As one of the best known (and most controversial) films made during
the early years of cinema, The Birth of a
Nation has a reputation as a very influential, and very problematic,
feature. It also has a reputation for its original musical score. Many people
who know little else about silent film scoring know that when the Klan rode to
the rescue, it was to the strains of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”
Most silent
films, The Birth of a Nation included,
had a wide variety of musical accompaniments during their runs in the movie
theaters around the globe. Most of these musical scores are lost to history.
Some scores were improvised by pianists and organists and never written down,
while orchestra scores were assembled from music in the theater’s library, used
for the run of the film, then sorted back into the library for future re-use,
leaving no record of which pieces were used.
Prestige
blockbuster films, for which The Birth of
a Nation served as the original model, had a time-layered distribution pattern.
First, a national tour would be conducted to large theaters in big cities,
sometimes with the director or stars appearing personally, as a “road show”
presentation. The music for these presentations was carefully controlled, so
that a score, a conductor, or even an orchestra would tour with the film to
present the “road show” score.
After the
road show tour, the film—often edited to a shorter “general release”
length—would go into wider distribution, with the musical accompaniment
being left up to each individual theater. In this phase, that original score
was usually abandoned. There were sound business reasons for this. First, the
road show score was usually a lot of trouble to present compared to the
established techniques each theater used for more routine films, and may not
have been flexible enough to be performed with the instrumentation and
musicians available. Secondly, the rental and preparation of a score that
served only one picture would be a waste of the musical director’s time and money—the
movie might run a week or less, then be gone forever. Theaters preferred to
spend their money on “generic” library music that would be useful for years of
future film scoring.
Although the
scores for most silent films are lost, some information survives on three
different historical scores for The Birth
of a Nation.
The film
first opened (under the title The
Clansman) at Cluny’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, using a score compiled from
classical works by the theater’s music director, Carl Elinor.
While this score does not survive, a newspaper ad for the production gives a
long list of classical pieces used in it, though it does not specify which
pieces were used for which scenes. The pieces include such symphonic war-horses
as von Suppe’s “Light Cavalry Overture,” Verdi’s “Nabocodonozar,” Beethoven’s first symphony, Mozart’s
“Marriage of Figaro,” and Wagner’s “Rienzi,” as well as unspecified “incidental
music.” Elinor boasts of having made a “diligent
search of the music libraries of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York” to
assemble the score.
While the
film was being shown with Elinor’s score in Los
Angeles, D.W. Griffith worked with composer J.C. Breil to prepare a different score for the premiere in New York and subsequent road
tour. This score was partly composed by Breil, and
partly assembled from much the same repertoire of music that Carl Elinor has access to, including “The Hall of the Mountain
King” by Grieg and most famously, Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” This Breil score was described by several viewers, including a
memorable passage in “Adventures with D.W. Griffith,” a memoir by Karl Brown,
one of the assistant cameramen on the film. The Breil score survives in several archives, and has been recorded for previous releases
of The Birth of a Nation on home
video, and is included on the Kino DVD set on the supplemental DVD.
When The Birth of a Nation was revived in
1921 at the Capitol Theater in New York, the theater’s impresario “Roxy” Rothapfel had an entirely new score created, using Civil
War era songs and music. This was controversial at the
time—after all, hadn’t D.W. Griffith himself approved of the J.C. Breil score? Roxy defended his choice in an article in The Musical Courier:
“The art of
the musical presentation has progressed so markedly during the seven years
since The Birth of a Nation was first
produced, that different standards and methods of adaptation have educated the
public to new musical values. In the original adaptation such selections as
Rienzi, Freischutz, Ride of the Walkyrie,
and Light Cavalry were used. The movie going public has since then become
familiar through the medium of the motion picture theater and popular opera with these operas and the stories of these works, and their
usage today in the accompaniment to Birth
of a Nation would have seemed inadequate and misrepresentative.”
When
approaching The Birth of a Nation, the Mont Alto Orchestra decided not to use the Breil score, for much the same reasons. I find that when music shows up that is familiar
to viewers, it can distract them from the film into a different mental context,
whether trying to place the piece, or remembering the last time it was heard. I
feel that although such “cultural references” can sometimes be useful in
comedies, such distractions do not serve dramatic films well.
A small
portion of J.C. Breil’s score, a snippet that he
republished as “Misterioso e Lamentoso”
in 1917, made it into our score for a couple of Klan related scenes: where the
Ku Klux Klan is first introduced and conducts its first terrorist act, and the
scene where Ben Cameron introduces the “fiery cross” to a meeting of Klansmen.
We have many
of the pieces from Carl Elinor’s list available in
small-orchestra arrangements, but most of them are also very familiar now to
concert goers. One exception is “Anathema,” by Von Fielitz.
This piece, part of his “Songs from Eliland” cycle, is
obscure to modern audiences, as well as being a very effective dramatic piece
of writing, so we included “Anathema” for two scenes: Stoneman confronting Senator Sumner in his library while his housekeeper Lydia listens,
and Gus’s vigilante “trial” at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
I then
scoured Mont Alto’s library for long-forgotten overtures, dance music, and
salon music that would have been available in 1915. We had no trouble finding
an adequate number of marches, love themes, dramatic andantes, and ceremonial
music for a three-hour film. What was lacking in this repertoire was music for
battles, chases, and plotting; without which you can hardly score this film. It
was this shortage of music for certain highly cinematic scenes that first
prompted the rise of a new category of music composed specifically for
films—but mostly that came along after The Birth of a Nation, whose orchestral road shows accelerated the
rise of the movie theater orchestra. Rather than rely on the excellent but
over-exposed music of Grieg, Wagner, and Verdi, I decided instead to extend our
range of dates as though—like Roxy—we’d been reviving the film in 1921.
This made available excellent battle music, agitatos,
and misteriosos by J.S. Zamecnik,
Hugo Riesenfeld, Gaston Borch,
M.L. Lake, and many others. We feel that this has resulted in a score that is
enjoyable and fresh to modern audiences, yet is still an authentic score that
could have been heard—if not at the premiere, at least at a
revival—played by a theater orchestra during the silent era.
REFERENCES
Martin Miller
Marks, Music and the Silent Film, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, Columbia University
Press, 2004.
Karl Brown, Adventures with
D.W. Griffith, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
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