Christopher Young (b. 1958)
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023)
Saya Hashino (organ)
Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich/Frank Strobel
rec. 2023/24, Tonhalle, Zürich, Switzerland
Reviewed as a Hi-Res 24-bit/44kHz WAV file
Warner Classics 2173 245792 [2 CDs: 93]
Even the most snobbish collector would have been forced into confronting his or her prejudices against film music over the last thirty years. Chandos and the Naxos group in particular invested heavily in this area and reaped dividends artistically if not financially. Of course most of these scores were for films of the “talkie” era. What of the silent film score?
Our very own late departed Carl Davis is the one I think of most in this area. His made a splash scoring several blockbusters of this era from the mid 80’s onwards. I love his work, which extended into ballet, too, and cherish the records he made of his own music. Davis and other notables in the area were commissioned into this work, as in many cases the music for these films was lost or incomplete. The “Silent” films you see were never meant to be silent. Most had scores of various sizes composed for them to be played live during the screenings. In the case of Nosferatu, Hans Erdmann was put to work. As you will read, the fact we have the film at all is fortunate, so to have most of the original music, too, is doubly so.
Nosferatu was the first vampire movie. Shot in 1922 and starring Max Schreck and Greta Schröder, it is famous as an early style-setter of the genre of the horror film and a classic of Weimar Republic Expressionism. Despite tinkerings to the plot, it was too obviously based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Stoker family sued, resulting in most of the reels being destroyed by court order. Some copies survived, though, as did most of the music which Erdmann helpfully gathered into two suites after realising it would never be heard in the theatre after the ban.
RCA issued 70 minutes of the music in a useful CD with the expert Gillian B Anderson conducting what I assume is a scratch orchestra from Northern Germany (no disrespect intended: indeed it is a lovely record). The score is worth hearing but to my ears too tame for this disturbing film. In 1997 on the Silva Screen label came a new score from James Bernard, he of the house of Hammer. Bernard scored many British horror films from 1957 to 1970 and his late work on Nosferatu is excellent. We have 63 minutes of music that oozes evil and terror. Bernard uses the leitmotif approach to his themes for Count Orlok (the vampire), Knock (his agent/accomplice), Hutter (the good natured estate agent) and Ellen (his wife).
The new score composed by the experienced Christopher Young had its premiere in Zürich in February 2023 in the Tonhalle with a giant screen above the orchestra simultaneously showing the film. You can do the same at home listening to this performance whilst watching the movie through a (legal) link on the Wikipedia page. I did this in preparing the review whilst also listening without the visuals to focus on just the music.
Most notable is the use of organ in the composition. Young revels in its many colours and effects, allowing our soloist Saya Hashino to demonstrate her not-inconsiderable skills over a wide canvas of the score in solos, in ensemble and as the sometime primeval source of the most diabolical utterances I for one have ever heard from the instrument. We are also blessed with an orchestra of this calibre. In recent years the Tonhalle-Orchester have impressed under their chief Paavo Järvi, especially in records on the Alpha label and we again hear a band rich in sonority equalised across the whole range. Our conductor Frank Strobel is a master of this repertory with recordings of other silent film scores (Die Nibelungen, Metropolis etc) already available in excellent performances.
For readers unfamiliar with the film, its protagonists are Orlok and Ellen. Ellen is a troubled, fragile soul from the very outset. She lives (I think) somewhere near Bremen with her young devoted husband Hutter. He is a young Estate Agent in the employ of Herr Knock (a disturbing caricature portrayed in the film to play on perceived audience stereotypes, of which more later). Knock has received word from Orlok who lives of course in Transylvania that he wishes to purchase a property in Bremen so Hutter is sent.
Hutter takes the land route; I presume south through the German states, through Bohemia, Moravia and across the Hungarian Plain to the Carpathians. If I had been a composer I would have relished this opportunity for developing perhaps some folk tunes on the way but Young gets to The Inn in the mountains pretty rapidly in this score.
Warned by locals about the ghostly destination, he is bound for Hutter is undeterred. Even a quick night-time read of a book on vampires and other ghouls doesn’t put him off. Young creates for us however a sense of claustrophobia and oppressive heat. Mosquitos buzz in the organ and hideous chords in percussion and high winds give us the sense that all is not well. In the Land of Ghouls and Phantom Carriage,do I hear the influence of Bernard Herrmann? Themes already stated return in the brass and are given full rein in the full orchestra and organ. We are in a Ride to Hell worthy of Berlioz’ Damnation de Faust.
I was particularly impressed with the new theme explored in The Dining Room as Orlok and Hutter get to know each other. The development in strings with an eerie woodwind counterpoint is most effective.
Next in the film, even though they are separated by hundreds of miles, we realise the connection between Ellen and Orlok representing good and evil, protective love and predatory malevolence. Hutter is attacked by Orlok but he is strong and recovers (he thinks his bite marks are those mosquitoes that plague the region). The next attempt is thwarted by Ellen’s paranormal protection of her husband. Hutter by now is finally cottoning on. When he discovers Orlok in dormant state in The Crypt (yes – in a coffin) he decides it is time to go! Brass fanfares and a vigorous rhythm build tension in the score.
In Escape and Delirium, the accumulation of pressure grows like a passacaglia. Here Young uses dissonances and discordant chords to illustrate the descent into mental anxiety of Hutter, Ellen and Knock (who I assume has worked himself into a frenzy about the imminent return of his overlord, and has been interred in an asylum).
The film starts to draw analogies that are disturbing to us now we have the knowledge of history and the benefit of hindsight. In scenes I find close in tone to those used by documentaries in mid-1930’s Germany, we are shown how nature is often brutal ensuring the survival of the fittest. The image of the spider in its web is most memorably used again later in the film. Although uncomfortable to us, we have to remember that Germany in 1922 was a shattered nation. Hundreds of thousands of men had died in the trenches, almost every family had spent years hungry eating ersatz products due to the blockade of the North Sea and the country was in a desperate state. Scapegoats were sought by many in the population and many others were drawn to the extremes in politics. There are tropes used in the movie that are antisemitic not least in the whole character of Knock and the fear of being overrun by aliens from the East is about to be portrayed as Orlok makes his way from Romania to the Fatherland.
In the meantime we have an intimate picture in the score of Ellen by the Sea. This is a beautiful portrait in sound depicting melancholy and longing. It could stand on its own as a sampler of the score. Ellen sits staring out to sea reflectively in the music although on screen she is in a kind of sand-dune graveyard.
My love of geography probably means I am more fascinated in Orlok’s journey to Germany than I perhaps should be. He goes by sea and readers will perhaps forgive me if I propose a possible itinerary he may have used. I reckon he headed first for Galati at the mouth of the Danube. Then he picked up his ship to sail into the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus, onwards through the Dardanelles and into the Aegean. From there it is easy although time consuming to get to Germany across the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar and hugging the Iberian coastline before heading North into Trafalgar, FitzRoy and Biscay shipping zones and into the Channel. You may ask, why did he not take the land route? Well, he had at least seven coffins filled with Transylvanian soil with him (which he needs to stay alive apparently) and being a vampire he cannot be exposed to daylight so it was the safer option, I suppose.
Orlok causes havoc onboard and Young’s score is illustrative of the horror. The rats that are in some of the coffins scurry out to shrill woodwind and we feel the waves crash on the hull. After the First Mate has thrown himself overboard Orlok appears behind the last sole survivor, the Captain and is framed with the rigging behind him portraying the archetypal spider in its web about to devour its prey. There is a forceful momentum in the music as the ship now moves onto its final destination inexorably. As before, Christopher Young proves his skill building up the tension as the endgame draws near.
On docking in North Germany Orlok with his coffin passes surreptitiously through town to find his new property whilst the rat-infested vessel offloads to the demise of the townsfolk. The rats you see carry plague; the town leaders first learning this through the deserted ship’s log and soon after from the rising death toll in the town. Young utilises the Dies Irae theme in bass lines and we hear the snare drum of the quickly despatched town official called upon to announce plague and enforce the lockdown. There is a sombre march tread in Dead Town and general cacophony with Young writing chromatically for organ with strange use of percussion.
Knock escapes from his internment only to be recaptured after a chase scene but the climax of the film comes with Possession. Here Ellen in her noble act of sacrifice and redemption offers herself to the vampire in the hope Orlok will indulge to such an extent he will ignore the cock-crow of sunlight and thus be killed. It works; after gorging for too long on Ellen’s blood, the dawn rays burn him up and he disappears in a puff of smoke. Ellen expires too unfortunately in the arms of her beloved but I get the feeling that like Senta in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer she was pre-determined for this fate from the beginning; she knew it and had fulfilment in it.
In the interesting notes from Warner, there is an interview where Christopher Young says he wrote most of the score whilst thinking about the film rather than actually watching it. He explains how this enabled him to paint longer brushstrokes and focus on his overall plan rather than the minutiae. Having immersed myself with the film and the score (alongside the Bernard and Erdmann soundtracks) for a week now I can hear this and I recommend you hear it too.
I am still unsure if the whole score stands up as a piece in and of itself but does it absolutely have to? It is an original and fascinating accompaniment to a film that will probably still be being studied in another hundred years. By that time, there may be other Nosferatu scores available but as a Symphony of Horror for today this fits the bill very well.
Philip Harrison
Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free.
Nosferatu Cue Points
1 Overture
2 Dead Flowers
3 Hutter’s Departure
4 The Inn
5 Book of Vampires
6 Land of Ghouls
7 Phantom Carriage
8 The Dining Room
9 Night Shadows
10 Ellen’s Portrait
11 Sleepwalk
12 The Crypt
13 Escape from the Castle
14 Delirium
15 Blood is Life
16 Ellen by the Sea
17 A Dark and Watery Grave
18 The Captain’s Demise
19 Ship of Doom
20 The Master is Near
21 The Plague
22 Dead Town
23 Burials
24 Knock’s Flight
25 Possession
26 Sacrifice and Finale
