Foolish Wives
(1922)
Directed by: Erich von Stroheim
Writing credits: Erich von Stroheim
Starring: Erich von Stroheim, Miss DuPont, Rudolph Christians, Maude George, Dale Fuller
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Running time: 2h 40m
Instrumentation List
Music composed by Timothy Brock (2022). Commissioned by the San Fransisco Silent Film Festival.
Flute (dbl. Picc.)
Oboe (dbl. E. horn)
Clarinet (dbl. Bass-cl)
Bassoon
Piano (dbl. Celesta)
Strings: (min. 8,6,6,4,2)
The music for Foolish Wives
Despite having a fair amount of silent film scores to my credit, Stroheim's cinematic language was somewhat foreign to me as a musician. Foolish Wives is a specific genre of film I had no real experience composing for, and I did struggle with my initial approach to the music.
I wanted the score to represent the two elements I felt the film had offered me as composer, old-world aristocracy and American naivete. The American “new” elements of the score (namely the ambassador and his wife) presented no real issues for me, as I am a student (and lover) of the early American symphonists, and felt that I could represent that school faithfully. But the aristocratic influence that I felt the score would require worried me, that it may come off as rather phony, or worse, Hollywood-y.
Instead, I utilized a handful of short incidental piano pieces by the rather obscure Russian composer, Sergei Lyapunov (1859-1924), to lend the score some authenticity. Not just in terms of the Russian “aristocracy” in the Stroheim character, but also in respectful deference to the hundreds of 19th-century piano pieces used by cinema pianists since film screenings began.
I tried to weave in and out of these two worlds as seamlessly as I could, until the clash and ultimate musical breakdown resulting in a violent fugue in the closing acts of the film. The score was commissioned by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2020 and calls for Piccolo, Flute, Oboe, English Horn, Clarinet, Bass-clarinet, Bassoon, Piano and Strings.
