The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

When E. T. A. Hoffmann described music as most Romantic of all the arts, he had no way of knowing that his comment would provide an entire entertainment industry with a guiding aesthetic principle. In 1810, of course, the cinema was still a long way off. Seventy-eight years later, Nietzsche's quip that Our big theatres subsist on appears to bring nineteenth-century romanticism a little closer to the screen, even though he was addressing dramatic opera and not M-G-M or Warner Bros. Yet romanticism has left its mark on film, especially on the Hollywood studio film, and more still, on the music it produced. Nowhere is this better exemplified than from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, film music's golden age. Not surprisingly, this age of film composition coincides roughly with Hollywood's period of production. Following Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson's use of the term in their authoritative study, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, classical here designates at once a style and a mode of industrial production (although Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson argue that its mechanisms were in place much earlier-in the 1910s).1 It makes immediate sense that Hollywood's age of scoring emerged out of this period of larger economic vitality and gain, and while the latter clearly did not cause the former, it nevertheless provided it with the technologies to stabilize and keep intact an overall coherent style. There is a certain terminological irony that the classical film score had so little to do with classical art music (the period dominated by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and so much to do with romanticism, particularly the late romanticism of Wagner and Richard Strauss. There are the oft-noted formal resemblances: film music's rich harmonies and orchestral color, its reliance on large, symphonic forms and instrumentation (best exemplified in the work of Viennese composer Erich Korngold [The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Robin Hood, King's Row]) as well as on smaller, intimate forms and techniques like the Wagnerian leitmotiv and use of solo instruments (the ubiquitous violin in films like Humoresque, an instrument Adorno was to equate with the ascending ideology of individualism). Even before the advent of sound, critics were comparing the emergent entertainment form to Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total artwork that would allegedly synthesize all of the arts) and