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Auric: Classic Film Music, Vol.3
Georges Auric: Lola Montez / Notre-Dame de Paris / Farandole
Georges Auric studied at the Conservatoires of Montpellier and Paris and finally
at the Schola Cantorum with Vincent d'Indy. In his early twenties he joined
the composers Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre
to form the famous Groupe des Six, of which Cocteau was a patron. Auric's
talents are to be found predominantly in his music for the theatre and the screen.
In addition to his ballets Les Matelots, Pastorale, Les Enchantements de
la Fée Alcine, La Concurrence, Les Imaginaires, Le Peintre et son Modèle,
Phèdre (on a libretto by Cocteau), Chemin de Lumière, La
Chambre and Euridice written for the ballet companies of Sergey Dyagilev,
Ida Rubinstein and David Lichine, his incidental scores and his opera Sous
le masque, Auric's credits as a composer can be found on some forty French,
forty American and fifteen British films. As a writer of both complete scores
and of songs, Auric collaborated during almost half a century with such directors
as Marc Allégret, Jean Delannoy, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Max Ophüls,
William Wyler, John Houston, Otto Preminger, Charles Crichton, Thorold Dickinson,
Terence Young and Henry Cornelius. Among his best known scores for British and
American films are Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), Bonjour
Tristesse (1957), Notre-Dame de Paris (1957) and The Innocents
(1961). Above all, however, Auric is to be remembered for his unique collaboration
with Jean Cocteau, including six films that were directed by Cocteau himself
(Le Sang d'un Poète, La Belle et la Bête, Les Parents Terribles,
L 'Aigle à deux Têtes, Orphée and Le Testament d'Orphée)
and three directed by others, but with Cocteau as a script-writer (L'Eternel
Retour, Ruy BIas and Thomas l'Imposteur).
Notre-Dame de Paris
William Dieterle's film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame of 1940, with Charles
Laughton and Maureen O'Hara, had a notable musical score by Alfred Newman [available
on Marco Polo 8.223750] and it is a fortunate coincidence that this and the
score by Auric for the French Technicolor remake of 1956, with Gina Lollobrigida
and Anthony Quinn, are being released on the same label. Compared to Jean Delannoy's
lavishly photographed new version, the famous black-and-white classic remains
unsurpassable, in spite of the fact that Hollywood's revival of medieval France
rather suggests medieval Hollywood. As far as the more recent version is concerned,
contemporary critics found it too dull, outdated and too long. Lollobrigida
was considered to be miscast and Quinn to look more like Frankenstein than Quasimodo.
Jacques Prévert as a writer of dialogues, Léonide Massine as a
choreographer, Georges Auric as a composer of the incidental score and Francesco
Lavagnino as a writer of additional songs and dances for Lollobrigida could
have been a promising team, but it did not hinder this picture from disappearing
in a short time from the cinemas and becoming one of those indestructible fillers
of television afternoon programmes. Apart from the fact that Lollobrigida and
Quinn supplied their original French speaking voices with marked foreign accents,
Delannoy managed to obtain only poor performances from the more professional
supporting cast, which included French theatre celebrities Alain Cuny, Robert
Hirsch, Roger Blin and Boris Vian.
Besides Auric's incidental music, Notre-Dame de Paris contains a large
number of "source" cues for dances, songs and choruses, making it
in a way drown in too much of everything. For the original French version of
the picture, lasting 150 minutes, exceeding all dubbed versions by twenty minutes,
Auric had to compose extra music, including a longer Main Title. Listening
to the incidental music separately (one should not forget that the advantage
of film music recordings is that the music can eventually be enjoyed and studied
separately, since it is better heard), I even come to the conclusion that Auric's
score, of which only a very few cues can be properly heard in the film and on
top of that in their entirety, is another example of a soundtrack of perhaps
too high a level, which really deserved a better film.
That Lollobrigida was also going to sing and dance by herself was already a
promotional device before the film's release and therefore, prior to shooting
and before Auric began to work, Lavagnino had already written her numbers. Besides
his rather "modern" sounding incidental score for symphony orchestra
and for a film which was intended to appeal largely to less pretentious audiences,
Auric too had to write a few additional dance pieces in the ancient style for
an ensemble of two harps, two guitars and cello, some of which have been grouped
on this recording into a short suite entitled Esmeralda, even though
they also underscore various other scenes involving the hustle and bustle of
the Beggars of Paris. Although their newly given titles sound rather anachronistic
to the period in which the film is set, I have preferred to emphasize Auric's
more romantic inspiration. Anachronism is in this particular picture (and in
most historical films) not unusual anyway.
The symphonic five-movement suite of Notre-Dame de Paris opens with
the Générique (here recorded in its shorter version) over
a view of the cathedral's famous stained-glass rose-window. This movement ends
in a short lyric Prologue, accompanying a camera pan, landing at the Greek inscription
ANAYKH (Fatality, the motto of Victor Hugo's novel) on the wall of a side aisle
of the cathedral and finally dissolving into a close-up of the open book with
Victor Hugo's introductory words. The following short Marche des Truands,
is heard in the film but in a too softly edited version and serving as an accompaniment
to a song. With very little thematic material and a pointed instrumentation,
Auric has created a very effective piece, which caused applause during our Moscow
sessions, not because it was the very last piece we recorded, but because it
found immediate approval among some eighty generally very critical musicians.
The unhappy rendezvous of Esmeralda and Phoebus, ending with the latter being
stabbed by a jealous Frollo, is a combination of two separate, but consecutive
pieces (Le rendez-vous - L'attentat), in which we recognize Auric's typical
and skilful combination of diatonic (lyrical) passages with chromatic (dramatic)
themes to build up short brassy climaxes. The more one-sided love affair between
Esmeralda and Quasimodo is the subject of the next movement, entitled Des
fleurs pour Esmeralda, at the beginning a tender and transparent piece of
modal character, whose increasing dramatic interventions describe the young
gypsy's fears in front of the Hunchback's looks and Frollo's jealous threats.
The suite's finale (Désespoir de Quasimodo - La cave de Montfaucon)
opens with Quasimodo throwing Frollo over the upper balcony of the cathedral
after having witnessed Esmeralda' s death, and his collapse over her body in
the cave near the gallows, where it had been dragged.
In this score, Auric worked with a handful of clearly recognizable leitmotifs
as, for example, the hymn which may be associated with the cathedral itself,
first heard in the string passage following the bell-ringing opening of the
Generique. In the same movement appears also a candid love theme played by the
flute, which will be heard frequently in cantabile string passages in the following
lyrical sections of the score. The "Destiny" motif of darker character
can be heard towards the end of the Générique and (unlike the
earlier motifs) it reappears later in definitely more variated forms, especially
in the last movement.
The score of Notre-Dame de Paris involves a traditional symphonic ensemble
with percussion, augmented by cor anglais, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone,
vibraphone, celesta, glockenspiel, piano, organ and two harps.
Before it had been adapted for the screen for the first time in 1923, in a
silent version with Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame
de Paris of 1831 had inspired quite a few opera and ballet composers, the last
and better-known of which is Franz Schmidt, from whose opera Notre-Dame, completed
in 1906, a haunting Interlude has become famous. The most recent screen version
of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame comes from Walt Disney Productions, with a musical
score by Alan Menken.
Lola Montez
A film biography of Maria Dolores Pones y Montez ( 1818-1861 ), the famous,
beautiful femme fatale of Irish extraction (her real name was Eliza Gilbert)
who had once turned the heads of Franz Liszt, Fréderic Chopin, Prosper
Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas senior and King Ludwig I of Bavaria,
to mention only the most illustrious. During her colourful love life, she had
toured as a dancer and acted as a political spy, before travelling to Australia
and to America and eventually settling down towards the end of her life as a
religious recluse.
Max Ophüls' film of 1955, the last of his successful career and his only
colour picture, was a costly Cinemascope production, shot simultaneously in
French, German and English. It was based on a script by Cécil Saint-Laurent
and featured Martine Carol in the title rôle. Ivan Desny, Oskar Werner,
Will Quadflieg and Anton Walbrook played the parts of Lola's most famous lovers,
and multilingual Sir Peter Ustinov appeared as the cynical Ringmaster of the
American Circus which had hired the disgraced Lola to appear as a show-booth
attraction.
The script of Lola Montez is a sequence of flashbacks, bringing the
viewer always back to the Circus, an opulent and bizarrely choreographed arena
where in fact the film's best scenes are taking place and in which Lola is exhibited
to the public to recount her scandalous past and to perform as a trapeze artist.
At the end of her performance, Lola even has to take her place in an animal's
cage outside, to be admired and touched by a queue of extra paying spectators.
The opportunity to underscore such a colourful picture and to work with a great
director would have made any film composer's mouth water and Ophüls' choice
for Georges Auric brought excellent results. Auric's versatility and theatrical
feeling contributed the right sound track with easy-going tunes, short dance
or character pieces and dramatic symphonic sequences, appropriately underscoring
the Romantic script. No matter in which country Lola's adventures were to take
place, Auric was able to furnish the right musical colour and this in perfect
harmony with Ophüls' sensitive touch, elegant irony or sarcastic social
criticism.
The main body of the score is made up of three Waltzes. The first one is a
slow and rather static Waltz, heard in the Générique (Lola
on her pedestal in the middle of the Circus arena, in G) and in the Epilogue
(Lola in her cage, in E flat), which I associate with Lola's "present",
as a failed, lonely and almost dead woman, trying to preserve her dignity and
elegance. The second and third Waltzes are of more lively and brilliant character
and orchestration: their almost identical themes are constructed on either ascending
or descending thematic cells (Valse de la Bienvenue, in A flat, Valse
des Adieux, in E flat), underscoring Lola's "past", be it her
childhood and disturbed relationship with a frivolous mother, or her own frivolous
mature career. The theme of Valse des Adieux is heard for the first time
in a flashback describing Lola's affair with Franz Liszt. It is actually the
composer who in the film writes this miniature as a farewell gift to Lola, after
he had to learn from her that she would leave him. Although the themes of these
two Walzes are very simple and popular, they never enjoyed the huge success
of the Waltz from Moulin Rouge (1952), the piece which earned for Auric
considerable royalties during thirty years. The present suite contains two lengthy
and full orchestra versions of Valse des Adieux; the two animated Waltzes
are heard in the film over and over again, also in the form of quotations of
a couple of bars.
An interesting feature of this score is the inclusion of five saxophones in
the wind section of the orchestra, in order to emphasize the Circus atmosphere
in which the main action takes place, but even more important and original is
the fact that the Circus sound also reappears in various musical cues of flashback
episodes, which is surely to remind the viewer that real life too can often
become a circus.
Besides the already mentioned saxophones, the orchestral ensemble of Lola
Montez requires, in addition to the usual strings, three flutes, two oboes
and cor anglais, four clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, three horns,
four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, piano, harp, vibraphone, celesta
and glockenspiel and nine different percussion instruments. In this film and
in Notre-Dame de Paris the sound track was conducted by Jacques Météhen,
a long-time collaborator of Auric.
Farandole
Farandole figures among several filmic adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler's
notorious play Reigen ( Round Dance, 1900), two of which, made by the famous
directors Max Ophüls (La Ronde, 1950) and Roger Vadim (La Ronde, 1964),
cast into oblivion André Zwoboda's F!ench realisation of 1944, entitled
Farandole, and a German one of 1963 by Alfred Weidenmann. A silent version of
Re;gen had also been realised in 1920. Zwoboda's picture, featuring actors Gaby
Morlay, Jany Holt, Andre Luguet, Bernard Blier and Maurice Escande, not only
seems to have disappeared hopelessly from French movie theatres, but also from
television, cinema collections and museums. Consequently, there was no way to
find a print as yet and the fact that Auric's manuscript bore nothing more than
the film's title and no titles for single cues made the editing of the present
suite seem a hazardous undertaking. But the more I studied the score, the more
I liked it, making me decide to include it in the present recording. However,
I would not be surprised if one day a print of the film turned up, that but
a few moments by Auric may be found, as had been in the case of another film,
Macao, l'Enfer du jeu, a score which will be featured in the next volume
of Auric's film scores on CD. Needless to say, the titles given here have been
inspired by the mood of the music and a sequence feeling following the original
play's text.
Schnitzler's play is a sequence of ten scenic dialogues between loving couples,
whose culminating moments of sexual intercourse are suggested in the text neither
by dialogue, nor by directing indications, but by some more than meaningful
lines of little dashes. The most scandalous aspect of the whole is that one
partner always reappears in the next scene, as having a liaison with another
partner and that the little whore of the first scene is having intercourse with
the protagonist of the last one, closing thus this circle of infidelity and
plainly justifying the play's title. A curious aspect of the mentioned filmic
versions of Reigen is that all but one have been conceived either by
French directors or by a German director in a version with French actors. Schnitzler's
fabulously frivolous dialogues seemed, apparently, to suit better a French background
or appeal to French audiences. Still, the reading of Reigen in its original
language remains to me a rare and unforgettable example of esprit français
from the Austria of the turn of the century.
The music of Farandole sounds more like Auric's earlier works for the
cinema, considering that not much later he was to write those scores for Jean
Cocteau which not only would become his masterworks, but also landmarks of his
post-impressionistic or symbolistic symphonic style, requiring also larger orchestral
forces. Later, in the 1940s, Auric would even find another congenial style,
while scoring some English comedies like Passport to Pimlico and The
Lavender Hill Mob. Farandole sounds like those scores of older French
cinema, written for a Berliner ensemble, by Maurice Jaubert, Arthur Honegger
and Jacques Ibert, in which alto saxophone and piano were indispensable to overcome
sound balance problems caused by the still rather primitive microphone technique
of the 1930s. Highly atmospheric moments, reached with the use of a minimum
of structural and instrumental means make this score eventually akin to the
works of the German neue Sachlichkeit or the neoclassicism of Paul Hindemith,
Hans Eisler and Kurt Weill.
The orchestration of Farandole is quite reduced, compared to the ones
of Notre-Dame de Paris and Lola Montez: besides flutes, clarinets
and trumpets in pairs, oboe, cor anglais, alto saxophone, bassoon, bass clarinet
and trombone are all soli. In addition, timpani, harp, piano, strings and a
modest percussion section including triangle, cymbals and tenor drum are required.
Adriano
edited by Keith Anderson
edited by Keith Anderson
Disc 1
- Main Title - Destiny - 03:24
- March of the Vagabonds - 01:40
- The Tryst - The Assassination Attempt - 02:53
- Flowers for Esmeralda - 03:22
- Quasimodo's Despair - The Cellar of Montfaucon - Finale - 04:25
- Intrada - 01:04
- Fandangol - 01:10
- Jota et Habanera - 01:59
- Fandango II - 01:24
- Final - 01:27
- Main Title - The Circus - 03:07
- Lola's Childhood and Youth - 03:21
- Welcome Waltz - 03:23
- The Cossacks - 00:54
- From One Scandal to Another - 03:31
- Farewell Waltz I - 02:38
- Fandango - 01:13
- Minuet - 02:27
- Farewell Waltz II - 02:35
- Revolution in Munich - 03:14
- Epilogue - 01:58
- Main Title - 02:15
- Reveries - 02:05
- Mysteries - 02:42
- Subterfuges - Finale - 05:19
Notre Dame de Paris: Suite (more info)
Notre-Dame de Paris: Esmeralda Dances (more info)
Composed by:
Georges Auric
Lubov Burtchakova, cello
Andrei Rein, guitar
Nikolai Kamaliatov, guitar
Irina Stepanova, harp
Oxana Zadoenko, harp
Lubov Burtchakova, cello
Andrei Rein, guitar
Nikolai Kamaliatov, guitar
Irina Stepanova, harp
Oxana Zadoenko, harp
Lola Montez: Suite (more info)
Performed by:
Moscow Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Georges Auric
Conducted by: Adriano
Stos Zabavnikov, piano
Composed by: Georges Auric
Conducted by: Adriano
Stos Zabavnikov, piano
Farandole: Suite (more info)
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Composer(s)/ Author(s):
Auric, Georges
Conductor(s):
Adriano
Orchestra(s):
Moscow Symphony Orchestra
Artist(s):
Burtchakova, Lubov; Kamaliatov, Nikolai; Rein, Andrei; Stepanova, Irina; Zabavnikov, Stos; Zadoenko, Oxana
Label: Marco Polo
UPC: 636943507025
Item Number: 8225070
Release Date: Jun 1, 2000
Auric, Georges
Conductor(s):
Adriano
Orchestra(s):
Moscow Symphony Orchestra
Artist(s):
Burtchakova, Lubov; Kamaliatov, Nikolai; Rein, Andrei; Stepanova, Irina; Zabavnikov, Stos; Zadoenko, Oxana
Label: Marco Polo
UPC: 636943507025
Item Number: 8225070
Release Date: Jun 1, 2000
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