BY PETER HUMMERS | In the earliest days of movies, before there was a way to embed sound, silent films would play at local theaters, accompanied by a musician, usually at a piano, but in the grandest theaters, at the house organ, which sometimes rivalled that of the church or cathedral down the street.
Sometimes musical scores were supplied by the film distributors; sometimes they were actually followed. More often the accompaniment was improvised by the organist, whose impromptu score was polished by repeated viewings of the movie.
Dorothy Papadakos arrived at the First Flight High School auditorium accompanied by a digital organ, which sat on the floor between the audience and the stage. The cockpit, or console, where she sat, was about as large as a Volkswagen Beetle and resembled that of a giant church organ, bristling with buttons, stops, bass pedals and several keyboards. But replacing the giant pipes embedded in the walls of the theater were eight large speaker cabinets lining the front edge of the stage, pointed at the ceiling. Another cabinet was on the floor in front of the stage, aimed at the audience.
As the audience arrived for the first show in the Outer Banks Forum’s 2008-9 series, pages from the printed program highlighting corporate sponsors were being projected on the back wall of the stage. “They’re not ads,” said Forum president John Tucker, referring to the nonprofit status of the Forum. “We’re a 501c3; they’re donations.”
Papadakos, who made her bones, as it were, as organist of the world’s largest gothic cathedral, St. John the Divine in New York, has collaborated with the likes of the Paul Winter Consort, Jessye Norman, Judy Collins, Max Roach, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, Philip Glass and numerous others, especially world music and music theatre artists.
And she is a fan of early cinema, or as she might more engagingly put it, “old movies.” She learned film-score improvisation at the feet of the master, Lee Erwin, and this evening she would work her magic on a 1929 edit of Carl Laemmle’s Phantom of the Opera, starring the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” Lon Chaney, who had recently had a triumph as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The house lights went down, and before the film began, in a pool of light at her organ, Papadakos played Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata in D minor,” a piece of music that many would recognize from countless gothic and horror movies.
The organ thundered appropriately; its vibrations could be felt through the floor, and Papadakos’ fluid reading brought out a sense of foreboding and menace that well served the evening. When the final note faded into the darkness, the film began.
To those who had only seen the occasional crusty old silent movie on television, the evening’s experience was a revelation. To begin with, it had color! Not photographic color, but each black-and-white scene was tinted to heighten its mood – amber for interiors, blue for night scenes, green for mysterious moods, red for fire and sunshine (yellow) for daylight exteriors. A pivotal scene at a Bal Masque – a masked ball – was in an early two-color Technicolor process.
The sets (the Paris Opera House and its environs) were magnificent. There was a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, and the opera depicted in the movie (Gounoud’s Faust) was a spectacle in itself. The acting was – broad; before directors got to know the medium of film, and the information that could be imparted by an actor’s smallest expressions, players tended to use the large, sweeping mannerisms of stage actors, which were meant to be seen by audients in the cheapest seats.
Of special note was the star, Lon Chaney, an actor whose extreme self-applied makeup earned him the title “Man of a Thousand Faces” and made him an early superstar. His horrific skull-like visage as the title character caused some contemporary viewers to faint, and holds up today as pretty darn scary.
And Papadakos nailed the score. Her music effaced itself in service to the film; each cue was perfect, each mood was enhanced. The degree to which the music disappeared into the film could be summed up by John Tucker’s description of an earlier performance Papadakos had done for the school’s students: “You could hear a pin drop.”
Dorothy Papadakos scores, and scores with, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ by Peter Hummers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
