11th Commandment: Restore the Music, Too

When moviegoers visit the restored Egyptian Theatre this weekend to see Cecil B. DeMille’s silent classic “The Ten Commandments,” their experience will be far from silent.

Helping to bring the images alive will be a 16-piece orchestra under the direction of musicologist Gillian Anderson (no, not the “X-Files” actress), who spent nearly two years tracking down and restoring the film’s original 1923 score by Hugo Riesenfeld.

Anderson, a former Library of Congress American-music specialist who for 20 years has been restoring and conducting scores for “early films”--she understandably bristles at the term “silent”--is passionate about her work. It bothers her that film archives, for the most part, care only about preserving the films themselves.

“The original artifact, the art form, is a mechanical moving image with live, often orchestral accompaniment,” she said last week from her Washington, D.C., home. “You haven’t restored that artifact until you have put the two elements together.”

“The Ten Commandments” is her 22nd film score restoration project. In recent years, she has reconstructed the original scores for such classics as Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” and “The Circus,” Wellman’s “Wings” and Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” and conducted them in locations that have included New York, Paris and Berlin.

American Cinematheque director Barbara Smith said she contacted Anderson in 1996 after discovering that Dec. 4, 1998, would be the 75th anniversary of the premiere of the DeMille film at the Egyptian. “I knew we wanted to open with a silent film with an orchestra,” Smith said. “It seemed like something we couldn’t pass up.”

Riesenfeld was a well-known composer and compiler of scores during the late 1910s and ‘20s. Musical director of three Manhattan movie palaces, he often assembled scores from existing classical works and supplemented them when necessary with original music (sometimes his own, sometimes that of other contemporary composers).

In the case of “The Ten Commandments,” Anderson estimates that about 40% is Riesenfeld’s own music. The rest consists of excerpts from other works: pieces of the Bruckner Third and Beethoven Sixth, some Grieg, Gounod, Schumann, Saint-Saens and other concert music, particularly in the first half, which is set in ancient times. The second half (set in modern times) features more contemporary music, including dance-band arrangements and pop tunes of the era such as “Mother Machree” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

According to Anderson, Paramount’s well-preserved music library still had a copy of Riesenfeld’s “piano conductor” score--that is, a vastly simplified reduction of the full orchestral score from which individual musicians’ parts would normally be drawn. Unfortunately, out of 112 separate pieces that comprised the entire score, only three contained any clue as to precisely where the music originated.

That’s where Anderson’s long and often tedious detective work began. Using a variety of musical reference works, consulting with fellow experts and examining collections of cinema sheet music at libraries across the country, she spent several months attempting to deduce the preexisting music from which Riesenfeld drew and, more specifically, which measures of each work.

“While this process was going on,” Anderson explained, “I also had to find a print running at the right speed, time the movie and then start synchronizing the music to the film.” Eventually a complete print--including a finale discovered at the Library of Congress, one not seen for many years and not in the commercially available video--was assembled.

Playing these scores is no easy task for the musicians, Anderson pointed out. “The music changes tempo every 30 seconds or so. The musicians have to play, pretty much without putting their instruments down, for two hours and 14 minutes.”

For the conductor, she added, ‘the greatest challenge is staying in sync and still doing a musical performance. I’m really very much in sync very often. But if I get ahead or fall behind, I have to change speed to catch up. The musicians have to be in constant communication with me. They can’t go on automatic pilot.”

Anderson is excited about premiering “The Ten Commandments” in the restored Egyptian. “Once you’ve seen a 35mm print in a theater that is of this historic vintage, with a live orchestra playing the original music that actually went with it, you’re going to come away with an understanding of that work of art that’s going to be completely different than what you could get watching a tiny screen at home on television,” she said.

Critical View

* Kevin Thomas comments on the return of DeMille’s epic in Screening Room. Page 16.