Classic movie music: grand and gushy

July 2, 12:49 PMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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Even conservatory theory professors have their little musical pleasures. We don't spend all our time thrashing out Schenkerian midgrund analyses of Bach chorales or terrorizing quaking undergraduates over their cruddy voice-leading. Well, maybe some do, but I for one enjoy taking a break from all the thrashing, terrorizing, and quaking.

I have a yen for those luscious, opulent movie scores of old — written by studio stalwarts such as Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Erich Korngold, etc., and played to the nines by those immense, virtuoso Hollywood orchestras.

Now, I'm the first to admit that those scores were and are utterly anachronistic. The composers were mostly Austrians or Germans trained during a time when the big post-Romantics such as Richard Strauss were the touchstone.

Thus cowboys trot off into the sunset to the strains of something that absolutely reeks of Viennese fin de siècle with a soupçon of harmonica stirred in for local color. A cancer-stricken socialite falls in love with a reformed gigolo, accompanied by background music which wouldn't be out of place at an emperor's coronation. Medieval Saxon peasants revolt against their cruel Norman conquerors while Wagnerian surges suggest strife amongst the gods themselves.

It's all overdone, overheated, oversized, oversexed, overstated, overplayed, and overwritten.

But it isn't overestimated. Critics, musicologists, commentators, and various sundry academic-types have all been coming around to the conclusion reached long ago by the general audiences: the stuff is absolutely terrific. It's fun, with or without the accompanying film. It's a twentieth-century musical genre that stands apart, on its own, a remnant of an earlier era somehow massaged and custom-fitted into a contemporary setting. Whether or not most of those composers were writing echt-Strauss, the music just plain works.

Silent movies weren't really silent; musical accompaniment was the norm. In the big theaters an orchestra provided the background; in the smaller venues one had to make do with a piano.

With the coming of sound, background music was briefly banished as an unnecessary distraction — after all, hearing somebody talk was thrilling enough. Nor was the technology quite up to the challenge of blending background music into the spoken soundtrack, at least not at first.

As a result, some signature moments of early sound film are wonderfully, eerily silent: Dracula rising out of his coffin, our first look at Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, or those shatteringly unquiet battle lines of the Western Front.

But background music regained its place quickly enough. Max Steiner established the classic Hollywood idiom, for better or worse, with his score to King Kong. It's all there in this glorious accomplishment: the use of Wagnerian leitmotifs (i.e., little signature tunes which accompany or comment on characters or situations in the drama), synchronizing onscreen action to musical events, and the blending of a post-Romantic musical idiom with local color.

Time spent listening to a good recording of the score can reveal some of Steiner's magical transformations of the "Kong" theme (the very first thing you hear) into a "love" theme, or his use of tribal-style drumming within his vast orchestral texture.

Steiner didn't stop with Kong, needless to say. He kept writing film scores until the 1960s, along the way cooking up some of the most memorable movie music in history. "Gone With the Wind" is probably his masterpiece, constituting what is in effect a wordless Wagnerian opera. Other memorable films by Steiner include some of those Bette Davis weepies such as "Now, Voyager" and "Dark Victory", or Bogart classics like "Casablanca" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The man's track record was astonishing.

Then there's Franz Waxman, who may not be as famous as Steiner but who gave us some real dillies. Interestingly enough, his breakthrough score, like Steiner's, was also for a fantasy picture: "The Bride of Frankenstein". James Whale's campy creepfest is perfectly matched by Waxman's silky, sexy, sometimes wildly funny, score. Yes, the "Bride" theme itself sounds just like Richard Rodgers' "Bali H'ai", from South Pacific. That's part of the fun. Waxman also gave us soundtrack perfection in the form of the scores to "Sunset Boulevard", "Rebecca", and "The Philadelphia Story."

Fortunately this music is easy to obtain in fine performances. Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra created a series of utterly spectacular renditions of classic film scores during the 1970s. Of course they went out of print. But ArkivMusic has come galloping to the rescue, with the whole kit 'n' caboodle reissued as ArkivCD re-releases. Many of the Gerhardt recordings are compliations that revolve either around a single composer (such as Steiner or Waxman) or a film star (such as scores for Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, or Errol Flynn.)

William Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra have also been putting out classic movie scores by the carload. In many cases they are offering meticulously restored versions of complete scores, available on the Naxos label and therefore very reasonably priced. Check out their recording of the original King Kong score, for starters — crank up the volume and let 'er rip!

More to come: Erich Korngold, Hugo Friedhofer, Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklos Rosza, Alfred Newman, and A CAST OF THOUSANDS!!