By A revamped musical backdrop composed for the silent version of England’s first talkie makes some fairly direct references to one the 20th century’s great operas. Mark Fraser attempts to draw a comparison between the two works.
Movie soundtrack buffs may well rejoice when they hear Moritz Eggert’s stunning updated score for a re-release of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 crime classic Blackmail.
In particular, music aficionados familiar with the work of the Viennese composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) – and especially his Lulu Suite (1934) – should no doubt enjoy Eggert’s sonic landscapes, which are now an integral part of the original film’s silent rendition.
Also hailed as Britain’s first talkie, with Hitchcock displaying his deft hand at storyboarding by pretty much shooting two takes of the movie in the one sitting, Blackmail is, like Berg’s second opera Lulu (for which the suite is a kind of sampler), about a woman whose attractiveness to men becomes an integral part of her downward spiral – a fall from grace that ultimately leads to murder.
Based on a 1928 play by Charles Bennett, the film is nowhere near as complicated, or as tragic, as the three act piece of musical theatre which has obviously inspired Eggert’s score.
It is, however, melodramatic enough to evoke a strong sense of catastrophic disorder – particularly when protagonist Alice White (Anny Ondra) ends up knifing and killing the artist Crewe (Cyril Ritchard) after he tries to rape her in his London studio.
Successfully reflecting the mood of the drama while providing a good dose of both compositional variety and evocation, the versatile 2024 soundtrack accompanying the silent release of Blackmail includes everything from grandiose chordal flourishes to light hearted, and sometimes frivolous, melodic banter.
This includes one of Lulu’s recurring orchestral leitmotifs, which has been described as a “fate rhythm” by American Pulitzer Prize composer George Perle, which sees the reciprocal relation between tempo and rhythm become “a controlled compositional device” that modulates from one tempo to another, effectively establishing “both local and large scale connections”.*
Like Berg, Eggert ‒ who was born in the German city of Heidelberg towards the end of 1965 ‒ seems unapologetic with his repeated use of this passage as a means of not only joining the small and large dots of the narrative, but reflecting the tumultuous elements underpinning the story.
Spontaneous requirements
Where the two composers’ works differ, however, is arguably in the way their music is employed to help define characters.
Members of Lulu’s dramatis personae, for instance, are “converted into personalities, that could effectively be characterised by musical means”, according to Perle, thus allowing Berg to create a work that is “more coherent, more complex though less complicated, more profound and, in every way, more effective dramatically than the original” text (by Frank Wedekind).
Eggert’s compositions, on the other hand, infuse the same kind of approach, but appear to be a little more spontaneous throughout the film – something that is required for a short motion picture where the score operates more on a scene-by-scene basis, providing the composer an opportunity to adjust the rhythm and timbre of the individual pieces to align with the action on the screen accordingly.
In this regard, the updated Blackmail soundtrack also earns its stripes as a Lulu comparison insofar as it too exploits multiple musical forms, reflecting “one of the most complex and attractive features of Berg’s music”.
At least this is how French composer/conductor Pierre Boulez – who oversaw the first full performance of the opera in 1979 – described it in an essay he had first published back in 1981, wherein he purported that this direct ability to express himself was Berg’s exceptional gift as a composer ‒ coupled with his determination to sustain this expressive power by a radical investigation of the formal means by which it could be achieved.
“Whether it is his taste for symmetry, his passion for allusions and secret references or his wish to combine apparently disparate forms, his musical universe seems unquestionably to depend on direct expression despite the presence of multiple underground streams,” Boulez said.
Listen to the updated soundtrack for the silent version of Blackmail, and it is arguable the same sorts of observations could be made about Eggert’s composition.
Interestingly, while Berg ‒ along with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern ‒ is known as a pioneer of serialism**, Eggert sees himself more of a “atopical composer”, who writes “without defined place” outside of the borders of style or genre “which define the musical world”.
“Atopical music is a free space, full of wild and unexpected ideas, (and) they might be sweet, bitter-sweet, shocking, transgressive, provocative,” he told the website 15questions.net.
“This is the non-place I want to be with my music, because there I can have the most freedom.”
Certainly this kind of philosophical aesthetic is present in Eggert’s score for the silent Blackmail, which undeniably embraces all of these attributes.
Style enhanced
To merely wax lyrical about the updated music in the original version of the Hitchcock movie would be something of an injustice to STUDIOCANAL’s Blu-ray issue of the film, which also features the part-talkie release in all of its beautifully restored glory.
In its analysis of the work, the British Film Institute (BFI) shamelessly – not to mention justifiably ‒ champions the director, pointing out that Blackmail “contains more shots, more camera movement and the fluidity of the cutting” which conveys the narrative with great style.
“Every scene counts and every shot either enhances the atmosphere or moves the story along,” the BFI says.
“The opening eight minutes of the film is a tour de force of montage in which we see the forces of the law hunt down and ‘process’ a career villain from capture to the police cell.
“Blackmail displays many of the stylistic elements and themes with which Hitchcock would come to be associated ‒ particularly a fascination with male sexual aggression and female vulnerability.”
As for the film’s place in the annals of cinema history, US writer and art critic John Russell Taylor has pointed out that the director’s embracing of sound at the time convinced producers, the public “and especially the unwilling critics who looked askance at the new medium” that it could be used creatively .
“The talkie did not have to be merely a photographed stage play but had other, more exciting possibilities,” he said.
“Blackmail confirmed Hitchcock as the most important and talented filmmaker of his day.”
FOOTNOTES
*Composer David Raskin also lifts from this Berg piece in his score for the Otto Preminger-directed Laura (1944).
**A fixed sequence of musical elements which most commonly employ a series of 12 pitches (notes) embracing the entire chromatic octave, according to Random House’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Classical Music.
REFERENCES
George Perle: ‘Alban Berg’, The New Grove Second Viennese School, Macmillan Publishers Ltd (London and elsewhere), 1980, pp 173-85.
Pierre Boulez: ‘Lulu’, Orientations, Faber and Faber Ltd (London), 1981, pp 380-98.
Tobias Fischer: ‘A Glimpse at Magic’ – Interview with Moritz Eggert, 15questions.net (Germany), date unknown.
Anonymous: ‘Blackmail’ ‒ BFI National Archive, BFI.org.uk, (London), 2013.
John Russell Taylor: ‘Moments of Fear’, The Movie, Orbis Publishing Ltd (London), 1979, Vol 1, Issue 3, pp 50-3.
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