Daniel Schnyder leads his trio in a production of Faust at Pacific Symphony May 19
Photo by Jarek Raczek
Fascinated by Friedrich Murnau’s famous silent movie classic “Faust” from 1926, the composer and saxophonist Daniel Schnyder has created music linking the saga about seduction and destruction of the human soul to its traces in Germanic musical history. This fusion of cinema and music will come to an Orange County audience on May 19 performed in Samueli Theater.
“I felt it was a perfect time to tour with this type of collaboration in silent film and music after the Oscar win of the silent film, ‘The Artist’,” said Schnyder. “Since the tale of Faust is an old German folklore, I wanted to represent a history of German music through the tale of Faust told in the 1926 silent film by Murnau.”
Inspired by the audacity in Murnau’s dramatic language, and by Faust’s legacy to classical music of three centuries, Schnyder and his trio “Words within Music” (with Dave Taylor, bass trombone, and Kenny Drew Jr., piano) accompany certain key scenes of the film with fully composed pieces and adaptions, while the protagonists’ actions and streams of consciousness are being interpreted by improvisations in the connecting film sequences.
“One example of how the music of a famous German composer’s piece accompanies the scenes in the silent film is my use of List’s Manifesto to a Manifesto scene in the film,” explains Schnyder. “I also composed a lot of music myself to correlate with the movements of the silent film.”
So this is not a film score in the traditional sense, which strives to reduce the complexity of images and their stories to a linear, emotionally seizable perspective. Schnyder multiplies the levels of storytelling, expands the field of vision and dares to enter into dialogue with this enormous film – a dialogue requiring daringness of almost Faustian scale.
“This has been a pretty unique and adventure and a very emotional one too, which I believe the audience will enjoy a similar experience with the music and film collaboration,” said Schnyder. “The audience will be receiving double information of music from famous German composers and a classic silent film based on classic German folklore.”
The performance of the entire work takes approximately 2 hours. The fully composed pieces by Schnyder, played by the “Words within Music” trio, was published on CD in Spring 2009 by the label Col Legno and can be listened to on the label’s website at www.col-legno.com.
The world premiere of this project was staged in 1999 at the Alte Oper Frankfurt in the context of the Goethe Year, celebrating the writer’s 250th birthday. The U.S. premiere took place at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2002.