State Theatre Collection during COVID part 3 Getting Serious with Opera

Around the era of WW1,the silent films were becoming very popular. Longer more serious films were produced and to match this more prestigious profile, it was necessary to get music to match. I imagine this was when The State Theatre people began to be serious about their library. The State Theatre Orchestra had an orchestra of 24 players but the music was a lending library which was sent to theatres all over Sydney.     When I say orchestra, it was a specific type of orchestra, a theatre orchestra which included a piano and a variable number of instruments depending which instruments were available. I know one orchestra in a Paddington theatre used a piano and one trumpet but ideally there should have also been a violin. Ideally, the orchestra should have consisted of mainly strings with a string bass. They had to sound like an orchestra, not a jazz band and the bass and percussion was to blend. Still any of the music is playable by the piano and one instrument as was done until the end of the era. This meant the music of the library was very identifiable, it was not orchestral music for formal concerts, it was always arranged for theatre. As the film industry fought for respect as a serious art form, big American theatres tried to set down the composition of an ideal theatre orchestra. It was to be 25 musicians but in large theatres it could double or treble creating a strain  on other performances requiring professional musicians. The State Theatre’s Orchestra was 25, obviously following the US lead. If even New York had to search hard for musicians who could perform the music on little rehearsal (tell me about it!)  How did little Sydney manage. More about the music later but it certainly was challenging. I was fascinated by trombone parts with the positions written above the music. Surely if a player could manage the part, he would not need to be reminded of the positions, but there was an obvious reason. Then I suspect we had a large number of Salvation Army bands training young players.  According to British traditional brass bands traditions, they learn to read everything in treble clef. Orchestral music uses bass clef for trombones thus the need to mark the notes. Even now a large number of our professional brass players began in the Salvation Army bands. The big theatres that used this library in Sydney managed. Like other cities, this music was loaned to other theatres although owned and managed by The Civic Theatre Sydney. This was also done by the worlds largest collection the Balaban and Katz collection in Chicago.  It consists of  26,000 scores but does not consist of scores just for films, but also dance. This is very like my Bradford collection, but not The State Theatre Collection of 13548 scores which  consisted of just music for films. There are some foxtrots used by the era but not enough to be used for general dancing. It is probably around the third biggest collection in the world but as it is purely for silent films it becomes a real treasure.Just prior to ww1  was the time  music for films began to be standardised and films were multi-reeled. To demonstrate how serious the new picture palaces were, a lot of traditional operas were filmed, of course expecting the orchestra to fill in the accompaniment. Carmen and The Merry Widow were both produced before ww1 . Gradually all the favourite operas were produced, including Madame Butterfly starring Mary Pickford. But what about the music? State Theatre Collection has many of them and seeing the scores shows the problems the poor musicians had. The early version of Carmen intended to have the main arias played as the operas backing. Of course the State Theatre owned a number of copies but not all the opera of course, just the favourite parts.

Obviously the films could not be the whole opera, nor the orchestra play the complete score. The picture was just the storyline which included parts that would have had the best music. As far as I can see, the music for this was all the best tunes cobbled together. A good example is from one of the popular  operetta of the time called, Blossom Time by Romberg. The music is called “Selection from Blossom Time”  and can be played in total but each section is marked by a double bar and the song used there is named. eg. Three Little Maids, Let Me Awake, Finale Act 1 and so on. It meant score could be split up and the orchestra  play the appropriate music at the correct time in the film.  As so often happened, only one song was wanted for a film and there were a large number of pages in the part, musicians have marked them…….makes it easy for me to work out exactly what was played.   This is seen in the collection’s version of The Merry Widow.Below is part of a film at the beginning of the talkies, of  The Merry Widow, the Merry Widow Waltz of course inWhen the overture or whole pieces like waltzes were contained within the show they were often published separately like March of the Toys from Babes in Toyland. I found difficulties in looking for a particular aria like la donna e mobile and finding it had been labelled as Rigoletto the opera in which it belonged. I feel sorry for the librarians, I expect life does get a bit difficult if you are working in a field you are not familiar with and early music is less than labelled correctly. March of the Toys created another problem for me. My YouTube was seen and marked having a copyright infringement by a large organisation.  The music is owned as part of The State Theatre Collection, published 1903, composer died 1924 and is still public domain. Just because Disney used it, does not mean they own it. I won, they backed down. I am always very careful. Here it is used in Journey to the Moon by Melies.By far the most successful use of opera in the silent film era has to be The Phantom of the Opera. Just basing the story around the magnificent Paris Opera House would have been enough but using the favourite grand opera of the times, Faust by Gounod and introducing Lon Chaney in his most famous horror role as The Phantom. It was just as popular in the 20s as the Lloyd Weber version is today.  I have always had problems with the Lloyd Weber version, even in the original book form the whole story was based around both the opera house and the opera Faust. To replace all of Gounod’s music with your own compositions seems like desecration.  No such thing happened in the 1925 version, all the music came from Gounod’s Faust. I wanted to put on Phantom and a check for the music was promising, the collection contained lots of general selections plus copies of some of the main arias and ballets.  I should have been more wary because of course this was a library. It was lent out all over Sydney and this was a very popular show. The Governor attended the opening and part of a  Sydney Opera company (probably the one started by Melba) sang, at a guess, the wonderful final chorus of the angels. The music had been used so much, most of it was worn out with missing parts and torn pages. I did what I could but could not even get what is known as the jewel song……which is when the chandelier falls. We did it with piano and flute, disappointing.  I will do it again. Thanks to Covid I have details of the collections’ versions of Faust, and am searching the world to get PDFs of the music. It will come, It is a magnificent film and you will see it as close as I can get to the way it was intended to be shown.Here is my earlier version of the Jewel Song. No way of syncing the music with the voice despite the soloist being a genuine soprano. Just a piano with the flute playing the sopranos part until the chandelier falls.Call this a stop press. I have found full theatre orchestra versions of Faust online so I now have the Jewel Song. Obviously, The State Theatre people whose collection is so intelligent had gathered complete versions, lots of them. As I said, most operas were just bits and pieces but The Jewel Song in the Phantom only appeared in the complete score was vital for the climax of the whole film so to produce it, they had to use it and buy complete scores. Below is a recording of Melba singing it with a translation added. ( go onto the youtube link) It would have been the opera company she started that sang at our Phantom’s first production. Now to get a Marguerite, Faust and Méphistophélès to sing the final chorus for us. Finale to Gounod’s Faust. Marguerite goes with the angels