Arthur Honegger
          Film Music

* Music from Farinet, Crime et Chatiment, Le Deserteur, Le Grande
Barrage, and L'Idee

Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Adriano
Marco Polo 8.223466 Total time: 58:48

* Music from Mayerling, Regain, and Le Demon de l'Himalaya

Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Adriano
Marco Polo 8.223467 Total time: 59:51

Summary for the Busy Executive: Film music grows up.

Music has accompanied film since the early silents, but it took until
roughly the Twenties before Modern composers got into the business in a
big way. The United States, both Astoria and Hollywood, lagged behind,
preferring, even well into the Thirties, ex-movie organists and theater-pit
conductors to concert-hall composers. As in Germany with Hindemith and
Weill, leading composers like Copland, Antheil, Thomson, and so on found
themselves more or less relegated to the documentarians and the avant-garde.
England and France did much better integrating classical composers with
more or less commercial product.

Honegger certainly qualifies as one of the pioneers. His influence on
French film composers was enormous, and he launched several careers,
most notably that of Miklos Rozsa. Very early on, he got to work on great
movies, beginning with Abel Gance's La Roue and Napoleon, the former as
early as 1922. In rather sharp contrast to many movie scorers of the
time, Honegger avoided both close musical imitation of the screen action
and Wagnerian underscoring. One often can't tell the difference between
Honegger's movie cues and his symphonic work. Honegger had a passion for
definite, classical form. Furthermore, unlike many film composers, he
thought of at least some of his movie music as symphonic and arranged
his cues into symphonic suites.  Indeed, it's quite remarkable, even in
suites arranged by other hands from cues less than a minute long, how
well Honegger's film music holds together.  One must, however, distinguish
between Honegger's film music and the pictures he worked on. French
directors of the time thought little of setting several composers to
work on a score. To many of the films, Honegger counted as one musical
contributor of several.

I daresay that most United Statespersons haven't seen any of the movies
Honegger worked on or would recognize directors' and actors' names. We're
that parochial, and our historic memory is definitely short-term. Farinet,
after a novel by Ramuz (librettist of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat),
is in its movie incarnation a typically French mix of cheap melodrama
and philosophical speculations about freedom, and it boasts Barrault in
the title role. Honegger contributed the main title, the finale, an
"atmospheric" accompaniment to an intimate conversation, and pursuit
music.  The pursuit music interested me most by far - very contrapuntal
and at the same time very clearly scored.

Honegger's music for Crime and Punishment reminds me a bit of the movie
itself - okay, but not really up to the book. However, the composer does
call for an ondes martinot (which he first used in L'Idee), sometimes
to reinforce bass notes, but often to take solos, usually portraying
Raskolnikov and Sonia. However, for those of us used to the Hollywood
mega-orchestra on steroids approach, Honegger's ensemble will sound a
bit thin. Honegger's arrived at his method of movie scoring by practical
experience from the early days of sound, where the recording equipment
couldn't capture orchestral depth and thus everything sounded cramped
and muddy. He tends to avoid expanded percussion and even double basses
and to include a piano at the expense of strings, all to the end of
getting the music clean and clear. However, for the CD, the strings, in
most cases, have been reinforced, so that instead of Honegger's rather
original ideas, we get something much more conventional. I don't really
understand this kind of silent editing, as if a composer like poor old
Honegger needed orchestration help.

For Le Deserteur, Honegger supplied less than a third of the music. The
fragment here is actually three different Honegger cues, woven together
by someone other than the composer. The composer conveys intensity and
obsession by canny use of rhythmic ostinato over which a wayward chromatic
line wails.

Le Grande Barrage counts as something of a curiosity. No film by that
name came out at the time Honegger wrote the fragment in the early Forties
or, indeed, during Honegger's lifetime. Only the three-minute fragment
recorded here survives, but it's a beaut - very complex and exciting, a
kind of Pacific 231 in miniature.

I actually saw L'Idee, I think on WNET in New York. It's an odd little
movie, a cartoon less than half an hour long. Created in 1932 (not 1934,
as the liner notes claim), it animates woodcuts by Belgian artist Franz
Masereel, although "animate" may be too strong a term. The animation
consists mainly of cuts and dissolves between different woodcuts - a
montage technique, if I recall right. The "story" is humanity's attempt
to follow an ideal throughout its history. The woodcuts remind one very
strongly of German Expressionism and UFA set design, particularly for
Lang's Metropolis as well as for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The
"philosophy" (as fans of The Matrix like to say) doesn't mean as much
(or much at all) as the progression of images, but the images exude great
power. For me, this is a classic movie, very little known. Honegger
Germanized his idiom somewhat. Lean and acidic, the music evokes a
Kurt-Weill cabaret band. Even with Adriano's increase of strings over
the original string quartet, this performance keeps much of that flavor.
The music is continuous and gives us a chance to hear more clearly
Honegger's feel for real symphonic movement in something ordinarily
fragmented.

Anatole Litvak's Mayerling has nothing on Ophuls's treatment of the
same subject, but it does work better than the horrid version of the
Seventies.  Among other things, it lets us glimpse Charles Boyer in a
somewhat different context than his American career. He was a really
good actor in either case, but far more complex with a bit more gravitas
when he acted in his own language.  Honegger invests the double suicide
of the Archduke and his mistress with both irony at the frivolity of
their lives and with pathos toward their deaths. It foreshadows the music
of the fifth symphony. The finale of the suite (published in 1936) builds
to two climactic pistol shots.

I suppose very few people recognize the name of Marcel Pagnol, a writer
and movie director inspired by the laborers of the south of France. The
film stars the rubber-faced Fernandel, who can break you up with a goofy
grin.  Honegger's score for Regain is one of his best, although in its
film incarnation it was manhandled, snipped, and removed with no regard
for the composer's input. Perhaps out of self-defense, Honegger arranged
some of the cues into one suite. I assume Adriano assembled the second
suite also recorded here. Unlike some of his scores, Regain shows off
Honegger's ability to cover a wide range of emotions. For example, the
cue "Printemps" brims full of Honegger's "nature mood," probably best
known from the Pastorale d'ete. On the other hand, "Gedemus le remouler"
reveals Honegger's comic gift, similar to Prokofiev's, all too seldom
encountered in his concert work.

Le Demon de l'Himalaya is an odd picture. A documentary filmmaker into
mountain climbing had some footage left over and decided to make a
thriller, very similar to the plot of The Mummy by the way. I haven't
seen this film, but it does sound terrible. Some of the footage the
producer sold to Columbia for use in Capra's Lost Horizons. Perhaps the
images save it. At any rate, the producer liked it enough to remake it
in early Fifties Hollywood as Storm over Tibet. Adriano considers this
one of Honegger's most important film scores, and you see his point. It
anticipates by several years Herrmann's hypnotic use of ostinato and
repetitive single-chord shifts. The musical idiom is far beyond just
about everyone at the time (except for avant-garde film composers like
Thomson and Shostakovich) - very chromatic and tonally nebulous. The
orchestration is also at the edge, and it includes the ondes martinot
Significantly, I think, one hears this music in essentially a horror
movie. The "Snowstorm" cue certainly scared the jeepers out of me.
Audiences probably accepted it - just as they accepted Waxman's
forward-looking score to Bride of Frankenstein - because it increased
the delicious thrill of movie fright. Real fright, of course, is far
more intense, overwhelming, incomprehensible, and curiously distancing.

Adriano is a fine musician, even though the one-name bit strikes me as
hokey as Liberace. Rhythm isn't quite as sharp as I like it, but he
certainly keeps his forces together and the music moving. He's especially
good over the long haul, with the scores for L'Idee and Le Demon (two
large excerpts from the latter, amounting to twenty minutes of music).
Especially in the "Snowstorm" cue, where the repetitive nature of the
music could grind everybody to a halt, Adriano manages to build, fall
back, and build again.  He has a superb feel for how music "goes." Marco
Polo does a good job with the recorded sound, although it might hit some
as a bit too bright.

Steve Schwartz