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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The First Ever Full-Orchestra Film Score, 6 May 2005
Someone must have advised composer Max Deutsch (1892-1982) that if you're going to steal, steal from the best, because he certainly did that in this film score from (!) 1923, the oldest (miraculously) extant film score that used a symphony orchestra. A student of Schoenberg, Deutsch obviously had terrific schooling. And he had a good ear, too, because one can hear bits of Mahler (e.g., the trumpet tattoos from his Seventh Symphony, among many other touches), Wagner (the Tristan harmonies), and folksong ('Ach, du lieber Augustin,' which of course Mahler had used, too). And it all sounds like Mahler meets Carl Stallings (you know, the music for the Bugs Bunny cartoons). This issue from cpo is billed as 'A Film Symphony in 5 Acts' but it's no symphony as we generally think of it. It's more like a ballet, perhaps, with short episodes. But, in fact, it is actually simply a film score whose form is determined not by Austro-German classical forms but by the incidents in the silent movie, 'Der Schatz,' one of G. W. Pabst's early silent films. The story is about greed and its results. The film ends with a spectacular collapse of the home of the protagonists and their fiery deaths, |