Film Series Will Bring Out Chaplin’s Musical Side

The autumn leaves were swaying

A music man was playing

I heard a girlie saying

“I love that cello--who plays that cello?”

His music so appealing

Into my heart comes stealing

I get a wondrous feeling

From that melody ...

--From “Oh, That Cello,” by Charlie Chaplin The legendary pathetic-yet-humorous “Little Tramp” of the silent screen was already a huge box-office sensation when he penned that rather presumptuous ode to his own musical talents in 1916.

Unbeknown to most of his fans, Charlie Chaplin had always dreamed of becoming a concert musician. Even after his 1913 signing with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Comedies launched his celebrated acting career, he religiously practiced the cello and violin and took great pride in writing musical scores for his myriad silent movie classics.

It is this relatively unheralded side of the king of slapstick that will be spotlighted Saturday night at Symphony Hall, when the San Diego Symphony presents a twin bill of Chaplin silents, “The Pilgrim” and “The Circus,” as the third and final installment in its Nickelodeon Concert series.

Before the projectors roll, there will be an hourlong lecture on the history of silent movie music--with an emphasis on the scores written by Chaplin--and a performance of “Oh, That Cello” by tenor Thom Gall and organist Dennis James.

Later, James and the entire orchestra, conducted by Carl Daelher, will provide musical accompaniment to both films, including portions of Chaplin’s original score for “The Circus.”

The 1928 comic-romantic melodrama about a circus janitor-turned-clown who falls in love with a horseback rider won Chaplin--its star, writer, director and producer--an honorary Oscar “for versatility and genius” at the following year’s inaugural Academy Awards ceremony.

Chaplin “wrote scores for all his films, even the talkies,” said James, who with Daelher has been packaging silent movies with major symphony orchestras around the country since 1981.

“He used to say his music provided a setting to his films instead of underscoring each action,” James said. “Back then it was customary for the music to ‘Mickey Mouse’ the visuals. If someone fell down the stairs, for example, the orchestra tried to reproduce that sound.

“But that was never Chaplin’s intent,” James said. “He preferred to hold back and let the movie speak for itself, while his music provided more of an atmosphere.”

When he wasn’t busy working on films, James said, Chaplin would often write pop songs, like “Oh, That Cello,” that he hoped would enjoy a long ride down Tin Pan Alley.

But with the exception of 1931’s “Smile,” Chaplin’s only real hit, his repeated attempts at establishing himself as a songwriter never got past the curb.

“When he wrote ‘Oh, That Cello’ in 1916, Chaplin had grand dreams of selling hundreds of thousands of copies,” James said. “He even set up his own publishing company, and in his autobiography he talks about how he waited in his office for the people to stream in.

“As it turned out, he only sold a couple of copies to other tenants in his building. Songwriting was one of the few ventures in his lifetime in which he was not a success.”

James, 37, said he has been hooked on silent movies since “I was a kid in the 1950s, and television stations used to show them a lot just to fill up air time.”

A decade later, he was an undergraduate music student at Indiana University, studying classical organ performance.

“Each Wednesday night, they would show silent films in the campus auditorium as part of the comparative literature program, and there was never any sound, never any musical accompaniment,” James recalled. “So one night, I asked the professor if I could play music to the films on this old piano up on stage, and for the next year I improvised.

“Eventually, I realized I could do a better job if I could screen the movies beforehand. And by the time I graduated, I had progressed to the next step: collecting, and learning, original scores that I found at antique shops, old movie theaters and estate auctions.”

Since then, James has made a career out of pairing vintage silent films with live music.

In 1981, he was selected by composer-conductor Carmine Coppola as organist for the world tour of “Napoleon,” the epic 1927 silent film by Abel Gance.

That same year, James and conductor Daelher formed the Silent Film Concerts production company, which over the past seven years has presented 14 different silent screen classics, along with appropriate musical accompaniment, in theaters and concert halls throughout the United States.

In most instances, James and Daelher have stuck with the original scores. But with Chaplin’s “The Circus,” they’ve done a fair amount of modification.

“One of the things about Chaplin’s film scores is that they’re extremely repetitive,” James said. “He rarely developed the music as much as he could have--he would write a given scene and repeat it, ad infinitum.

“So what we did was get rid of the repetition while retaining the major elements of his original score. And that entailed replacing some of his pieces with other period silent film compositions, as well as authentic circus music from the same era.”

For “The Pilgrim,” a 1923 featurette in which Chaplin portrays an escaped convict, the symphony will play an entirely new score, written by James and Daelher.

“Chaplin’s original music simply hasn’t survived, as is the case with so many early silent film scores,” James said.