March 6, 2019

  • Important Early Swedish Film Score

     

     

    Jarnefelt: Song of the Scarlet Flower
    Gavle Symphony Orchestra/Jaakko Kuusisto
    Ondine 1328-2D
    Disc One Total Time:  46:40
    Disc Two Total Time: 52:24
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Exploring the early days of film can often yield a number of wonderful surprises.  It is often fascinating to think about early French scores by the likes of Saint-Saens, who wrote one of the first original scores for the 1908 L’assassinat du Duc De Guise, or Satie and how they are quite different from most popular attempts that blended familiar tunes from classical excerpts to folk and popular song.  The latter, coupled with original music by Joseph Carl Breil in 1915’s The Birth of a Nation becomes a sort of touchstone for the melding of music and image.  A similar milestone occurred in Swedish film with the 1919 film, Sangen am den eldroda blomman.  Directed by Mauritz Stiller (1883-1928), the film would become one of the most popular Nordic releases and essentially brought Stiller’s work to a greater audience.  The novel from which it is taken was a popular work of Finnish literature.  It also featured an entirely original film score by Finnish-born composer Armas Jarnefelt (1869-1958).  Those familiar with the work of late 19th- early-20th Century Nordic composers such as Hugo Alfven or Wilhelm Stenhammer will discover a similar musical sound here with perhaps just a bit more pathos as required for its storytelling purposes.

    Jarnefelt is mostly remembered for two orchestral works (Berceuse and Praeludium) and spent most of his career as the conductor of the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm.  As a composer, he had his greatest successes at the end of the 19th Century.  While he had written a variety of incidental music, and obviously had a sense of grand-scale dramatic writing from his conducting of grand opera, he had never written music for film until he was approached to do so by Stiller.  It is thought that Stiller, who was also a Finn now living in Sweden, felt a sort of kinship with the composer.  While Jarnefelt was given timings for each of these chapters, the end result did not always quite match up.  With no real standard for projectors, it meant that the film ended up playing faster than had originally been expected.  Herein was the first discovered challenge of composing for film where exactitude was necessary.  The result was that Jarnefelt had to edit many of his cues so that they would better fit the film.

    The film is divided up into seven chapters with the title cards helping to indicate the new section.  Jarenefelt’s music then works almost like a grand collection of symphonic poems.  He intersperses some Finnish folk tunes along with some thematic threads that will be connected to key characters using this leitmotif process throughout the film.  What is also quite delightful is that the music itself sometimes shifts so that it is not accompanying a scene but actually morphing into diagetic music that seems to come from within the scene.  Scene setting is key here from the outset.  In the first chapter, “The first flush of spring”, Jarnefelt features a nice little dance piece full of bucolic joy and with touches of burgeoning nature.  The more romantic moment gives us a taste of a late-romantic idea with an achingly beautiful line at the end representing the heartbreak of the character Annikki.  The music’s ability to paint a picture of everyday life is captured well with the folk-like ideas that will change from one chapter to the next adding some nice variety.  Delightful wind writing lends itself to this feel in chapter 2 (“The mother’s glance”) including a beautiful idea for oboe.  “Learning life” features some interesting blends of folk music ideas and this sense of a bubbling stream that comes and goes in the music with a bit more tension beginning to come out.  The shifts between full orchestra and the more delicate writing is also well done.  This all culminates in music for an action sequence where the main character, Olof, decides to impress a woman by shooting the rapids (depicted in the following sequence, “A young man’s daring-do”)!  The 17-minute Chapter 3 segment has the most suite-like feel with the following chapter having a sense of a dramatic symphonic poem.  Chapter 5, “Kylliki”, further develops her theme providing some touching, and interestingly poignant, music at times.  Folk dance music also appears to help set the scene of this encounter, complete with a Latfiol quality (the Swedish relative of a Hardinger fiddle).  It also features a great little fight scene admirably supported in the score.  “In the Town” is a longer sequence that begins a variety of slow melodramatic narrative reveals.  One nice touch is the addition of castenets (connected to a prostitute Olof picks up) in a slight bolero moment.  Another great lyrical line grows into a beautiful little waltz.  This all works its way towards a more tragic conclusion that presents one shock after another in some of the more operatic music of the score.  The final chapter, “The Pilgrimage”, returns us to the pastoral qualities heard earlier, exemplified in an oboe solo.  There is even a segment for organ that adds a nice solemn moment.  At another level, one can explore the way Jarnefelt also helps guide these shifts between rural life and urban settings as these are additional themes underlying Stiller’s melodrama.

    Several excerpts from the score would be recorded by Jarnefelt in 1931 (a perhaps important nod to Nationalist resistance to the growing threats from Germany) but he never really did much more with this music.  At one point he gave the score to the Finnish Broadcasting Company, but then asked for it back but they retained the parts.  It was not until a doctoral student, working on Swedish silent films discovered the score in the 1980s.  The music was reunited with the film in 1988 though this was a bit disastrous.  Not only did the synchronization issues still occur, but Stiller’s film had not survived in its original length or even a later edited version since only a later restored version is all that remains.  Some editing and removal of repeats was necessary in order to better synch things up.  This work was done by the restoration team of Jani Kyllonen and Jaako Kuusisto.  The latter is the conductor in this new release featuring the Gavle Symphony Orchestra.  It was this version that was premiered with the film at the 2017 Oulu Music Festival.  The recording here was made last June for Ondine.  The performances are excellent with a good sense of the sort of nationalistic qualities necessary coupled with a good command of the post-Wagnerian musical style that informs Jarnefelt’s work here.  The late-romantic style of the music makes this a rather interesting score to hear.  The ensemble is slightly larger than a normal theater orchestra of the time which helps with its thicker textural moments.  All around, this is a significant release for Nordic cineastes.