'BilderMusik': Panoramen, Tableaux vivants und Lichtbilder als multimediale Darstellungsformen in Theater- und Musikaufführungen vom 19. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (review)

From a certain historical perspective, film music existed before film. Most musicians have at some time experienced the pleasurable sensation of recognizing that the angry music first heard accompanying a televised drama of demonic possession was 'really' Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, or that the thrilling music accompanying a children's drama of the French Revolution was known to adults as the Symphonie fantastique. The mutability of absolute instrumental music into film affect is easily demonstrated and leads to paraphrases and medleys that constitute a strange afterlife to the composition of musical works. Can the strangled, halting march of Schumann's Piano Quintet ever sound quite the same after it is heard, orchestrated and stitched together with music by Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and others, to accompany Lugosi's lugubrious pursuit and flaying alive of Karloff in The Black Cat (1934)? To the pre-history of film music, Anno Mungen has applied the pre-history (or, as he prefers, the archaeology) of film. His thesis is straightforward: there are parallelisms in structure and reception between assorted kinds of pictures accompanied by music in the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century films with music. An initial reaction to this premise is that it would be surprising if there were not, and that a historicist mindset might assume that the latter would flow, albeit with indirections, from the former. As with film music, Mungen's nineteenth-century genres make few concessions to ideas of high art or notions of good taste; Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner jostle light music, ballads, waltzes, pantomimes, and illustrative music. What the book makes clear is the sheer variety of forms that flowed into the cinematic mainstream. For this reason alone, Mungen has provided a valuable work of historical differentiation, whatever its status as a work of film theory.

There is, of course, theory in plenty, partly because this is relatively new ground for musicology, dealing with areas that have tended to surface in the margins of studies of life and works. BilderMusik earns its quotation marks in the title, being a term drawn from a mid-century score, and in its orthographic peculiarity it captures both the juxtaposition of media reduced to substantives as well as their simultaneity, without intrusive hyphenation. Simultaneity of media and performance in public are the two essential circumstances of Mungen's repertory, but there are other limiting factors to the study, such as size (no peepshows), and independence (no subordination to dramatic action, the pictures themselves are the medium of performance). A distinction between those pictures that stir into movement (panorama and diorama) and set pieces (tableaux vivants) informs the large-scale structure of the whole study. Nonetheless, such set pieces have their own relationship to early film; the latter, considered as 'living photography', implies an observer behind the camera as rigidly unmoving as 'the object that remains motionless in tableau vivant' (vol. I, p. 18). Music is the added element that completes both by providing a mirror of perception. Mungen is confident that his observations here break new ground, which makes me wish that more time had been spent on how psychological perception operates in the different perspectives (object and observer, observer and interpreter, mirroring action or subverting it), but he prefers to rely on his specific examples.

When discussing movement, Mungen clarifies his method and approach. Filmed movement as point of departure for the 'duplication of the temporal aspect in a musical image' suggests that music is no equal partner in the combination of media (I, p. 19). Music's forms, functions, and aesthetics are strictly subordinated to concepts and approaches from visual media. That music could and should be viewed in this context as lacking sonata-style development, for example, is something that Mungen finds in the mid-nineteenth century, though an anonymous review from Breslau of an oratorio by Adolf...