The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919, score 1996)
Original Title: Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari
Directed by: Robert Wiene
Writing credits: Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer
Starring: Conrad Veidt, Freidrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Werner Krauss.
Genre: drama
Country: Germany
Running Time: 72 mins
Instrumentation List
String sextet:
2 Violins
2 Violas
2 Violoncellos
or String orchestra
“Who the hell is Timothy Brock? A well-known man in film connoisseur circles in the USA, he wrote the soundtracks for the German silent film classics of the 1920s, which David Shepard restored faithfully on behalf of Film Preservation Associates. Brock was born in 1963, is a self-taught musician, lives in Washington state and leads the Olympia Chamber Orchestra, which recorded most of his film scores.
He has now also emerged as a composer of symphonies and operas. The Olympia-based rock label K Records has created the music for the expressionistic chamber horror play about Dr. Caligari has already presented the fourth Brock disc. It started with Murnau’s “Sunrise” (KOCO-1), very romantic-elegiac sounds in a somewhat amateurish production. All the more sensational is the highly dramatic music for “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” (KOCO-2), which, despite all the uninhibited eclecticism in the gripping dramaturgy, also reveals Brock’s own mysterious, mischievous tone. The symphonic music for Murnau’s “Faust” is large-scale for a 45-man orchestra and lasts almost 70 minutes (KOCO-3).
Style elements from Schubert, Beethoven and others are used in an imaginative way. woven in, with an intuitive feeling, although not for humorless moral guardians. Sophisticated entertainment, surprisingly sophisticated for the film genre. The new “Caligari” music goes the furthest in terms of ambition, conceived more ascetically for string sextet, but not composed in the least bit ascetically. The music may not seem terribly creepy without images, but it is extremely atmospheric and coherent, varied in its dark sound and musically consistent, although it is precisely aligned with the plot. This is probably how good film music should be: unobtrusive but intense, and without the constraints of the genre being noticeable. For many soundtrack collectors, Brock will also be an exciting discovery of slowness.”
“I didn’t know anything about the original German score. All I know is that German copyrights are essentially impossible to untangle, so I didn’t try. I commissioned a new score from Timothy Brock, and I thought he did a wonderful job. We have two versions of it. It was originally going to be done for 28-piece string orchestra. Then, largely because of time constraints — we had an announced deadline that was getting close — we reworked it, because Tim couldn’t find that many good string players in Seattle that he wanted to work with. We worked it down to a string sextet, although we have the scores and parts now for both versions, and we are going to start presenting it as a concert attraction and use whatever score the venue wants to play. If they can find 28 good string players, well, God be with them. So we recorded the score and the music was new. It was an artistic choice, one I think we were very fortunate on.”
