What was the first score written specifically for a movie?
Ironically, music has become just as important to the art of movie magic as film itself. This is not to say that one is more vital than the other, but it just proves that music has the most powerful way of expressing emotion, more than mere physical actions or words ever can.
Could you imagine seeing Jaws without that dreaded amping piano in the background, or seeing Simba being held aloft in The Lion King without the swell of ‘Circle of Life’ to make your eyes leak? The point is that for most of us, even from our very earliest or most classic memories of film, they have always been soundtracked with music as the key element alongside them. That’s something which will never change.
But living in the way that we do now, with the plethora of both film and music coming out of our ears, it’s easy to take for granted that things weren’t always this way. Indeed, the development of film and the concept of pairing music alongside it was hardly something that happened in the Middle Ages – it was only really within the past 120 years. Of course, putting classical music to the old-fashioned silent films was hardly a novel approach, but when it came to the idea of creating original scores, it was like striking gold.
That first came to be in 1908, with the French silent film The Assassination of the Duke of Guise – or, to use the proper lingo, L’Assassinat du duc de Guise. Clocking in at a whopping 15 minutes in length, this was actually considered a long film for its time – but clearly, with the plot events unfolding of King Henry III summoning his rival, Duke Henri du Guise, to brutally murder him, the story was so thrilling that no ordinary stock music was going to cut it.
What’s the story behind the film having the first original score?
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise was unique in a number of respects – not only was it adapted for the screen, rather unusually, by a playwright named Henri Lavedan, but it was also the first ever film to feature an original score, which was composed by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. As a classical pianist and composer of the Romantic period, knocking out the music for a film was probably seen as small fry compared to the suites of concertos and pieces that he was accustomed to.
But to those more inclined to the romanticism of the filmic world, Saint-Saëns’s contributions with his scoring of The Assassination of the Duke of Guise were second to none, and certainly changed the landscape in truly irrevocable ways. Just think – John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and everyone in between owe their entire careers to a French classical composer who was roped in to try something new.
While the blockbuster fans can hardly be expected to root through the archives to source out The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, because it’s hardly going to compare to the film soundtracks we know and love now, it’s always worth giving a little time to the ancient texts – or scores, in this case. French classical cinema may not be the mode of choice, but it is undeniably one of the most important to the rest of film today.
