Tag: Charlie Chaplin

Musical fragments: Ervin Nyiregyházi at the cinema

It’s the last night of 2025, so what better moment to talk about the passing of time, about loss, and about transcendence. (Such is the mood of looking back here that in my first attempt at the above sentence I wrote “…the last night of 1925”.) I’m also going to indulge in something a little self-indulgent in writing primarily about recorded sound. But I hope to do so in a way which both springs from silent cinema and returns to the notion of early film history. Yes, this week I want to write about the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987).

I came across the name of this obscure artist while searching for a piece of music that I will later discuss here. So transfixed was I by various snippets on youtube that I bought Kevin Bazzana’s wonderful book Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick (2007). Bazzana (who also wrote the classic biography of Glenn Gould, a much more famous eccentric pianist) traces the quite astonishing journey of Nyiregyházi from imperial Budapest at the dawn of the century to old age in America in the era of digital recording.

Nyiregyházi was a child prodigy whose gifts prompted distinguished teachers to develop his talent. These mentors were young enough to have been taught by the legendary composer-pianist Franz Liszt – or by those who were themselves taught by his pupils. To a child that could sightread anything, and was already composing prodigiously, they enhanced Nyiregyházi’s technical ability and expanded his knowledge of the piano repertoire. Not yet a teenager, Nyiregyházi was performing concerts with the most famous conductors and orchestras of his day, touring within and beyond Europe. By the 1920s, he was trying to make his name in America – but was already falling out with the managers and promoters who were shaping his career. Addictive traits – especially in the form of sex and alcohol – were also eroding his personal reliability. In concert, Nyiregyházi became known as a “second Liszt” not just for his astonishing technical virtuosity, but for the perceived radicalness of his interpretations – and the sense of something faintly mad in his whole persona. There was something ungovernable and perverse about the way he played music, about his whole way of living. One witness to Nyiregyházi in America was Arnold Schoenberg, who sought out Nyiregyházi with a great degree of scepticism, but found himself transfixed by “a pianist who appears to be something really quite extraordinary”:

I have never heard such a pianist before… First, he does not play at all in the style you and I strive for. And just as I did not judge him on that basis, I imagine that when you hear him, you too will be compelled to ignore all matters of principle, and probably will end up doing just as I did. For your principles would not be the proper standard to apply. What he plays is expression in the older sense of the word, nothing else; but such power of expression I have never heard before. You will disagree with his tempi as much as I did. You will also note that he often seems to give primacy to sharp contrasts at the expense of form, the latter appearing to get lost. I say appearing to; for then, in its own way, his music surprisingly regains its form, makes sense, establishes its own boundaries. The sound he brings out of the piano is unheard of, or at least I have never heard anything like it. He himself seems not to know how he produces these novel and quite incredible sounds – although he appears to be a man of intelligence and not just some flaccid dreamer. And such fullness of tone, achieved without ever becoming rough, I have never before encountered. For me, and probably for you too, it’s really too much fullness, but as a whole it displays incredible novelty and persuasiveness. […] [I]t is amazing what he plays and how he plays it. One never senses that it is difficult, that it is technique – no, it is simply a power of the will, capable of soaring over all imaginable difficulties in the realization of an idea. – You see, I’m waxing almost poetic. (qtd in Lost Genius, 9-10)

I too will wax poetic a little later, but I must reassert the connection between all of this and silent cinema. For in 1928, Nyiregyházi moved to Los Angeles and became involved in film music after contacting the prolific composer and arranger Hugo Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld was a major figure in the silent era, and he continued his work for film into the sound era. Alongside Riesenfeld, Nyiregyházi was involved in creating the music for the synchronized productions Coquette (1929) and Lummox (1930). Alas, I cannot find either of these films, so their tantalizing glimpse of Nyiregyházi’s work at this time remains obscure to me. Equally invisible is his work playing music on set and in sound studios to aid the work of various arrangers and technicians during production.

Nyiregyházi was also exploited as a performer for early sound films. His involvement with Fashions in Love (1929) is precariously preserved. The film itself is seemingly lost, but the Vitaphone soundtrack survives. (The first half can be found online here, and the second half here.) Nyiregyházi’s playing can be heard in the opening of the first part, presumably over the credits; then from six minutes for about ninety breathtaking seconds. (There is a song performed later, which may or may not be him playing beneath the rather warbly voice of Fay Compton.) You can also see The Lost Zeppelin (1929) and witness his performance of Liszt. In these instances, he is quite literally pushed into the background, a pertinent metaphor for his subsequent oblivion from music (and film) history across the central decades of his life. Curiously, by 1932 Nyiregyházi found himself playing to audiences in the cinema itself. Film journalist Louella Parsons encountered his playing at the Paramount Theater in June 1932, a live musical act now divorced from the films themselves.

Nyiregyházi’s own taste in film is curious. He himself professed a love for lowbrow cinema: “the worse the better”. His favourite characters in film were Sherlock Holmes and Zigomar (Lost Genius, 149n). Bazzana makes little of this anecdote, but the mention of Zigomar takes us back to the extraordinary crime serials of the 1910s. I love the idea of the young Nyiregyházi taking in the bloodthirsty Zigomar films in some dingy Austro-Hungarian cinema in the 1910s, and the fact that he might recall such an encounter with film so fondly. (I also wonder what Nyiregyházi’s sense was of the music being performed at such screenings. And did he ever find himself accompanying a silent film?)

This is not the only evidence of his taste in film. Around 1935, Nyiregyházi began compiling a book of essays he called The Truth at Last: An Exposé of Life. This bizarre assemblage of reminiscence and opinion included an essay devoted to Charlie Chaplin – or rather, as Bazzana notes, on “Charles Chaplin”. This was the distinction Chaplin himself variously made between “Charlie” the performer, the clown, the character, and “Charles” the artist, the writer, the director. Nyiregyházi clearly understood the difference, for it was as a social critic that he admired Chaplin. He described Chaplin’s comedies as “tragic as hell, as tragic as anything Dostoevsky ever wrote” (Lost Genius, 170). Noteworthy also is the fate of this essay, and the whole collection of The Truth at Last. In 1957, Nyiregyházi’s seventh wife, Mara, stole the manuscript (along with some of his compositions) when she was deported to Switzerland after facing various criminal charges. By then, Nyiregyházi himself was approaching a personal low point. His career had ceased to exist, and he battled with alcoholism and homelessness. Sleeping on park benches, he became the very kind of tramp Chaplin played on screen.

What I want to draw from the above is the fragility not merely of musical artistry, but of the media that might sustain that artistry. In the case of Nyiregyházi, an entire lifetime of work is essentially lost. When he was able to perform and record his work in the last years of his life, he was both the same man and a ruin of his former self. The survival of the artist is no guarantee that their art survives. What remains of Nyiregyházi’s work when he was in his prime is fragmentary in the extreme. The scraps of music-making that survive in films of the late 1920s and early 1930s are meagre clues as to the body of work that preceded them. A wider point might be made that the synchronized soundtracks of late silents and early sound films are both marvellous documents of earlier film music traditions and a radical distortion of what that music was.

In the 1920s, Nyiregyházi made a dozen piano roll recordings (i.e. mechanical transcriptions of his playing) for The Ampico Corp. Piano rolls were a fascinating example of early media technology being used to distribute the work of contemporary performers, including many important composers at the turn of the century. Happily, some of Nyiregyházi’s work for this medium survives. A CD release of this material from 1921-24 is (I believe) scheduled for February 2026. In the meantime, a few sample numbers can be found online. Again, mechanical reproduction is not the same as live performance, and these documents cannot offer us Nyiregyházi as he was as a performer in the 1920s. But what all such recordings offer us is a glimpse into the past – or at least, a way to imagine that past.

This whole preamble is really an excuse for talking about one recording by Nyiregyházi that encapsulates everything I’ve been talking about so far. To me, it embodies the transience of music, the memory of lost art, the humanity – and the fallibility – of performers and performances. In the late 1970s, the ageing Nyiregyházi was given the chance to record an album of pieces by Liszt. Liszt was perhaps the composer with whom Nyiregyházi had the closest interpretive relationship. His recordings from 1978 are astonishing for the personal way they handle the music. Sometimes he seems to be trying to physically destroy the piano with the force and rapidity of his fortissimo, while at other times he is so quiet and so slow that the music itself seems on the point of disintegration into silence.

In his programme for the LP release, Nyiregyházi included two extracts from Liszt’s Weihnachtsbaum (“Christmas Tree”) suite, which was written in the mid-1870s and first performed on Christmas Day 1881. The music arranges a multitude of hymns and other traditional music alongside original material by Liszt. It is designed to be relatively easy to play, but – as with so much of Liszt’s later work – it has some amazing emotional depths. The movement I want to talk about is “Abendglocken”: “Evening Bells”. To get a sense of the sheer strangeness of Nyiregyházi’s performance of this piece, I should offer you something more like a “normal” performance. Before I heard Nyiregyházi, my favourite recording was by Alfred Brendel – the pianist through whom I discovered Liszt, and one of my favourite pianists of all time. Brendel’s 1986 performance of “Abendglocken” is slower than the few other modern recordings that exist, and he brings out the emotional resonance of this deceptively simple music better than most. (Brendel was also the first to record the entire Weihnachtsbaum suite in 1951. It is amazing how similar his two performances of “Abendglocken” are, thirty-five years apart. Talk about continuity across time.)

Brendel’s performance runs to four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Nyiregyházi’s 1978 performance runs to ten minutes and twenty-two seconds. This is partly due to the slowness of his tempi, but also because he repeats the entire first section of the piece. This doubles the sense of concentration, and the affirmation of importance on this simple, delicately chiming melody. Indeed, the slowness of it starts to gently pull the music apart, as though trying to work out quite what it is – or as though marvelling at something so beautiful, wanting to handle it with a kind of awe. Just listen to how Nyiregyházi brings out the irregularity of Liszt’s regular chords, how in slowing them, stretching them, deforming them, he makes them sound more like bells – bells that must be rung by hand, by physical exertion, by bodies prone to error. Indeed, the repeat of this first section of the movement features more slurs (i.e. fudged notes) than the first run-through. These are moments when Nyiregyházi’s left and right hands seem to trip over one another, or else to smudge distinct phrases. Yet even these moments seem to make sense, to re-emphasize this performance as an act of wonderment at the music. They also suggest what is to come in the movement’s final section, played just once by Nyiregyházi, where the overlapping of hands, of tempo and time itself, is most strong.

I really do struggle to describe the final two minutes of this performance. On the recording, there is a few seconds’ caesura when you can hear the creak of Nyiregyházi at the piano, preparing his body for this last section. When his hands again rejoin the keyboard, the tempo of the music seems, if anything, even slower than what has come before. The music is a chiming of hours, a ringing of sound that carries between the delicate higher and sonorous lower tones of the piano. In some performances, the “evening bells” of Liszt’s title can sound like a domestic clock, so quickly do the chords ring. One has an impression of the music being both designed for domestic performance and a kind of encapsulation of this domesticity – a memorial to it. The music is intimate, delicate, but it is also about the passage of time – about a place and an occasion. In its place within this seasonal suite, it speaks of a night waiting for specific hours to arrive – to find oneself encountering these hours in the quiet of a winter, whether sounded by a mantelpiece clock or a nearby church. But in Nyiregyházi’s hands, the bass chord has the immense resonance of a cathedral bell, a tolling from outside one’s own world, a distant, booming, solemn tocsin from somewhere entirely elsewhere. It’s so slow that it cannot be a real bell in a real location. It must instead be a memory, an imagining, of such a bell. The higher, lighter chords of the right hand are not in synch with those of the left. There is a disjunction between two tempi, two imagined sets of bells. It is like a scene in a silent film where multiple bells are magically superimposed over one another. These are sounds from two separate spaces, two separate times. It is as though Nyiregyházi’s hands are caught between two centuries. There is hardly any other piano recording – any other single sequence of recorded sound – that I find so profoundly, uncannily beautiful.

Here, I think of two moments from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The first is Scrooge’s encounter with the spirit of the past, who motions for him to follow them out of the bedroom window. “‘I am a mortal,’ Scrooge remonstrated, ‘and liable to fall.’” It’s a beautiful line. And yes, here in Nyiregyházi’s performance is the liability of humans to fall, and their skill to fail – another kind of encounter with temporality. This recording captures a performance, but also a performer in time. Here there is surely a tangible, physical reminder in sound of those ageing hands struggling with the discipline of artistic form. But I also think of the very next moment of Dickens’s scene, as adapted in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), when Scrooge is flying towards the horizon: “Spirit? What is that light? It cannot be dawn.” “It is the past”, the spirit replies. Indeed, it is the past. It lies behind us, without us; but it is also within us, and might appear again in a form mediated by art. Nyiregyházi’s performance is an encapsulation of time, a mediation of time, and a meditation on time. It is the past, and we miraculously encounter it in our present. It reminds me of a central reason for my love of silent cinema: here we may contemplate the past, enter into a relationship with it. This is a distant world, one that lives again with us while remaining loyal to its own silence, to this absolute separation from our world.

I listen to Nyiregyházi’s recording religiously on Christmas Eve, close to midnight. Invariably I am alone in the room in my mother’s house where I spent all my holidays away from university, and where I still spend the ten or so days around Christmas. It is in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, and in the afternoons I always spend a couple of hours walking. I leave the house shortly before the sun sets, so that I might enjoy the sense of isolation more – away from other walkers, who are usually put off by the encroaching dark. On the heights of either side of the valley, there are prehistoric burials and ancient earthworks – the work of the distant past. And there am I, in this same space, a space that is both as it was and irreversibly different. My own past lies here, in the invisible network of routes I have taken in years gone by; but this is a past that I take with me, that lives – if it can be said to live – only in my mortal form, so liable to fall. And as I return home in the dark, walking through this landscape that I have walked countless times, I sometimes find Nyiregyházi’s irregular chords sounding, silently, in my head. It is a tolling not merely for the past of others, but for my own.

A Happy New Year to you all, dear readers.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2025, Day 1)

I’ve just returned from a rather intense and wonderful few days in Berlin, gorging on culture of all kinds. (And on some seasonal German dishes, too.) I would be settling down to write about the filmic aspects of this trip, were it not for the fact that by the time I landed the Pordenone festival had already begun. Pausing only to shower, receive a flu vaccination, make some rice, upload a thousand photographs, and take the car for its MOT, I logged in to my streaming account and fell headlong into Day 1…

The Bond (1918; US; Charlie Chaplin). Famous for its final scene of the Tramp biffing Kaiser Wilhelm over the head with a large mallet, this short film begins with a rather more subtle and sophisticated series of sketches exploring other “bonds”. “The bond of friendship”, “The bond of love”, and “The marriage bond” are delightful vignettes, set against beautifully simple, picture-book style backgrounds (entirely black, with two-dimensional details that sometimes take on unexpected depth). Chaplin undercuts the premise of the first (getting increasingly fed-up by his friend’s friendliness), makes the second surreally literal (he is shot by Cupid’s arrow, then gets tied up with the object of his love), and undercuts the third (he resents paying the priest and gets hit with the lucky shoe). The final sketch, “The liberty bond”, is a rather brilliant series of diagrammatic tableaux in which Chaplin illustrates the motive, method, and outcome of wartime liberty bonds. He manages to be both sincere, charming, and funny – a very difficult combination to bring off in what is essentially state propaganda (albeit for a good cause). Chaplin makes human what could easily be stilted or polemic.

His Day Out (1918; US; Arvid E. Gillstrom). Our second short from 1918, this time not with Chaplin but with Chaplin’s most persistent and successful impersonator: Billy West. The film is a rather disjointed series of skits, the best of which is the prolonged scene in the barbershop in which Chaplin West variously shaves/assaults/preens/insults/scams his customers – including Oliver Hardy. (Inevitably, they all reappear in the slapstick finale.) It’s all very silly, but there is something inherently strange about watching this uncanny Chaplin. And as funny as some moments are, the film inevitably suffers from evidently not being by Chaplin. West is less sharp in every facet: less elegant, less quick, less touching than Chaplin. The very fact of his trying to be someone else (and not even this: he is being someone else’s persona, performing someone else’s performance) robs something of the pleasure in watching the film. Nevertheless, an interesting curiosity.

A Little Bit of Fluff (1928; UK; Jess Robbins/Wheeler Dryden). Our main feature presentation follows newlyweds Bertram Tully (Syd Chaplin) and Violet (Nancy Rigg), who live under the thumb of Violet’s imposing mother. While she and Violet are away visiting an aunt, Betram encounters the woman next door: the dancer Mamie Scott (Betty Balfour). Mamie and mutual friend John invite Bertram to the Five Hundred Club, where Betram accidentally gets hold of Mamie’s valuable necklace. There ensues a series of farcical encounters, mistaken identities, and run-ins with jealous boyfriends, the police, and criminals in disguise…

This film was an absolute unknown for me, so I was very pleased at how charming and funny it was. Sydney Chaplin is known to me (as I imagine to most) for his later role as his half-brother Charlie’s off-screen assistant, so seeing him take centre stage was fascinating to watch. He is delightful as the fey, trod-upon, Betram – a character whose name evokes Bertie Wooster, just as his actions undergo a very Woodhousian series of mistakes and minor disasters. (Troublesome matriarchs, nightclub misdemeanours, adventurous dancers, valuable necklaces, fake burglaries, and jealous boyfriends are all Woodhouse tropes, as they must have been for any number of stage comedies of the 1920s.) Syd Chaplin makes the most of his character’s small world and narrowed expectations. I love that his only visible pleasure is to play the flute, and even this is somehow a struggle and an imposition. (When he plays, he keeps blowing out his candle.)

Indeed, everything Bertram does goes wrong. The meekness of his character means that the increasing difficulty of his situation brings out wonderful and unexpected bursts of face-saving improvisation and expressive energy. I found myself laughing a great deal when Betram is cornered and has to find a desperate way out. The scene in which he his trapped between police, Mamie’s thuggish ex, and the police outside, is a delight. Ultimately forced into Mamie’s bathroom while she is bathing, and having first to impersonate her maid and then to impersonate Mamie herself, Bertram finds – just – a way out of his predicament, while also finding delight in his own ingenuity. The way he dons Mamie’s gown and bonnet, then sets out polishing his nails and smothering himself in powder, he seems to get lost in the pleasure of being someone else: having so often fallen short in fulfilling his masculine role, here is finds refuge in an exaggerated femininity.

I also loved the scene in which, trying to get his friend to back-up his alibi, he desperately mimes the title of the play and author they have supposedly seen. His mime, first “Love’s Labour Lost”, then of “Shakespeare”, is brilliant: it’s funny because it’s both an accurate mime, inaccurately identified (John announces that they saw “Gold Diggers” by Bernard Shaw), but because it once again gets this meek character to perform outlandish gestures. Having been discovered in women’s clothing by his mother-in-law, he is now discovered waving a speer by his wife. The shock of these disruptions to his usual character, and his own evident delight at his ability to perform as (respectively) highly feminine and masculine personae, make for wonderful sequences. They are also a marker of Chaplin’s ability to win us over to his character, making us believe both his meekness and his untapped performance abilities. The way each scene seems to snowball through a series of small incidents into absurd situations is both a dramatic success, but also a way for Chaplin to demonstrate a range of performance style – from small details to broad slapstick. But the film doesn’t offer any great transformation of Bertram’s character, and I rather liked how there is no effort to make us believe he has quite learned anything about himself, or that he has – ultimately – improved his lot. Early in the film, he sees the newspaper headline: “Man chokes mother-in-law”, and it’s clearly an unconscious fantasy. Even if the film has shown that he has untapped energies, he never (in the manner of a Keaton or Lloyd feature film) proves himself. There is no defeat or exile of the mother-in-law, just as Bertram himself never foils the real burglar to save the day. His successes are accidents, and at the end of the film he sinks into unconsciousness, oblivious as to what he may – or may not – have done.

I must also mention Betty Balfour. Balfour was a major star of British cinema, maintaining her popularity with audiences throughout the 1920s. She starred in a number of foreign films as well, but I’m not sure her fame ever really had much impact beyond the UK. Even if her eponymous character is as superficial as the titular A Bit of Fluff suggests, Balfour holds her own on screen here: she’s happy to sing and dance and get involved in slapstick and farce. Balfour’s character is introduced as “celebrating the tenth anniversary of her 25th birthday”, but the film never makes her a villainous figure. (It’s worth noting that Balfour was only just older than 25 when she made this film.) She’s strong-willed and independent, traits which are never condemned. She also gets some nice lines of dialogue, as when Henry asks to borrow her necklace, to which she replies: “You showed my ring to a friend and she’s still looking at it.” Here, as often in the film, a single line of dialogue tells you much about the character and her relationship and past with others.

So that was Day 1 of Pordenone from afar. Having barely had a chance to stand still for a few minutes since I returned to the UK, I ignored all context for this Day 1 programme and ploughed straight through the content. Emerging from this rather mad dash and finding time to pause of think, I realize what a delightful programme this was, themed around various Chaplins: Charlie Chaplin, fake Charlie Chaplin, and Sydney Chaplin. It makes for a wonderful journey through the silent era, from the short slapstick of the late 1910s to the more elaborate narrative feature comedy of the late 1920s, from the most famous Chaplin who ever lived to the Chaplin who is more famous as an off-screen assistant than an on-screen lead. Starting with the familiar, moving to the familiar-yet-unfamiliar, and concluding with the hardly known is a superb way of guiding us through these three films and their stars. I hadn’t seen The Bond for many years, and it was a huge pleasure to be reminded of the context for that famous image of Chaplin with his foot on the vanquished Kaiser. (Having just returned from Berlin, I have been seeing much imagery from Wilhelmine Germany.) I had never seen either of the other films, and these are just the kind of thing I hope to encounter at a festival. If Billy West offered a rather uncanny experience, profoundly overshadowed by the real Charlie Chaplin, then Syd Chaplin was absolutely his own man. I had a great time watching A Little Bit of Fluff and was charmed by Syd’s genteelly hapless character. It was also a pleasure to see Betty Balfour, a star whose historical popularity stands in marked contrast to the difficulty of seeing her films nowadays. There are also nice echoes to Charlie Chaplin’s work in the other films: from the extendable barber chair in His Day Out (reminiscent of The Great Dictator (1940)) to the gag when Bertram uses his hands to make some dolls dance (reminiscent of the famous dance of the rolls/forks gag in The Gold Rush (1925)). It really is a superb trio of films that rhyme and contrast in pleasing ways. All in all, a highly engaging evening at the pictures. (Well… a highly engaging couple of hours in front of my television screen, anyway.) The piano music for the comic shorts (by Meg Morley) and for the main feature (by Donald Sosin) was, of course, exemplary. A marvellous start to this year’s festival.

Paul Cuff

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