Category: Silent stars

Searching for Der Evangelimann (1923; Ger.; Holger-Madsen)

This week, I’m writing about not being able to write. I’d love to be telling you all about the beauties of Holger-Madsen’s film Der Evangelimann (1923), but all I can do is write about my entirely unsuccessful efforts to find a copy. While I am therefore unable to offer much insight into the film itself, I hope to offer some reflection on the intractable difficulties of writing about film history – and finding it.

Why am I interested in Der Evangelimann? Well, as previous posts indicated, I have a growing curiosity about the work of Paul Czinner and Elisabeth Bergner. I have a longstanding project on their Weimar films, but I am also interested in their work before their first collaboration in 1924. Der Evangelimann was Bergner’s first film role, and her only pre-Czinner work for the cinema. This Ufa production was made in Germany but was directed by the Danish filmmaker Holger-Madsen and premiered in Austria in December 1923. Contemporary reviews were mostly favourable, but since its general release in 1924 it has virtually disappeared from the record.

I am also interested in the cultural background to Der Evangelimann. The film was based on an opera of the same name, composed by Wilhelm Kienzl (1857-1941). As even semi-regular readers of this blog may be aware, I am a devotee of late romantic music – and obscure operas by lesser-known composers have their own attraction for me. Since it swiftly became apparent to me that Der Evangelimann was going to be a difficult film to see, I turned my attention to finding a recording of the opera. As it turned out, Kienzl’s music was an absolute delight. A pupil of Liszt and a devotee of Wagner, by the 1890s Kienzl had become a successful composer and music director in various central European cities. Der Evangelimann (1895) was his greatest hit and became a regular production for opera houses into the first decades of the twentieth century. However, Kienzl never produced another opera that established itself in the repertoire to this extent, nor did he write much in the way of substantial music in other genres. By the 1930s, he had withdrawn from active work and by the time Europe emerged from the Second World War he was dead, and his work largely neglected. (His support for the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 cannot have helped his posthumous reputation.)

The opera Der Evangelimann is a pleasing blend of late romanticism with a touch of verismo (i.e. something rather more realistic than romantic drama). The libretto, adapted by Kienzl from a play by L.F. Meissner, is also a kind of ethical drama. Act 1 is set in 1820 around the Benedictine monastery of St Othmar in Lower Austria. The monastery’s clerk Matthias is in love with Martha, the niece of the local magistrate Friedrich Engel. Matthias’s brother Johannes is jealous of this romance, since he covets Martha for himself. Johannes betrays the lovers’ secret relationship to Friedrich, who furiously dismisses Matthias from his job. Seizing his chance, Johannes proposes to Martha, but he is angrily rejected. Matthias arranges with Martha’s friend Magdalena that he will meet his beloved late one evening, before he leaves town to seek work elsewhere. Their nocturnal meeting is witnessed by Johannes, who storms away in a fury of jealousy. As the lovers say a sad farewell, a fire starts in the monastery. Matthias tries to help but is swiftly blamed and arrested for the crime. Act 2 is set thirty years later, when Matthias returns to St. Othmar. He has spent twenty-five years in prison, after which he became a travelling evangelist, preaching righteousness and justice. He encounters Martha’s old friend Magdalena, who now looks after the ailing Johannes. We learn that Martha drowned herself rather than submit to Johannes’s proposal, and that Johannes has since attained great wealth but is haunted by enormous guilt. Magdalena ushers Matthias to see Johannes, who receives Johannes’s dying confession of guilt for the fire. Matthias forgives his brother, who dies in peace.

Kienzl’s opera is gorgeously orchestrated and contains at least two rather wonderful melodies. The most famous, “Selig sind, die Verfolgung leiden um der Gerechtigkeit willen”, is Matthias’s evangelist hymn. Kienzl, knowing he had written a good tune, cunningly makes Matthias teach a troupe of children this melody on stage. We thus get to hear the melody several times in a row, and it becomes the leitmotiv of reconciliation and forgiveness between the brothers. But my favourite scene of the opera is in Act 1. Rather than a set-piece number, it is a scene of anxious, hushed dialogue between Mathias and Magdalena. They are arranging Matthias’s final meeting with Martha before he leaves, and as they talk the bells are ringing across town for vespers. Kienzl creates a spine-tingling atmosphere that has remarkable depth of sound: from the slow, deep ringing of the cathedral bell to the warm halo of strings, then to the bright chiming of a triangle. A simple downward motif is thus given greater emotional resonance: you can sense the space and warmth of the evening, but also the sadness of departure, the steady pressing of time upon Matthias. In Act 2, when Matthias meets Magdelena again, the midday bells sound: suddenly, the scene evokes the past through an echo of its warm, chiming orchestration. It’s a beautiful scene, perfectly realized. (At this point, I pause to recommend the 1980 recording of Der Evangelimann conducted by Lothar Zagrosek. It has a great cast, too: Kurt Moll, Helen Donath, Siegfried Jerusalem. Though the EMI set is out of print, it is readily available second-hand. A must for anyone interested in out-of-the-way late romantic opera.)

The 1924 film maintains the same basic plot and setting as the opera, though it has one or two curious departures. Per the opera, the first part of the film replicates Mathias (Paul Hartmann) and Martha (Hanni Weisse) being betrayed by Johannes (Jakob Feldhammer) to Friedrich Engel (Heinrich Peer), followed by the fire in the monastery and Mathias’s arrest. Years pass, Martha has married Johannes and together they have a young daughter, Florida. Martha then discovers that Johannes was the real arsonist (when he talks in his sleep) and ends her life rather than continue in their doomed marriage. After her death, Johannes moves to America – leaving Florida in the care of Magdalena (Elisabeth Bergner). Twenty years after the fire, the dying Johannes returns to St Othmar – as does the newly-released Mathias, now known as “the Evangelist” due to his preaching of holy justice. After Magdalena and the teenage Florida (now played by Hanni Weisse) go in search of him, Mathias eventually meets the dying Johannes – who then confesses to his brother and receives forgiveness.

I initially pieced together a synopsis from those available via various online sources, plus evidence from contemporary reviews. However, online sources do not provide the sources of their information, and I was left uncertain of numerous details. After a more thorough searching of the documentation catalogue of the Bundesarchiv (Germany’s state archive), I located the German censorship report of July 1923. Thankfully, this had been digitized and made available for public access. (As have many such censorship documents from the period.) The censorship report includes a complete list of all the original intertitles for the film, together with an exact length (in metres) for each of the six “acts” (“act” usually being a synonym for reel). Though there is no accompanying description of the action (i.e. what’s happening on screen), the titles provide a much clearer picture of the film’s structure and action. The document demonstrates how significantly Holger-Madsen expanded the ellipsis between the opera’s original two acts. The film’s second and third acts are set after the trial and the first years of Mathias’s imprisonment, allowing a glimpse into the minds of both brothers and of Martha – and showing us Martha’s discovery of Johannes’s guilt, and then her suicide.

Yet even the list of titles leaves some aspects of the narrative unclear. The film’s invention of a daughter for Martha/Johannes allows Hanni Weisse a double role as both mother and daughter. But I am unclear as to what (if any) dramatic function Florida has to the plot (she is evidently not a suicide deterrent!), or how exactly Mathias’s return is handled. Does Magdalena have a crucial role in this, or does he find his way back by chance – or by his own volition? Does Mathias encounter Florida, and what is his reaction to seeing the spitting image of his lost love? The titles do not make this clear.

Would other documents help? I know that if I visit the Bundesarchiv collection in person, I can inspect a copy of the programme for Der Evangelimann which may (or may not) clarify the issue. But where else to turn? I cannot find evidence of the film being released in France, in the US, or in the UK, and thus cannot find any other easy source of a more elaborate synopsis or of additional still photographs.

What of sources on Bergner? In Germany, there are many books devoted to her life and career on stage and screen – as well as her own memoirs. Ten years after the film was released, Bergner recalled being so disappointed with her experience on Der Evangelimann that it inspired her “contempt” for the entire medium of cinema (Picturegoer, 18 August 1934). In her later memoirs, Bergner claims that Nju (1924) was “my first film” (69) – erasing altogether the memory of Der Evangelimann. Those subsequent biographers or scholars to mention the film do so only in passing, but most accounts simply ignore its existence. The only account that even suggests familiarity with the film is that of Klaus Völker, which provides a meagre synopsis in its filmography and describes Bergner’s “slightly hunchbacked” appearance (398). Had Völker seen Der Evangelimann, or was this description based purely on publicity photos of the production? (The book contains only one other reference to the film, which repeats Bergner’s own grave disappointment in the role and the medium as a whole.)

Elsewhere, Kerry Wallach’s very interesting discussion of suicide in Bergner’s films (and contemporary Weimar/Jewish culture) makes passing reference to Der Evangelimann (19), but nothing that suggests familiarity with its content. Given Wallach’s interest in suicide and love triangles across Bergner’s films, it is odd that nothing is made of this first screen role being in a film that has both. I am curious, too, that Holger-Madsen chose to cast Bergner in the secondary role of Magdalena, since Martha is a much more interesting character – and her off-screen suicide (“in the waters of the Danube”, according to Matthias in the opera) would have directly foreshadowed the deaths of Bergner’s later characters.

All of which brings me to the nub of the issue: does any copy of Der Evangelimann survive? Has anyone seen it? Of course, the first source interested parties are usually advised to consult is the Fédération internationale des archives du film (FIAF) database. This is designed to be a collaborative database for information on archival holdings from across the world. Search here, and you can find the details of a film and a list of archives that hold material relating to it. That, at least, is the theory. In practice, it relies on data from its member archives that is not always available, complete, accurate, up-to-date, or forthcoming. I have long since accepted that the absence of a film on the FIAF database does not mean it is absent from the archives. This acceptance brings hope but creates other problems.

The next step, at least for a German production, is the usually (but not always) reliable filmportal.de. It is usually a decent indicator of the film’s survival in German archives and will also list the rights holders to the film and/or any restored copies. In the case of their page on Der Evangelimann, it lists the rights holders as the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung – the inheritors of much German cinema of the pre-1945 era. The FWMS lists details of the film on their website but (having asked them) they do not themselves possess any copy. Such is often the case, where the legal possession of a film does not coincide with the physical possession of a copy – or even the guarantee that a copy exists.

Where next? Well, the Bundesarchiv helpfully provides an accurate database of its film holdings – but this too yields no copy of Der Evangelimann. Various catalogue searches and archival contacts in Germany, Austria, the UK, and Russia have likewise yielded no result. Given that Holger-Madsen was Danish, I did also consult the Danish Film Institute about the film – but Der Evangelimann is not even listed on the DFI filmography of Holger-Madsen’s work, and they profess to have no copy. (Or at least, did not profess so to me.)

If Der Evangelimann had been restored, it would likely appear on more archival or institutional catalogues available online. But it seems scarcely to have made any mark on film history before proceeding swiftly to oblivion. Indeed, the only record I can find of any screening since 1924 was at the Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg in 1963, where Der Evangelimann was part of a retrospective of Bergner’s work. Was this a complete print? Was it even shown, or just listed as part of the line-up? (Needless to say, I have contacted the IFFMH to see if they have any record of which archive loaned them the print, but I have not yet heard back.)

My only remaining option is to contact every film archive in the world, but there is no guarantee (as I have already discovered) that any of them will reply to a private researcher undertaking a wild goose chase. If an institution, restoration team, or legal rights holder were to make this inquiry, I imagine the process would be much more likely to yield results. As an individual, I have only a handful of contacts in the archival world, and limited resources of time, money, and patience to feed into this search. I cannot issue a convenient “call for help” that summons responses from across the world.

All of which makes an illustrative example of the problems of film history. What I have experienced scouring public resources for traces of Der Evangelimann is a frequent and frustrating instance of a common issue. The film may well exist in an archive, but without any publicly available acknowledgement of its status it might as well (for the purposes of film history and film historians) not exist. That which cannot be seen cannot be studied. It is also frustrating that no scholar on Bergner has ever taken care to admit either that they have not seen the film, or that the film does not exist – and that therefore future scholars should not waste time trying to locate it. Filmographies are infinitely more useful if they include information on a film’s original length (in metres, not duration), together with its current restorative status in relation to its original form of exhibition. These are quite basic facets of film history, but it is amazing how rarely scholars ever cite them – or are required to do so. (I am myself guilty of this.) As regular readers will know, it is a bugbear of mine that many restorations and home media editions likewise provide viewers with so little information on the history of what we are actually watching. It perpetuates a cycle of missing information: the material history of a silent film – the most literal evidence of the medium itself – is too often taken for granted and simply left out of its presentation, either on video or in written texts.

In the case of Der Evangelimann, a century of critical and cultural disinterest has left me with very little evidence to go on. Does the film survive? I do hope so. Even if it is a failure, and even if Bergner’s performance awful, I just want to see it and find out. A film doesn’t have to be a masterpiece to deserve recognition and restoration. I just want to see it! I will continue to pester archives, but in the meantime I suppose I can also pester you, dear reader. Do you know anything about where a copy of Der Evangelimann might be held? Any information would be most gratefully received.

Paul Cuff

References

Elisabeth Bergner, Bewundert viel und viel gescholten: Elisabeth Bergners unordentliche Erinnerungen (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1978).

Klaus Völker (ed.), Elisabeth Bergner: das Leben einer Schauspielerin (Berlin: Hentrich, 1990).

Kerry Wallach, ‘Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner and Jewish Disappearance in Der träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932)’, German Studies Review 38/1 (2015), 17-34.

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

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