Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertolucci's 'The Spider's Stratagem'
Deborah Crisp; Roger Hillman
Music & Letters > Vol. 82, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 251-267

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-4224%28200105%2982%3A2%3C251%3AVASIB%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

Rick Altman's article calls for further attention to: interaction b/t “classical” music and popular song in films that include both. Song melody thematized, turned into leitmotif; song used according to “classical principles; lyrics/title imposed on “classical” material; “classical” theme repeated emulating pop song.

Only original music by Clifford Vaughan for main title and "Narrative" (resume). Uses tons of underscoring from previous films.  See Richard Bush "The Music of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers" in Film Music 1.

Score by W. Franke Harling heavily derivative of Wagner, liberally quotes "Grail" theme from Parsifal "as a religioso." inerowen with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1. Reused in Flash Gordon, flight and arrival on mysterious planet Mongo (Richard H. Bush, Film Music 1, 146)

Score by Roemheld features principal theme of Liszt's Sonata in B minor and part of symphonic poem Tasso, and paraphrase of Tchaikovsky's love theme from Romeo and Julet.  Score re-used in Flash Gordon.

1. Theater Music During the Boom Years

2. "Making Friends with Music": Music Education in the Classroom and Concert Hall

3. "Symphonies Under the Stars": The Romance of the Hollywood Bowl

4. The Art of Pageants, Plays, and Dance

5. Leaving a Legacy: Early Recording of Indigenous, Classical, and Popular Music

6. "An Invisible Empire in the Air": Broadcasting the Classics during the Golden Age

7. Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound

Chapter 7 of Musical Metropolis is devoted to “Music on Film: Hollywood and the Conversion to Sound,” with the goal of demonstrating music’s vital role in creating “an atmosphere or mood in both nonanimated and animated films,” though to my mind Marcus’s argument amounts to, ‘films had music so music was vital.’ Marcus’s history of film music is concise and informative, however. Marcus shows that during the silent era most musical accompanied was drawn from preexisting European art music, and that the idea of composing music for films came only gradually. Marcus credits Warner Bros.’s 1926 The Jazz Singer, presented using Vitaphone, with “demonstrat[ing] with finality that audiences wanted to hear music on film (167). Many theaters kept their orchestras for the first few years of sound films, using them as entertainment between viewings. “In 1929 theaters were by far the largest employer of musicians in the country,” but the financial strain put on theaters by the Depression combined with sound film put an end to that.
While I find the explanation, “Because music had become an essential part of filmmaking, each of the studios formed a music department following the conversion to sound,” (168) wanting, Marcus’s account of the early music departments is informative, including figures for number of musicians employed and the typical pay around 1930. Marcus then turns to in depth biographical and musical discussions of the three leading symphonic film score writers, Max Steiner (the pioneer of letimotivc symphonic underscoring), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (the face of high-art respectability) and Alfred Newman (less educated but master of subtlety), and then to a discussion of music in animated films at Warners and Disney.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

borrows from Johann Strauss (waltzes) during shots of hotel's main floor. Rachmaninoff love theme, jazz for Kringelein's liberation. Music separate from dialogue. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13).

There is in fact copious underscoring of dialogue with music.

The ballerina's manager, lamenting the empty house, says after this he will do no more dancing, just jazz.

With the entrance of the maid into the ballerina's room (34:25) pop-jazz-dance music starts. It continues during the entrance of several more people, a subtlely comic sequence. When the ballerina returns and her manager dumps her the music turns briefly minor, ominous. A muted trumpet solo accompanies the ballerina's undressing. It stops when she exits the frame in the nick of time not to expose herself. There are then some moments of silence as the baron takes his gloves off. Then music reenters with the ballerina, this time Russian-flavored accompanying her phone call. It smoothely transitions into pop-dance music and continues quite incompatibly with her desperate monologue and the baron's intervention, and continues to the end of the scene with some nuances changes appropriate to the dialouge (end 42:46).

Sign for American Bar Jazz Band at 57:45.

1:39 - "The music has stopped. How quiet it is tonight. It was never so quiet in the Grand Hotel."

Innovative concentration of (7) stars in one film. 

Novel (Menschen im Hotel) first translated to broadway.  Also Vitaphone musical comedy picture Nothing Ever Happens (1933).

Farewell to Arms - original love theme during opening credits and at key moments. Italian atmosphere established by opening of Mendlssohn's Fourth Symphony, "La donna é mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto and traditional "Santa Lucia". Borrowings from Wagner: "Ride of the Valkyries" during battle scene, brassier treatment of Wagner while Frederic searches for Catherine, music from Tristan and Isolde while Catherine dies in Frederic's arms. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13)

Tony whistles "Slaves' Chorus" from Verdi's Nabucco in opening murder scene.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

Ernest Lindgren is a self-reflective and knowledgeable film lover whose views are informed by his having witnessed the transition from silent to sound films; his goal in writing “The Art of the Film” wass to provide film goers with the critical skills necessary to view film intelligently.  Two chapters are of particular interest to me: “The Use of Sound,” and “Film Music.”  Regarding the use of sound, Lindgren is highly critical of sound that merely duplicates the information already provided by the image.  He provides a psychological argument for why the principles guiding the use of sight and sound in film are different.  Also, in an approach I’ve seen no other critic use and which seems to me quite fruitful, Lindgren compares sound in literature to sound in film, quoting from Tolstoy and Dickinson in order to demonstrate the unique functioning of sound (it can be tuned out and it can represent something other than the immediate visual surroundings).  Regarding music, Lindgren compares its use in silent films to its use in sound films, the latter being distinguished by its intermittency seeing as how the music was no longer the only sound present.  Ultimately, good film music is film music that is “not heard,” a view Lindgren rightly claims is widely held.  Lindgren again employs psychological principles in explaining the proper use of music, and though he lacks the terms diegetic and nondiegetic the distinction is an important one to him. 
Lindgren illustrates all his aesthetic opinions with concrete examples from films, which not only adds immeasurably to his arguments but also provides useful information about what films were innovative in certain techniques.  Interestingly, Lindgren ends the film music chapter with a discussion of poetry used in voice-overs, a discussion he put off from the sound chapter, where he also discussed voice-overs, because he thought it proper to music.  The synonymy of poetry and music was operative in the middle ages, but I’ve not before encountered it in the 20th century.  This is not relevant to my present purposes but is perhaps something to keep in mind for another time.
 

This article is fascinating as a historical document (from 1942); it backs up a culturally specific view of the superiority of absolute music using historical and psychological evidence.  The author, Dr. Horace B. English, was a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.  He argues that a film experience which is dominantly aural does not work psychologically.  His case in point is Fantasia which was purely received by “the musically sensitive.”  English offers historical and psychological arguments for the inevitable failure of any attempt to fit visual images to music.  Historically, all aural-visual combinations, namely theater and opera, have used sound to support drama; the story always comes first.  Psychologically, the ear is specialized to receive symbolic signals, while the eye is specialized for concrete, representative signals.  The dependence of English’s argument on a cultural privileging of symphonic and chamber music – which he calls the more “noble” forms – becomes clear in his insistence that music written independently of a story generates a wide range of unique responses in listeners (agreed), while music written to fit a story does not.  English’s argument also depends on a privileging of individuality, expressed most clearly in his conclusion, “When we are really responding to music, we are creating something unique and individual; and at the moment of such creation, anyone else’s response, be it ever so beautiful, is only a distraction and an annoyance.”