NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
City Lights
Charles Chaplin
W
e’re all familiar with Charlie Chaplin, one
of the towering icons of film history, central to the field of film as a producer, director,
and actor, instantly recognizable to people
around the world for his signature character
The Tramp. In 1999 the American Film Institute
placed him on its list of the greatest male movie
stars of all time (at No. 10, if you care about that
sort of ranking), and it also acknowledged his
film City Lights as one the 100 best American
films ever made (at No. 76, just beating out his
Modern Times at No. 81).
Chaplin’s musical inclinations went back to
his earliest years, and as a young man he
achieved competence as both a singer and an
instrumentalist. In My Autobiography (Simon
and Schuster, 1964) he wrote of the vaudeville
tour with the Karno Company that first brought
him to the United States in 1910. (That troupe
also included among its members another
young Englishman who was Chaplin’s roommate — Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later altered his name to Stan Laurel.) Chaplin recalled:
On this tour I carried my violin and my cello.
Since the age of sixteen I had practiced from
four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each
week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I
played left-handed, my violin was strung lefthanded with the bass bar and sounding post
reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert
artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville
act, but as time went on I realized that I could
never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.
After working his way through mostly
forgettable silent films, in 1919 Chaplin
co-founded (along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffiths) the film distribution company United Artists. As he
turned to producing his own films, Chaplin
enjoyed an unusual degree of artistic independence, which gave rise to the nine films
from his years of mastery: A Woman of Paris
(1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928),
City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The
Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux
(1947), Limelight (1953), and A King in New
York (1957). In 1929 he witnessed Hollywood’s
introduction of feature-length “talkies” with
some regret. He recalled in his autobiography:
IN SHORT
Born: April 16, 1889, in East Lane, Walworth,
England
Died: December 25, 1977, in Vevey, Switzerland
Work composed: Chaplin produced his film
City Lights from December 28, 1928, to the final
months of 1930, composing its music near the
end of that span. Musical arrangements were
entrusted to Arthur Johnson and musical
direction to Alfred Newman.
World premiere: The film was premiered
January 30, 1931, at the Los Angeles Theatre
in Los Angeles, and was released for distribution
by United Artists Corporation on March 7, 1931.
New York Phiharmonic premiere:
This performance
Estimated duration: ca. 86 minutes
MAY 2016 | 31
M-G-M produced The Broadway Melody, a
full-length sound musical, and a cheap dull
affair it was, but a stupendous box-office
success. That was the twilight of silent films.
It was a pity, for they were beginning to improve. … But I was determined to continue
making silent films, for I believed there was
room for all types of entertainment. Besides,
I was a pantomimist, and in that medium I
was unique and, without false modesty, a
master. So I continued with the production
of another silent picture, City Lights.
Of course, silent films were rarely silent
when they were screened. Most theaters employed musicians — sometimes only a pianist
or organist, but often a fair-sized orchestra — to
accompany the films. In some cases music was
captured on records that could be more or less
coordinated with the film action. Sometimes
scores were composed specifically for these
films, but far more often the performers filled
in a background of all-purpose music that drew
on current standards and popular classics,
sometimes working their way through anthologies of pieces classified as appropriate for love
scenes, slapstick sequences, high-speed
chases, and so on. The film’s director almost
never had the slightest involvement with the
music that would eventually be attached to a
screening of his film.
Chaplin, however, did what he could to
control this aspect of his films’ presentations,
even during the silent era, and he did assist in
compiling officially authorized scores to accompany a couple of his productions. But City
Lights provided a new level of opportunity for
his involvement:
In the Conductor’s Words
This performance of City Lights presents the original score as restored and reconstructed by conductor Timothy Brock in 2004, at the behest of the Chaplin estate. In an interview on the official Charlie Chaplin website
at the time, Brock related:
Score restoration is a very precise and exact science, and the City Lights score, we felt, needed some careful
attention … I wanted to transcribe as much of the incredible delicacy in City Lights notational ornamentation
and other general intricacies of the 1930s Hollywood musician … Over a year’s period I was able to complete
the restoration into a final edition, which I hope encompasses most of what Chaplin composed and heard in
the studio.
Brock did have to make one adjustment to the
instrumentation, for practical reasons:
Chaplin had engaged three reed players to cover
12 different wind instruments. As an example, the
first reed player was required to bring to each session 5 instruments, consisting of B-flat clarinet,
alto clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax and baritone
sax. Which means for each reel (they always
recorded each reel in one pass) this player would
have around his neck two saxes, on his lap both
clarinets and the baritone sax at his side, all at the
ready for him to grab with three to four seconds
notice in order to perform the upcoming passage
in time. It’s quite unbelievable when you follow his
part and try to imagine how quickly he had to go in
between different instruments in complete silence!
The Tramp meets the blind flower girl in City Lights.
32 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
— The Editors
I tried to compose elegant and romantic
music to frame my comedies in contrast to the
tramp character, for elegant music gave my
comedies an emotional dimension. Musical
arrangers rarely understood this. They
wanted the music to be funny. But I would explain that I wanted no competition, I wanted
the music to be a counterpoint of grace and
charm, to express sentiment, without which,
as Hazlitt says, a work of art is incomplete.
Sometimes a musician would get pompous
with me and talk of the restricted intervals of
the chromatic and the diatonic scale, and I
would cut him short with a layman’s remark:
“Whatever the melody is, the rest is just a
vamp.” After putting music to one or two pictures I began to look at a conductor’s score
with a professional eye and to know whether
a composition was over-orchestrated or not.
Team Effort
Although Chaplin proved adept as a composer of film
music, his scores were, in effect, communal compositions. His protestation that he was essentially concerned with melodies seems entirely realistic, and
there is little doubt that his musical directors were very
much involved in expanding Chaplin’s ideas into fully
harmonized and orchestrated scores. Even in these
areas, however, studio archives make clear that Chaplin was remarkably “hands-on,” assessing suggestions
made by his associates and expressing his own ideas
freely. In the case of City Lights, the musical arranger
was Arthur Johnson and the musical director was Alfred Newman (1900–1970), who had by then studied
composition with Rubin Goldmark in New York and
soon would become a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg’s in
Hollywood. Newman had arrived in Hollywood only in
1930, following a decade of involvement with musicals
on Broadway; he would go on to work on 450 films and
win nine Academy Awards.
At the Premiere
City Lights was a great success when it received its public premiere on March 7, 1931, at the Los Angeles Theatre — the first time a major motion picture opened in downtown Los Angeles rather than in Hollywood. However,
the opening of Chaplin’s film was also the opening of the theater itself, and, without clearing its plans in advance,
the management abruptly stopped the film halfway through to run an announcement extolling the glories of the
new venue. A near riot ensued, and
although “it took a reel before the
laughter got back into its stride” (as
Chaplin related), the premiere continued to an enthusiastic conclusion.
Chaplin’s guests at the premiere
were Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein,
whom he had befriended several
years earlier. “During the finale
scene,” reported Chaplin, “I noticed
Einstein wiping his eyes — further
evidence that scientists are incurable sentimentalists.”
Chaplin with special guests Albert
and Elsa Einstein
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If I saw a lot of notes in the brass and woodwind section, I would say: “That’s too black
in the brass,” or “too busy in the woodwinds.”
Nothing is more adventurous and exciting
than to hear the tunes one has composed
played for the first time by a fifty-piece
orchestra.
Extracted from a note originally written for the
San Francisco Symphony and used with permission. © James M. Keller
Instrumentation: flute (doubling piccolo),
oboe (doubling English horn), three clarinets
(one doubling bass clarinet), three saxophones (one soprano doubling alto and baritone, one soprano doubling alto, one soprano
doubling tenor), bassoon, two horns, three
trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani,
snare drum, drum kit, castanets, orchestra
bells, chimes, temple block, tambourine,
harp, banjo (doubling guitar), piano (doubling
celeste), and strings.
A Final Glance
Unlike many films that undergo multiple re-writes and re-shoots to reach a satisfying conclusion, the finale of
City Lights was never in doubt. Chaplin worked out the ending first and he spent six days filming the final encounter with the flower seller played by Virginia Cherrill — recognized throughout by the theme “La Violetera”
(“Who’ll Buy My Violets?”), a popular song by Spanish composer José Padilla (1889–1960). Chaplin was especially proud of the outcome, later recalling it as
a beautiful sensation of not acting, of standing outside of myself. The key was exactly right — slightly embarrassed, delighted about meeting her again — apologetic without getting emotional about it. He was
watching and wondering without any effort. It’s one of the purest inserts — I call them inserts, close-ups —
that I’ve ever done.
City Lights went on to become an inspiration for
filmmakers from Orson Welles to Federico Fellini, and
Woody Allen has called it Chaplin’s best work. In fact,
many have noted an echo of City Lights in the final
scene of Allen’s own Manhattan (which will be
screened, with a live performance of the sound track,
as part of the New York Philharmonic’s The Art of the
Score, September 16–17, 2016).
— The Editors
Chaplin, in the final scene of City Lights
34 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC