Israeli composer gives ‘The Golem’ new life

Betty Olivero’s 1997 score for the German 1920 silent film “The Golem” serves to bring back the dead. The movie is a faded relic of other times, reminding us how much fashion -- styles of dress, acting and social etiquette, to say nothing of moviemaking -- has changed in eight decades. But there the long-gone actors were on screen at the Skirball Cultural Center on Monday night dancing to the tunes of an up-to-date Israeli composer.

Presented as part of the Jewish music festival “Beyond Bim-Bam,” the screening featured the Armadillo String Quartet and clarinetist Marty Krystall seated on stage, their illuminated music stands making them plainly visible. Indeed, with the stand lights washing out the contrasts on the screen, there was little question that this was not meant to be a film with music, but a performance, with film illustrating music.

Olivero is hardly the first contemporary composer to find something liberating in returning to silent cinema, where so much more is left up to the imagination than in talkies and where the contract between sight and sound is so much freer. Minimalists, modernists and more conventional traditionalists all do it -- Thursday night in New York, for instance, Michael Nyman will perform, with the Eos Orchestra, his new score to Paul Strand’s “Manhatta.” In Olivero’s case, she has said that she was taken with movement in “The Golem” and saw her role as inventing music for existing choreography more than as using music to enhance drama. That proved a wise choice, because it is the fluid movement, and its Expressionistic visual character, that makes this film still watchable. Credited as inspiring “Frankenstein,” “The Golem: How He Came Into the World” is the story of a monster created from clay by a rabbi in 15th century Prague.

Using cabalistic magic, the rabbi (Albert Steinruck) brings his creation to life to save persecuted Jews, but the monster, with its clay pageboy haircut and wide-eyed expressions, cannot be controlled. Many scenes in this landmark film directed by Paul Wegener, who also plays the Golem, found their way into film language, from the rabbi’s pointed sorcerer’s hat and Faustian lab to the stiff-walking Golem carrying off a damsel -- here the rabbi’s lascivious daughter, Miriam (Lyda Salmonova). The audience’s natural response Monday night was laughter.

Olivero’s music is, however, serious and multifaceted. Clarinet and string quartet can be a radiant combination, an ensemble used with glowing results by Mozart and Brahms. Two incandescent clarinet quartets in our time are Morton Feldman’s luminous Clarinet and String Quartet and Osvaldo Golijov’s ecstatic, klezmer-evoking “Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind,” which Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians will play Sunday night at Adat Ari El in Valley Village for “Beyond Bim-Bam.”

In her effort to make “The Golem” her property, Olivero occasionally distanced us from the film; edgy, grating, agitated music for string quartet making silent film actors seem even more comically exaggerated. But Olivero’s music also generated striking moments -- a haunting solo clarinet wailing during a synagogue scene as the city burned, or the use of no music at all that seemed to freeze the rabbi in a silent scream. Renaissance dance music amusingly accompanies the foppish king’s messenger with bad teeth. Klezmer makes regular, appropriate appearances. The clarinetist is kept busy on five different-sized instruments.

The performance was expertly conducted by Gunter A. Buchwald; he has led this score on many occasions. But it also felt frenzied. The Skirball’s projector sped the film up by around 10%, and the players had to keep up. Try as a composer might to dominate, films do have a way of asserting themselves.

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‘Beyond Bim-Bam: New Directions in Jewish Music’

What: Concerts, workshops and a symposium at various sites in Los Angeles

When: Through May 4

Contact: (818) 716-6211; www.Jewishmusicfoundation.org