfilm or Gosfilmofond that originated in the late 1960s-70s. There is a familiar kind of soundtrack: a giant orchestra, crammed into a thin mono recording. In these confines, the music seems to warp and wobble rather than reverberate. The scores tend to be aggressive, brooding, threatening—with the noise of real gunfire thrown in for good measure. They often sound like cobbled-together Shostakovich (and sometimes are) but more often feature music by a composer you’ve never heard of whose name is uncertainly transliterated from Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet in the “restoration” credits. (Did the composer of the 1969 score for Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg (1927) wish to be called “Yurovsky” or “Lurovski”? I still don’t know. Confusingly, his son—the conductor Michail Jurowski—went by a different spelling, as do the conductor’s own sons, also both conductors.) Some of these Soviet recordings have very effective, and affecting, passages. The opening few minutes of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1927)—in a restoration from 1973(?)—is among my favourite in all Soviet cinema: super slow-motion riders pass before a screen of trees, as a hushed, yearning pulse of music flows beneath. Image and sound grip you instantly. It’s a hauntingly beautiful opening shot. (The rest of the film rather loses me.)

But the film historian is on dodgy ground with these 60s-70s versions. The way these copies are curated for our use severely interferes with their historical status. Where are the original credits? Are these the original titles? Is there any missing footage? And what of the music? Were scores assembled especially for the films? Was the music original or arranged? Was it any good?

These questions are commonly asked about many works of musical theatrical history. Take opera, for instance. I was recently relistening to Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (1841). No single edition of this grand opera is “definitive”, in the sense that it underwent continual editing throughout its time on stage. Even during rehearsals, music would be cut or added or rewritten. Sometimes, this complex, often last-minute work was too much for Halévy himself, so he outsourced parts of the orchestration (or even the composition itself) to an assistant. New arias were inserted at the behest of singers, new passages of intermediary music at the behest of stage managers. And all this was without any of the score being printed in full. The “performing edition” of the work would exist across a wide range of documents: parts for the orchestra, the conductor, the composer. Many of these would be notated only in shorthand, overlaid with numerous manuscript corrections or instructions from conductor or composer as they worked on the production. Once the run of performances had ended, this array of paperwork would end up in various collections, often being scattered in the process. If the opera was produced elsewhere, it would undergo further changes and produce further paper trails. Even if all of this paperwork survived, the result is a kind of collective palimpsest with competing and conflicting evidence for what the score should be. Thus, there are always editorial choices to be made with historical material. The musical content of La reine de Chypre shifted across time, never being the same from one season to the next. So when the opera was “restored” in the 2010s, there was a huge range of choice regarding what music to include or exclude from the recording. (There would also, inevitably, be budgetary considerations: recording all the various possible numbers, even for an appendix on a bonus CD, would dramatically increase the cost of the project.) So when a new “performing edition” was created and then the recorded in 2017, a lot of music that survived in various sources was excluded (the overture, the ballet, the gondoliers’ chorus…).

This complex textual history is paralleled in the world of silent film music. Even if an original score existed, its survival is subject to all the same processes as might affect an opera score: different editions of the film for different markets, or for subsequent revivals; paperwork for different scores produced by different musicians for different cinemas etc. It follows that the question of a silent film’s musical restoration is as complex as that for its visual restoration. But how often does the same level of attention get paid to the music as to the image? And how often is this issue of musical reconstruction even acknowledged or addressed by the studios who own the films or the companies that release them on DVD? Whereas the Palazetto Bru Zane release of La reine de Chypre on CD in 2018 is accompanied by a fabulous book, including essays on the work’s genesis, reception, and textual history, most silent films do not get anything like this kind of documentation. Instead, there is the familiar blurb boasting “original versions” of this, and “complete restorations” of that. The word “original” and “complete” are rarely qualified, and even in cases where they are most appropriate, they never tell the whole story.

In relation to October (1928), the work of Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) and Bernd Thewes (b.1957) is an interesting case in point. Thankfully, the Edition filmmuseum DVD (2014) is as good as it gets when it comes to documentation. All the issues mentioned thus far are addressed, qualifying the selling point of this edition as featuring “the original orchestral score by Edmund Meisel”. As Richard Siedhoff writes in the liner notes:

[O]nly the torso of Edmund Meisel’s body of film music survives. Not only was the archiving of films and music not common practice at the time, but with the ascendancy of sound films, interested in the music of silent film composers waned precipitously. In the few cases where the ‘original music’ for silent films has survived at all, it is only as piano sheet music or as incomplete, handwritten orchestra parts. Musical directors in cinemas used the piano music as ersatz scores, since they were easier to work with than full scores. So full scores were almost never printed and when a film was no longer in distribution, the orchestra parts were stored somewhere or sometimes simply destroyed. […] [W]hat we have of [Meisel’s] film music comes from piano sheets, for which new instrumental arrangements have been written, and which have been adapted, re-arranged, lengthened and re-defined for longer versions of a film.

This is an orchestral score for October, but one whose orchestration has had to be rearranged by a different composer. It is both a score by Edmund Meisel and a score by Bernd Thewes. Not having a complete picture of how Meisel arranged his music, we must give credit to Thewes for filling out the sound world that survives on Meisel’s extant staves. What we have now likely offers a much better listening experience than for audiences in 1928. As Siedhoff writes of Meisel’s scores: “Prepared in a great hurry at the time, they are riddled with mistakes. Working from them in live performance must have ranged from torture to total chaos.” And while Meisel worked with Eisenstein’s approval on both Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October, Eisenstein would ultimately break off contact with the composer over the presentation of October (claiming Meisel had it projected deliberately slowly to aid his music).

So, talking about the way this music sounds when performed is a complex issue. I do no propose to write a piece on the whole film and score: it would exhaust me to write it as much as it would you to read it. Besides, while the film is a baroquely dazzling exercise in filmmaking, it wears me out after about 45 minutes. The images are always superb, but the drama loses me. This is where music can make such a difference. The Meisel/Thewes score for October kept me engaged musically even when my interest in the drama dwindled.

I want to write about the sequence which seemed to me the best combined use of image and music in the film—or rather, the scene where this combination gave me the greatest pleasure. It begins about 25 minutes into the film and shows Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, heading into the Winter Palace to assume his office.

We see three men, their backs to us, advance down the hall. The shot is slightly undercranked, so that they seem to waddle at speed rather than walk or march. The first shot doesn’t show their faces, and in the second shot they are so small as to lack features. Eisenstein makes them tiny in the palatial spaces, miniscule dictators. Meisel knows the scene for what it is: it’s comic, absurd, playful. It’s also repetitive and surreal. We see the endless columns, the endless arches, the endless steps, and the figures’ endless movement along and up, and up—and up. So Meisel spells out a musical beat that is both steady, banal, but almost too fast: it’s as though we can hear the men waddling at speed through the score. And Meisel/Thewes knows exactly how to get the best out of the rhythm. Below pizzicato strings, the main two-note figure of this section is played on the trombone, an instrument whose low, slightly bluff sonic roundness gets a lot of use in comedic film scores. The performance (I cannot speak of the score as written or notated) plays this up: there is a certain sliding in the transition between notes, giving this simple beat a sense of being out of breath, ever so slightly out of balance. The shape of the beat (descending phrases: one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four) suggests a kind of effortful trudge as much as a triumphant march.

Then, as we cut from a title (“The dictator”) to a closer view—but again from the rear—the strings take up the two-note step of the beat and the trombone and brass start to warm up into a kind of fanfare, supported now by the martial crash of drums. The trio of generals ascend the stairs.

Another title: “Commanders-in-chief…”. So now the strings develop the beat into a melody, albeit equally simple and just as repetitive. They are supported by the snare drums and, deep below them, the great blast of the tuba. It’s a pleasingly bombastic development of the initial musical idea, but it’s still deliberately simple—you can spell out the one-two-three-four of the beat, the tuba joining in for the first and third note. The tuba has the same role as the trombone in the first few bars of the scene, only it now amplifies the pompous oom-pah, oom-pah rhythm of the generals’ footsteps.

For the generals are now ascending a giant marble staircase, and Eisenstein distends the time it takes them to climb. First we have a long shot from the right side, looking left; then a title completes the information begun in the previous text: “…of the army and navy”, before a view from the left of the staircase repeats the same pattern of movement. Up the stairs they go, as the music builds in volume. (Another title: “Prime Minister”). Eisenstein cuts closer, but again so that we see only the backs of the commanders. At this point, the snare drums double their speed below the rhythm of the brass, as if to say: keep going! keep going! The trombones are now given a delicious upward swing to keep step with the drums’ quickened pulse.

Having cut closer, Eisenstein then cuts further away: the officers are still ascending, and it becomes clear that he’s making them repeat the same steps as at the end of the previous shot. As he does so often in October, Eisenstein uses montage to make successive shots overlap in time: space is made subservient to time. Just as we start to appreciate how elaborately the upward march of the generals is developing, an intertitle cuts in: “And so on, and so on, and so on.” But the text, too, becomes a visual joke: you read it from top to bottom, each line successively indented so that the phrases take the form of steps. Disconcertingly, you are reading the text from left to right, top to bottom, while each line moves further to the left as you go down: the way we read the text is moving in the opposite direction to the way the figures are moving on screen. It’s an extraordinarily complex visual/textual joke, and a brilliant way to make the intertitles graphic in a meaningful way.

Cut back to the stairs, now viewed from another angle, and this time we see the generals from the front for the first time. We cut from the stairs to the statues that overlook the figures. Stone hands hold out crowns of laurel, and the cutting seems both to join in with the march but also break it, or even to anticipate its culmination at the top. “The hope of the Fatherland and the revolution—” a title announces, and the statues are seen from below, from disconcerting angles, mirroring one another, as if they might topple over us. After the next title: “A.F. Kerensky”, we finally get a close-up of a human face. But this too is disconcerting, threatening, surreal. For it breaks the rhythm of ascent, the continuity being built up (however playfully) in the previous shots: here is Kerensky glowering down into the camera, leaning brow-first into the lens, the angle of his head and the side lighting transforming his face into a kind of arrow pointing at us. Eisenstein cuts to the statues bearing laurels, and a train of thought seems to dance across the screen—for Kerensky breaks into a smile, but a smile made sinister by the deep shadow in which it is formed.

And now—well over a minute into the sequence—we finally see the top of the stairs! A line of lackies looms from the shadows in this cavernous space, a space which—though we have seen so many shots of its details—surreally escapes our full comprehension. How exactly is the staircase arranged? Is there one set of steps, or are two sets of steps facing each other? And where are the steps leading? How high have we climbed, how many flights of steps?

“The Tsar’s lackeys”, a title announces. (And the film’s titles are always faintly sarcastic, mocking, whenever they aren’t slogans or exclamations or punctuation points.) A large man, whose uniform bulges with his bulk, steps forward—and the statues seem to look down on him, the statuary of the imperial past, the dark columns made defy gravity by the camera’s tilted angle. There are salutes seen from close, from afar, from close; time overlaps, gestures overlap, formalities pile into one another, pile onto one another. Their handshake takes an age, it’s captured in one, two, three, four, five different shots—emphasizing the lacky’s subservience, Kerensky’s effort to look imposing, and (cumulatively) the sheer awkwardness of a handshake that lasts this long.

Kerensky moves on, and the musical rhythm shifts once again. It grows in subdivision, the same foursquare beat now marked with the tuba spelling out all four notes in the bar. And listen to the strings in conjunction with the added brass: there’s such a glorious swing to the way the music is played, sounded out. The bright notes of a glockenspiel punctuate the rhythm; the notes are like shining medals, buttons or baubles catching the light. And it’s a marker of how beautifully orchestrated the sequence has become: listen to the sense of acoustic depth here, from the dark blasts of the tuba, through the swell of strings, the rasp of snare drums, up to the gleam of the glockenspiel. It’s such an intelligent piece of musical texture. You sense both the cavernous space of the hall, the near-dark extremities of the palace—and also the sheen of manservants’ buttons, the jingle of medals on the lackey’s chest.

“What a democrat!” the title says, as more handshaking takes place. Every servant is greeted, every servant nods happily to the next. The shaking is seen in close-up, from a distance, from close-up, from a distance… It’s an endless sequence made even more endless the way time and space overlap, the way the editing repeats and moves restlessly back and forth. And all the while, the orchestra is growing in volume, warming to its swing. It’s still the same, simple idea: four ascending notes that are repeated (one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four), followed by a three-note phrase that rounds off the tune. Thus, even the music (like that earlier intertitle) spells out the steps and (in its last three-note phrase) a kind of subservient bow, a satisfied execution of an about-turn before the four notes of the march climb once again. Both the visual and the musical halves of this scene could be extended forever, ad infinitum. Only the little variations keep it all building: visually, there are the various stages of the staircase, the titles, the lackeys that give the repetition a kind of crescendo; and musically, the tempo shifts and orchestration build the simple motif into a great movement of sound.

Finally, Kerensky has shaken hands with everyone, and the two commanders take the final steps behind him. Listen how that last three-note phrase of the melody now becomes a five-note phrase in the brass: one-two-three, four-five—and then a six-note phrase: one-two, three-four-five, six. It’s a simply delicious little development; the steady step of the music is becoming a skittish skip, as though the march is about to break into a dance. It’s ludicrously infectious.

“The democrat at the Tsar’s gate.” Kerensky approaches the doors to the inner palace. The anticipation is both built and suspended through editing: Kerensky’s hands clasped behind his back; shots of coats of arms on the door; shots of lackeys nodding, winking to each other; shots of Kerensky’s boots; shots of the generals; and then—in a dazzlingly strange cutaway—we see a spectacular mechanical peacock unfurl its wings, then spin around to show us its backside. Even the bird’s movement is split, repeated, made gloriously weird—close-ups of wings, feathers, feet, face—and rhymes with the turning heads of the servants, the spinning salute of the lackey, the upturned faces of the commanders. The gates open across one, two, three, four shots (wide shot, closer shot, close-up, tighter closer-up; in each shot the movement of the door is pushed back a few frames to be seen again), and the music now slows—the beat is the same, but the tempo slows by at least half. The musical march sinks back into the tonic with an ecstatic sigh—of relief as much as anything. You realize how tense this sequence—visually and musically—had become. How much longer can out satisfaction be denied? Just as the generals are climbing the steps, the music has been chromatically climbing its way through the march, creating a tonal tension that needs resolving—and is only resolved in these final bars, when we see the gates open and then shut behind Kerensky. The last bass note is allowed to extend out over the final images of the scene: the massive locks of the gates, the image of the sealed doors. In one sense, it’s like the echo of the shutting doors reverberating through the palace. But because this is a purely musical resonance, it attains a heightened sense of strangeness. It’s a kind of afterglow, a dark, ominous extension in sound. This kind of moment doesn’t exist in a paper score; it exists only when music is performed. It’s emotive, intelligent, brilliant musicmaking.

The whole thing reminds me of another joke built on similar musical-dramatic ideas in Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867). At the end of Act 1, the little state is preparing for a pointless war with its neighbour. The sword belonging to the Duchess’s late father is ceremoniously carried before the assembled forces. She sings an area, “Voici le sabre de mon père”, accompanied by the chorus. Offenbach repeats the individual blocks of the line: “Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre, le sabre de mon père!” The Duchess points to the sword, sings several lines to the same melody, before the chorus likewise repeats the main refrain several times to the same text (the libretto merely describes their line as: “Voici le sabre etc.”). Then the Duchess picks up the sword and repeats the exact same musical passage she’s just sung, with only moderately different words, before handing the sword to her favourite soldier. The voices of the chorus don’t even get this much variety, now repeating their first chorus wholesale. The joke is in the repetition, and in the banality of the tune extended ad infinitum in ludicrous martial pomp. But the best bit is at the very end of the act, when the soldiers are marching off to battle. “You forgot my blessed father’s sword!” the Duchess cries, whereupon the poor chorus must strike up the same melody again. Offenbach and his librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) are making the same joke, to much the same end, as Eisenstein and Meisel. Film and operetta give us martial music and pompous scenery, continually inflated and endlessly repeated, to highlight the paucity of the ideology that underpins them. Puffed up with its own vacuity, it becomes bathetic.

Having now watched this sequence about forty times, and listened to it about a hundred times as I write, I grow more and more impressed by how well it’s put together. The Meisel/Thewes score makes a tremendous impact, and is by far the best way to experience this film. The soundtrack for the DVD for October was recorded at a live screening of October in Berlin in 2012. There is often something disconcerting in live recordings of music for silent films (I’ve written about this issue elsewhere). But this recording is excellent. You get the sense of excitement in the orchestra at the climaxes—the great benefit of live performances—with minimal acoustic interference from the performance space. Indeed, the only such instance is at the final’s final chord when there is a great burst of cheering and applause—which is a lovely way to end the experience at home, and links your own enjoyment of the film with that of the audience in 2012. It reminds us that what we’re watching was and is meant to be experienced as a live event, performed by musicians and theatre staff, in front of a large audience. It’s why I love silent cinema.

Paul Cuff