RIP film composer Carl Davis.
His soundtracks included over 50 restored silent films — starting circa 1981 with Kevin Brownlow's 5-hour restoration of the 1927 “Napoleon” directed by Abel Gance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napol%C3%A9on_(1927_film)
Davis also did the soundtrack for the 1995 BBC “Pride and Prejudice.”
This you tube clip explores how he and director Karel Reisz
arrived at the theme for the 1981 film “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” In this clip, you can see the opening credits and hear the theme...
Carl Davis Wash Post obit 8.23 by Brian Murphy 8.4.23https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/08/04/carl-davis-composer-dies/?fbclid=
Here's the complete text of the obit:
Carl Davis, a prolific Brooklyn-born composer whose classically inspired scores touched performances spanning more than a century, from films, television and ballet to revisiting the silent movie era with music for restored works including the five-hour epic “Napoléon,” died Aug. 3 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was 86.
Mr. Davis, who had lived in Britain since 1961, died after complications from a brain hemorrhage, said a statement from his family and his publisher, Faber Music.
In wide-ranging projects over more than six decades — including dozens of miniseries and films such as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981) — Mr. Davis gained acclaim as a deft interpreter of emotions and sense of place. He wrote music for war documentaries, comedies, dramas and added new soundtracks for more than 50 remastered silent films — as diverse as the pratfalls of Buster Keaton and the nail-biting chariot race in “Ben-Hur” (1925).
“To get the right sort of music,” he said in a 2011 interview, “I’m always searching for a solution … It must tell the right story.”
He sought to capture “longing for love and experience” with the haunting opening theme from the “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” which starred Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in a fraught love affair. In a collaboration with Paul McCartney on the 1991 “Liverpool Oratario,” Mr. Davis interspersed styles such as arias and violin solos in an eight-movement work loosely based on the life of former Beatles star.
Mr. Davis peppered deep bass notes to chilling effect in his soundtrack for “The World at War,” an award-winning documentary series about World War II that ran from 1973 to 1974. For a 1995 miniseries version of “Pride and Prejudice,” Mr. Davis contrasted the pastoral sounds of French horns with driving piano flourishes to convey the inner conflicts in the Jane Austen novel.
He could have some fun, too. He teamed up in 1981 with Dame Edna Everage, an irreverent diva character played by Australian actor Barry Humphries, for a British-mocking spoof, “Last Night of the Poms.” At one performance, Mr. Davis traded his conductor’s baton for gladioli, Dame Edna’s signature bloom.
Mr. Davis often reached back to the orchestral and operatic traditions of Western music as his musical foundations, crediting composers such as Wolfgang Mozart or Richard Wagner. Yet he embraced other styles when needed — adding a sitar to his score for the 1984 miniseries set in colonial India, “The Far Pavilions,” or bringing North African drums into the 2000 ballet “Aladdin.”
There always, too, was Mr. Davis’s affinity to the American-influenced sounds from growing up in New York. “It was a height for Broadway musicals, a center for dance, wonderful ballet and contemporary dance,” he told the cinema website Filmzene. “Simply everything was available.”
His rich musical vocabulary fully came into play when he was approached in the late 1970s by British film historian Kevin Brownlow, who had completed a restoration of the 1927 silent film “Napoléon,” directed by Abel Gance. Brownlow and Mr. Davis had worked together on a television series about early cinema. Brownlow was now looking for a full score for “Napoléon,” with only fragments surviving from the original music by Arthur Honegger.
Mr. Davis was at first reluctant. Brownlow needed the music in less than four months. “Five hours of it!” Mr. Davis recalled. He eventually agreed, turning for inspiration to a musical giant of Napoleon’s time, Ludwig van Beethoven. Elements of Beethoven’s compositions were infused in Mr. Davis’s score such as odes to “Symphony No. 3,” often called the “Eroica Symphony.”
The restored film premiered in 1980 at the Edinburgh Film Festival and in London, introducing a new generation to Gance’s groundbreaking cinematography that included some of the first uses of montages and mobile camera work. “It became the most sought-after ticket in town,” wrote film scholar Annette Insdorf, describing the London premier. “The standing ovation at the end was long, deafening, and reverent.” (A version of the restored film was presented in New York in 1981 in a event arranged by director Francis Ford Coppola, but without Mr. Davis’s score. Coppola’s father, Carmine Coppola, conducted an orchestra in accompaniment.)
“It was such a success that we needed a second one,” Mr. Davis said in 2010, referring to the silent movie projects that followed “Napoléon." “And we just kept going.”
Mr. Davis worked for 20 years on music for silent-film restorations, including D.W. Griffith’s tales of morality and cruelty, “Intolerance” (1916); “The Thief of Baghdad” starring Douglas Fairbanks (1924); “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925) with Lon Chaney in the title role; and “Flesh and the Devil” (1926) with Greta Garbo.
For Keaton’s “The General” (1926), Mr. Davis made light parodies of martial music. On “City Lights” (1931), Mr. Davis adapted José Padilla Sanchez’s tango “La Violetera” and other songs to mimic Charlie Chaplin’s body language onscreen, a technique called “Mickey Mousing.”
“It’s
like composing a continuous ballet or an opera,” Mr. Davis said.
“The main thing is to pull the audience in so strongly,” he noted to the Los Angeles Times in 1997, “that they forget they’re looking at an archaic form of filmmaking.”
Carl Davis was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Brooklyn, where his father worked in the post office and his mother was a teacher. Mr. Davis played piano as a toddler and being spellbound by the blend of music and storytelling in Disney’s 1940 animated classic “Fantasia.”
Inspired by the movie, the 4-year-old prodigy told his music instructor that he wanted to study Bach, he recounted to the Times of London. When the instructor refused, he was fired.
Mr. Davis studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he graduated in 1958. A few years earlier, Mr. Davis said he wandered into a music shop in Philadelphia and was hit by a revelation that he was destined to be a composer. “I had a flash,” he said. “I realized I wanted to write.”
Mr. Davis became assistant conductor at the New York City Opera. He soon decided he could advance his career further in Europe. He studied in 1960 with composer Per Nørgard in Copenhagen. In 1961, a revue Mr. Davis co-wrote, “Diversions,” headed to the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
The show was a hit, and Mr. Davis was offered a job to compose music for the news satire show “That Was the Week That Was,” which ran until 1963. He stayed in Britain, landing other jobs with the BBC and troupes including the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Mr. Davis’s work with BBC included music for a 2011 revival of the 1970s drama series “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “The Pickwick Papers” (1985). Among his film scores: the drama “Champions” (1984) starring John Hurt; “Scandal” (1989) with Ian McKellen and Joanne Whalley recreating the John Profumo political scandal in the 1960s; and “The Trial,” a 1993 crime thriller starring Anthony Hopkins.
In the past decade, Mr. Davis worked on music for dance productions including “Chaplin, The Tramp” in 2019 and “Le Fantôme et Christine,” inspired by “The Phantom of the Opera,” which premiered at the Shanghai Ballet this May.
He received a BAFTA award, the British equivalent of an Oscar, for original music for “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2005.
Survivors include his wife of 53 years, actress Jean Boht; two daughters; and three grandchildren.
In 2000, Mr. Davis’s wrapped up his last composition for the silent-film project. He looked back on his body of work with vicarious pleasure.
“It’s
very exciting,” he told the Times of London. “It’s as if it’s me dancing with
Garbo, me fighting in the First World War in ‘The Big Parade,’ or me doing the
chariot race in ‘Ben-Hur.’ I take part physically and emotionally.”
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