Music for a mystic monster

“Der Golem,” the 1920 classic of the German silent cinema, has been accompanied by several different musical scores in the past 80-plus years.

Perhaps none is more appropriate for this tale of oppressed Jews in 16th century Prague than the music that will be performed with the film Monday night at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Israeli-born composer Betty Olivero’s original score, written for string quartet and clarinet -- actually five different clarinets played by a single performer -- is a highlight of the festival of Jewish music being sponsored at various L.A. locations by the Jewish Music Foundation.

“It is a combination of popular folk music with contemporary music, but in a natural way,” says Olivero by phone from Florence, Italy, where she lives. “Some of the music is drawn from original klezmer tunes, and the clarinet playing, in some sections, is really klezmer style.”

For the performance Monday, clarinetist Marty Krystall will perform with the Armadillo String Quartet. Gunter Buchwald, a German specialist in music for silent films, will conduct the 78-minute score. Olivero will attend and speak, probably after the film.

“Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam” (“The Golem: How He Came Into the World”) is widely acknowledged as one of the cinematic inspirations for “Frankenstein.” Elements of its story about a man-made creature who discovers emotion and runs amok, terrorizing the townspeople, will be familiar to fans of the Boris Karloff film.

Based on a medieval folk legend, “Der Golem” starred, and was co-written and co-directed by Paul Wegener, then Germany’s leading horror-film actor. It was photographed by Karl Freund, the lighting genius who would later shoot “Metropolis” (1926) and “Dracula” (1931), direct “The Mummy” (1932) and win an Oscar for his cinematography on “The Good Earth” (1937).

In the story, the senior rabbi (Albert Steinruck) in Prague’s Jewish ghetto predicts bad times ahead for his people and constructs a clay warrior, the Golem, to defend them. He teaches the robot-like giant (played by Wegener) to fan a hearth fire, fetch supplies and perform other menial tasks.

When the emperor vows to banish all Jews from the city, the rabbi shows off the Golem, who saves several lives during a building collapse. The emperor rescinds his original ruling, allowing the Jews to remain.

Meanwhile, the rabbi’s daughter (Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s wife) is having an affair with the emperor’s messenger. The rabbi’s jealous servant learns of the liaison and unleashes the Golem against the messenger, unwittingly setting in motion events that nearly destroy the town.

“Der Golem” is regarded as a classic of German Expressionist cinema, along with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (also 1920) and “Nosferatu” (1922), all early examples of the macabre that influenced many later American horror films. It was seeing “Der Golem” without any music that inspired Olivero to compose a new score.

Born in Tel Aviv, she became aware of the mystical Golem legend at an early age. “It was part of the general culture,” she says. “I always dreamed of doing something with the legend. I thought originally that I might write an opera or a ballet.”

While in Munich in 1996, she was invited to a screening of “Der Golem” by a member of the team then restoring the film. To her, the exaggerated acting style of the period, “almost like mime,” suggested that music could accompany their movements a little like ballet, “with the choreography already existing.”

A chance meeting with noted klezmer clarinetist Giora Feidman led to a commission for Olivero to score the film for him and string quartet.

She spent six months on the music, which premiered at a silent-film festival in Vienna in 1997 with Feidman and the Arditti String Quartet.

Since then, “Der Golem” has become one of Olivero’s most performed works, with about 30 performances around the world, including at New York’s Lincoln Center. She has also adapted it for concert performance, minus the film.

Its klezmer roots made it a good fit for the Jewish Music Foundation’s current three-week festival, a series of concerts and panel discussions that, according to Neal Brostoff, the festival’s artistic director, “takes as its philosophical point of departure the comfort music of Chassidic ‘bim-bam’ and klezmer, and explores diverse pathways into fresh and stimulating new works.”

Monday’s performance of Olivero’s “Der Golem,” which screens with a restored print of the film, marks its West Coast premiere.

Composer as teacher

After initial music studies in Israel, Olivero attended Yale University and won a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Center, in Massachusetts, where she first met composer Luciano Berio. She worked with him there, and in Italy from 1983 to 1986. Berio has since been quoted as calling her “a most impressive voice in Jewish culture ... one of the most self-aware and deeply connected to today’s Jewish music.”

Now 48, she has written dozens of pieces, ranging from chamber works to symphonies, which have received performances by orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic to the Chicago Symphony. But “Der Golem” is her only film score.

“I was terribly enthusiastic about it,” she says. She composed in the leitmotif fashion, creating themes for different characters and situations, but often drawing on traditional Hebraic melodies, both folk and liturgical.

For example, she explains, “I wanted to emphasize the human side of the Golem,” so for the scene of the Golem’s creation, she chose a familiar melody, “Place Me Under Thy Wing.” It’s “a symbolic message of love,” she adds. The theme is repeated much later in the film, in a scene (emulated in “Frankenstein”) where a little girl offers a flower to the monster.

“There are a lot of traditional melodies, mostly for scenes of crowds. But the transcription of those melodies is mine. So you can recognize the melody, but the dressing of the music is my own.”

Providing additional color in the score is the sound of five different woodwinds: clarinets in B flat and D, bass clarinet, basset horn and E-flat piccolo clarinet. This was done at the suggestion of Feidman, the original performer, Olivero says.

The composer is known for quoting Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish melodies, as well as Ashkenazic tunes, throughout her work. “It’s a very complex tradition,” she says. “I was born into this reality. In Israel, this is the music that I heard from morning till night. It had already arrived as a synthesis, a mixture. I didn’t create it. I just have to expose it.

“Add to that not only Western musical tradition, but also contemporary Western music, avant-garde music. For me, contemporary music was a means of expression -- but into that I can very easily put my roots.”

“The clarinet and the string quartet together play music that is very evocative,” Brostoff says. “It’s viscerally Jewish; one hears it and feels that it’s Jewish music. It’s very engaging, and even though it’s also very stylish in terms of new-music styles, it’s still accessible to the average concertgoer.

“The music doesn’t try to explain the story. It enhances the film and makes it an emotionally satisfying experience.”

Olivero hopes that audiences will appreciate not only “the beauty of the film itself, its shadows and light,” but also “the positive energies I was trying to create with the music. There are moments when you feel the cruelty, and as a Jew, I was brought up learning how the Jewish people survived catastrophes and attempts to exterminate our spirit.

“Nevertheless, we remained. This is something that I was trying very much to show.”

*

‘Der Golem’

When: Monday, 8 p.m.

Where: Magnin Auditorium, Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles

Price: $8 (students) to $15

Contact: (818) 716-6211

For a full schedule of the Jewish music festival, (818) 716-6211 or www.jewishmusic foundation.org.