CAMBRIDGE - In his narrow, crowded office at MIT, Martin Marks plays the piano. Just over his shoulder, the screen of his Mac is showing “Faust,’’ a classic German film made in 1926 by F.W. Murnau; images of the title character and Mephisto flicker on the screen. As the scenes change, so does the accompaniment - scraps of music by Gounod, Schubert, Saint-Saens, and others less well known. Behind Marks stands soprano and fellow MIT faculty member Ellen Harris. She has laryngitis, so she isn’t singing today, but she quietly hums along whenever a vocal selection comes up.
The whole musical sequence is laid out in a bulging black binder, each page containing music, timings, and action cues. This is how many movies of the silent era were given live musical soundtracks, back in the day. Marks is an expert on this topic, and he’s assembled the scores for a slew of silent films.
His “Faust’’ score, though, is an unusually elaborate undertaking, marshaling a wide array of music to cover the nearly two hours of this cinematic landmark. Since Marks created the score, in 2003, he and Harris have given only one public performance of it, though they have reprised it twice for MIT classes. They will do so again at tomorrow’s showing of “Faust’’ at MIT’s Killian Hall. (The screening is part of an MIT course but is open to all.)
The method of cobbling together a score from passages of existing compositions for live accompaniment “is a lost art that’s been revived,’’ Marks says. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t have it today.’’
His expertise goes back to his days as a Harvard graduate student, during which he wrote a dissertation on the topic of music with silent film. He was often asked to play for silent films and became deeply familiar with what he calls the “vast apparatus of music publishing’’ that allowed musicians to create film scores from snippets of music by other composers, many of whose names are now almost completely forgotten. He points to a book on his shelf called “Motion Picture Moods,’’ which has entries like “Airplane,’’ “Birds,’’ “Chatter,’’ “Battle.’’
As Marks grew more proficient, his scores became more ambitious. His score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc’’ (1928) used music by Bach and Renaissance composers. He began to improvise more during performances. When the offer came to construct a “Faust’’ score for a 2003 showing of the Murnau film in the British city Newcastle upon Tyne, he got more ambitious still. He wanted to touch on some of the many works based on the Faust legend. Since much of that music is vocal, he wanted the score to call for soprano in addition to piano.
The resulting score covers an astonishing range of music history and cinematic atmosphere. There are “Faust’’-related selections by Schubert, Gounod, and Berlioz, but also music by Chopin, Grieg, and Weber. And more of the mood-related pieces, too, with titles like “Ominous Forebodings,’’ “Recitative for Tension,’’ and “Weird Night.’’ Much of the music is cut into bits and pieces, and matched to the action of the film via a series of detailed cue sheets.
“I’m a shameless carver, and that’s the fun of it,’’ says Marks with a smile. “That’s what people did.’’
Harris, who is also a distinguished musicologist, calls Marks’s ability to pull in snippets of music from across the repertoire “astonishing.’’
“They all work,’’ she says. She points to a scene in which Gretchen, Faust’s love, is rocking her baby, where Harris sings part of Brahms’s “Wiegenlied’’ (“Lullaby’’). A church scene, complete with choir, is accompanied by the Easter Hymn from Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.’’
Nevertheless, Harris says she found her first performance of the score - at the Harvard Film Archive in 2003 - “terrifying.’’ As a classically trained singer, she was used to getting up and singing a piece from start to finish. Here, by contrast, there are startling jumps from piece to piece as the music follows the action. And there is the challenge of trying to communicate with Marks and keep an eye on the film - all in a dark room. None of their performances has been the same.
“There’s an improvisatory element to this even though the music is all written down, and that was not an experience I’d had in classical art singing before this time,’’ she explains. “It was very disorienting for me. And scary. [But] increasingly when we have done it, I have found this wonderful sense of becoming one with the film.’’
It’s easy to see how the “Faust’’-related music contributes to that sense. But perhaps the most interesting musical selections are those that have no connection to the story - or to any narrative at all. At the very start of the film, during the title sequence, Marks plays the bracing opening bars of Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B Minor. The music will recur a few times throughout the film, and for Marks it seems to portend the film’s whole tragic tale.
“I’m one of these people who likes to find narrative too easily in Romantic music,’’ Marks admits. “I’m not sure that Chopin didn’t have something like ‘Faust’ in mind when he wrote that movement. Whether there’s any truth to that, I don’t know - probably not. But it’s become fixed in my head.’’
David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@gmail.com