A Kiss for Cinderella (1925) The Importance of Historical Accuracy in Reconstructing Scores to Silent Films Based on the Mirskey Collection

Academic preoccupation with the heritage of silent film has been growing in recent years. This concerns both the surviving movies and archive collections of music used as live accompaniment while screening the films. Among the preserved archives, Mirskey Collection currently attracts particular interest. It is a private music library comprising ca 3,500 works used by the Polish violinist and conductor Nek Mirskey (Bronisław Mirski) in his daily work as music director of US movie theatres in 1914–1927. ⁽¹⁾ This vast collection of music prints, now kept at the Theodore M. Finney Music Library at the University of Pittsburgh, will soon be made accessible online thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Approximately 45,000 pages of music once used to accompany silent films will be digitalised and made available free of charge as part of this project. ⁽²⁾ The collection has so far been used both by researchers reconstructing scores for various movies and by musicians wishing to remain faithful to the silent film traditions in their present-day compilations.

Of special value in the Mirskey Collection are the owner's original notes scattered in different volumes of the music. They make it possible unequivocally to establish which works were in use in Mirskey's day. At the same time, they provide important information about performance practice. These notes can mainly be found in the conductor's violin parts and, less frequently, in the piano parts. ⁽³⁾ The vast majority of the comments were entered in pencil so that they could easily be erased after finishing work on the given composition. In this way, one copy of sheet music could be used many times for various musical compilations. Among the various notes, indications of tempo, rhythm, articulation, dynamics, sound colour, and instrumentation take pride of place, along with guidelines concerning the organisation of musical material and its synchronisation with the given film. Most of the works were not performed from the beginning to the end as in the original. This is because music material had to be adopted to suit the given scene or sequence by deleting or repeating selected fragments. In the music prints we may thus find indications of leitmotifs (e.g. ‘theme A’, ‘love theme’) and direct references to the visual material in the form of initial fragments of intertitles (then called subtitles, e.g. ‘Love feels his uncanny…’), brief summaries of film action (e.g. ‘woman fight man, ‘husband exits’, ‘when dog comes to Sally’), and sound effects (e.g. ‘shot after subtitle man draws gun’, ‘factory whistle’).

Despite the presence of cues such as those listed above, relating the music to specific film titles constitutes a major challenge. No musical cue sheets with lists of musical pieces recommended for the given film survive from the Mirskey Collection. This is because the music works brought together by Mirskey in his library could be used many times, but the cue sheets were only used once, exclusively in connection with the film currently on show, which was typically replaced by another title on a weekly basis, with no chance of ever being screened again. Musical cue sheets were published by film companies and distributed to selected movie theatres along with the film tape. Mirskey certainly made use of such publications in his work, but nowadays they need to be sought out outside his collection. A large collection of such cue sheets can be found at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. ⁽⁴⁾ There are also some interesting specimens in the online Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. ⁽⁵⁾

In order faithfully to reconstruct a historical silent film score on the basis of the Mirskey Collection, one needs to consider several sources of material. Only the mutual confrontation of these sources can bring us close to a complete image of that final result which Mirskey himself attained in his work. These sources consist, on the one hand, of sheet music from his collection, with handwritten notes, on the other – of surviving musical cue sheets, and finally – of the film itself, which ought to be considered as primary in relation to the other two. Suffice it to say that of the more than 230 films (identified on the basis of press cuttings) for which Mirskey compiled his soundtracks over the years, only approximately 108 have been preserved to our time in part or in whole. ⁽⁶⁾ Information concerning individual film titles can be found in the internet database developed from a report on US silent feature films from 1912–1929 and their state of preservation. ⁽⁷⁾ Access to digital copies of movies, from which selected fragments can be played back many times, seems indispensable for the purpose of further analyses of both the music and the film. ⁽⁸⁾ Extremely valuable information is also provided by such secondary sources as Mirskey's statements for the press, movie theatre ads, and film reviews.

The starting point for reconstructing the music for our chosen film was provided by materials from the Mirskey Collection. In several of the music works in that archive, the characteristic word ‘Cinderella’ can be found, referring unequivocally to the Grimm Brothers’ fable. One of the identified films for which Mirskey compiled musical accompaniment was the 1925 picture titled A Kiss for Cinderella, directed by Herbert Brenon, starring Betty Bronson and Tom Moore. The plot of this romantic drama-fantasy faithfully follows the eponymous theatrical play of 1916, written by James M. Barrie. It is the story of a poor London girl named Jane, who secretly takes care of a multi-ethnic group of orphans during World War I. A great fan of the tale of Cinderella, she dreams of a Prince Charming. Reality fuses with fantasy, and, following a great ball, the protagonist ends up in hospital, in a state of utter exhaustion. There she is looked after by a befriended policeman, who proves to be her true love.

Produced by Paramount Pictures, the film has only been preserved to our day in 16 mm format, ⁽⁹⁾ in copies kept at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Brussels, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film & Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, and George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. ⁽¹⁰⁾ That last institution also possesses a musical cue sheet for this film, prepared by a Paramount Pictures collaborator, James C. Bradford. There are seventy-seven cues on the sheet, referring in total to sixty-three different pieces of music, three of which serve as leitmotifs (the themes of the Policeman, of Cinderella, and the love theme). Contained on ten rolls of tape (ca thirty metres long), the film was supposed to last 1 h 32 min according to the cue sheet. The currently available digital copy is 1 h 45 min long when played back at the present-day rate of twenty-four frames per second. ⁽¹¹⁾ The time ranges quoted in the sheet do not always precisely correspond to the actual duration of individual scenes, which translates into this thirteen-minute overall difference.

In Mirskey's lifetime, A Kiss for Cinderella was on show between 27 December 1925 and 2 January 1926, that is, between Christmas and the New Year, at Newman Theatre in Kansas City where Mirskey was in charge of a forty-piece orchestra. ⁽¹²⁾ The precise make-up of that ensemble is unknown, but analyses of the surviving film music should make it possible to describe it in some more detail. The so-called De Luxe programmes with all the extra attractions were shown at Newman Theatre as often as four times a day. The programme of the revue titled New Year's Follies opened with the overture A Musical Cocktail, arranged by Mirskey out of the previous year's greatest classical and popular music hits. This was followed by the newsreel, with music likewise compiled by Mirskey. The Variety reviewer praised his work as follows:

The cue music for the news reels should not be overlooked. It was just about the finest and most artistic heard in a picture house in the town. Some of the shots were but 40 seconds, but Mirskey had special music for every subject, and pictures and the music were timed to a split second. ⁽¹³⁾

The overture and the newsreel were followed by a musical duo consisting of soprano Ruth Racette and pianist Harry Rockwell performing Lucien Denni's latest song I Saw You in Your Window in a specially designed stage setting. The next item in the programme was Newman Mirror of Current Events, after which organist Earl Thursten played the song Then I'll Be Happy with slides and lyrics projection on the screen, inviting the audience to sing along. Likewise maintained in the Christmas mood, Ruth Racette and Agnes Sellers sang a duet, accompanied by Six Kelly Dancers choreographic ensemble. Next came a company of young dancers, followed by an accordion duo in a classical-and-jazz repertoire. Twelve Kelly Dancers presented a dance number on roller skates, which served as an intro for a virtuoso display by skaters Galleck and Clarett. It was only after this extensive programme consisting of variety acts that A Kiss for Cinderella was finally presented with live music played by The Newman Symphony under Mirskey.

Figure 1

Comparison of various notes scattered throughout the Mirskey Collection with the film's title cards proves that Mirskey directly quoted the intertitles to indicate when a given musical fragment was to be performed. For instance, the second movement of Francis Popy's Ballet-Suite (MC 2959 ⁽¹⁴⁾ ) is coupled with the words ‘Cinderella, you frightened me’, which come from a dialogue between Cinderella and her employer. In movement three of John Ansell's A Children's Suite (MC 1540/44) we find an excerpt from a title card in which Cinderella says: ‘Trust in the Lord, every other customer, cash’. Moreover, an excerpt from Engelbert Humperdinck's opera Hänsel und Gretel (MC 2721) is accompanied by the Policeman's words that open another title card: ‘We have an in-fal-ly-able way’, marked as Theme A, which suggests that this material was repeated throughout the score.

Figure 2

The next step in my analysis has been to compare the titles selected by Mirskey with recommendations found in the musical cue sheet. Of the 63 pieces selected by James C. Bradford, around twenty can be found in the Mirskey Collection, which means that he may have used them in his film accompaniments. For instance, in the conductor's part for Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Humoresque Op. 10 No. 2 (MC 5524), we come across a brief summary of film action: ‘Cinderella comes thru doorway’, which corresponds to cue No. 6 ‘Cinderella opens door’. Dorothy Forster's Rose in the Bud (MC 3353), marked by Mirskey as theme B (but later erased), is listed in the cue sheet as No. 36 (Love Theme), repeated five times more in this score (Nos 60, 62, 68, 72, and 76).

Figure 3

However, two of the three works mentioned at the start of this section, which Mirskey certainly incorporated into his compilation for A Kiss for Cinderella, are absent from the cue sheet. Mirskey's originality and inventiveness thus manifested itself in occasionally selecting music other than that recommended in the cue sheets, and in dividing the film into sections partly in accordance with his own concept. For instance, Jack Stanley's piece titled The Festivities, assigned to cue No. 58 ‘Trust in the Lord, every other customer, cash’, is replaced by Mirskey with John Ansell's A Children's Suite (MC 1540/44); cue No. 4 ‘Mr. Bodie awakens’, linked to Percy Grainger's Shepherds’ Hey, in Mirskey's version comes with an excerpt from Hänsel und Gretel (MC 2721); cue No. 69, originally coupled with The Swan (Le cygne) from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnaval des animaux, marked as Cinderella's theme, was illustrated by Mirskey with Aristide Scassola's Pensée d'Amour (MC 3475).

Figure 4

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Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

A detailed analysis of the score and the film was represented in the form of a table based on the information found in the musical cue sheet. In the successive columns, the following elements were included: cue number, summary of film action (or a quotation from the title card), recommended piece of music, its duration (in minutes), additional comments, the work selected by Mirskey (if different from that in the cue sheet), tempo / time signature / musical key. For each of the seventy-seven film sections distinguished in the cue sheet, relations between the visual and musical layer were then analysed and described in detail. ⁽¹⁵⁾ The thus presented analysis has yielded conclusions which shed valuable light on Mirskey's working methods. The artist himself thus described the process of compiling scores for silent films:

Each picture is viewed by me a week in advance and very carefully timed; that is, each scene's duration on the screen in seconds is noted. The music is selected and cut to the same number of seconds, while utmost care is exercised that the musical form be preserved and no thought of the composer distorted beyond recognition. The pieces are then joined together and tried with the picture. Tried and tried again, until the performance is wholly satisfactory. ⁽¹⁶⁾

Analysis has confirmed that, though cue sheets are missing from the Mirskey Collection, he did use the musical recommendations issued by film companies. For most music directors and conductors working in local movie theatres, those cues were probably the initial point of reference, since they suggested the expected musical style, the structure of the accompaniment (division into sections, leitmotifs), and the sheet music that was potentially required. By following the cue sheets, they could save precious time that was always running short during their intense work in movie theatres operating seven days per week. In his musical compilation for A Kiss for Cinderella, Mirskey included many of the works recommended in the cue sheet, as confirmed by his original notes in the sheet music.

On the other hand, one should remember that the musical cue sheets did not represent the only ‘correct’ version of musical accompaniment for the film. What they offered was recommendations for the local compilers of film music. Sometimes musical directors must have departed from cue sheet suggestions simply due to what music they had (or did not have) in their own libraries. This is evident from notes pencilled in on one such cue sheet for A Kiss for Cinderella by an anonymous owner who, like Mirskey, chose to follow only selected guidelines while modifying others or ignoring some of them altogether. In many cases, Mirskey not only opted for musical numbers other than those recommended by James C. Bradford (this concerns both works present in and absent from the Mirskey Collection), but also diverged from Bradford's listings when dividing the film into sections (i.e. the given piece of music could start a bit earlier or later than indicated in the cue sheet). In every such case, the conductor's chief objective was to reflect the character of the film scenes and the protagonists’ moods as accurately as possible in the music.

In his above-quoted press statement, Mirskey assured that while working on his film accompaniments he took special care not to distort the form of the musical works or the composer's key concepts. The analysis seems to confirm this, since he frequently performed the compositions in their entirety, and, where he decided to introduce some cuts, they invariably make sense from the musical point of view. What is particularly striking is that, in comparison with the cue sheet, Mirskey's musical fragments are frequently longer than those recommended (i.e. they cover more than just one listed section). This means that the musical material changes less frequently, and therefore the total number of compositions needed to illustrate the whole film is smaller. At the same time, the character of the given scene or sequence can be captured more accurately wherever it does not require changes as frequent as those envisaged by the cue sheet author. This is especially true with regard to fragments less than a minute long, of which there was a relatively large number in this particular cue sheet.

The form of the passages between successive pieces of music or their fragments is an interesting question. No notes have been preserved to suggest that Mirskey prepared some bridges or modulations between consecutive numbers (a practice that we encounter among music directors of New York's movie palaces). The successive works are in either relative or parallel keys, which introduces some degree of cohesion. In the sheet music we also find the indication segue, suggesting that the orchestra should move smoothly from one piece to the next. Where there is no such mark, a brief pause was probably left in between the numbers.

Mirskey's approach to leitmotifs is likewise of note. Three main themes were singled out in A Kiss for Cinderella: the Policeman's (repeated thrice), Cinderella's (seven times), and the love theme (recurring six times). Notably, theme durations frequently differ in the repetitions, which suggests that each time they should be presented in slightly different versions, otherwise not precisely defined. Mirskey's notes indicate that only two leitmotifs, the Policeman's theme and the love theme, were actually used in his score. Dorothy Forster's Rose in the Bud featured as the love theme in accordance with the cue sheet, whereas for the Policeman's theme Mirskey chose an excerpt from Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel, which replaced Frederick Jacobi's Marche Miniature. Since Camille Saint-Saëns’ Le cygne, designated as Cinderella's theme, was missing from Mirskey's collection, the latter leitmotif seems to have been left out altogether. It should have appeared as theme B; besides, film sections to which it is assigned in the cue sheet are accompanied in Mirskey's compilation by other pieces of music, such as, among others, Aristide Scassola's Pensée d'amour. Since the same work by Scassola was also repeated in the final scene, it could be interpreted as Mirskey's equivalent of Cinderella's theme.

It was a tradition in the 1920s for music to be performed throughout the film without breaks. This called for a suitable work division among the orchestral musicians and for a skilful diversification of the music material by the conductor. Each of the pieces used by Mirskey in his accompaniment for A Kiss for Cinderella is scored slightly differently, as evident from the instrumental parts preserved in the collection. The successive pieces certainly differ with regard to instrumentation, and the cue sheet actually recommends such changes (for instance, some film sections are accompanied by the strings alone). On the basis of the surviving part books (including handwritten copies) and Mirskey's comments contained therein, the following orchestral forces were most likely employed: four first violins, two second violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute, first and second clarinets, oboe, bassoon, first and second horns, first and second cornets, first and second trumpets, trombone, timpani, and percussion. Assuming that each instrument was doubled, this adds up to the approximately forty musicians mentioned in press articles dedicated to Newman Theatre's orchestra.

The organist played a key role in each movie theatre. He lightened the orchestra's burden by taking over the role of accompanist at selected points. In A Kiss for Cinderella, organ solos can be heard three times. Interestingly, in each case these are sequences of repeated actions: first, Cinderella serving customer after customer at her shop ‘The Penny Friend’; for the second time, when she introduces the children she takes care of to the Policeman, one by one; and finally, when candidates to marry the prince enter the successive stages of the contest. The cue sheet divides these sequences into very short fragments with frequent changes of musical accompaniment. What could be problematic for the orchestra worked perfectly as the basis for an organ improvisation.

The music material selected to accompany the film A Kiss for Cinderella can be divided into four main categories, which seem characteristic of silent film music in general. The first consists of arrangements of works by classical music composers, primarily of the Romantic period, but also later. The compilation under study includes excerpts from works by Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Camille Saint-Saëns, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Jean Sibelius. These are arrangements of piano, chamber, symphonic, and operatic music published as sets of parts for a small or large symphony orchestra and piano. They were transcribed by composers and arrangers such as Theodore Moses Tobani, Thomas H. Rollinson, Paul Henneberg, and others, who collaborated with publishers in the early 20^th-century United States.

The musical cue sheet also lists pieces by less known European composers such as Gabriel Marie, Ernest Gillet, Felix Foudrain (France), Ede Poldini (Hungary), Moritz Moszkowski (Germany), Karel Komzák (Bohemia/Austria), and Roger Quilter (UK). Such considerable diversity reflects the market's great demand for new music. There is a large representation of American composers active at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Percy Grainger, and Frederick Jacobi, most of whom worked as instrumentalists or conductors at some stage of their careers and focused on composing music in later life but were not directly connected with the film industry. Joseph Carl Breil, known for his collaborations with David W. Griffith, was one of the few US composers who combined autonomous music composition with writing for the silent motion pictures industry.

The second category is the original photoplay music, that is, pieces written with specific types of film scenes in mind, such as Storm or Fire Music by Herbert E. Haines, Dramatic Allegro and Processional by Domenico Savino, Wot’ Cher and Mrs. ‘Awkins by Ernst Luz, The Irish Washerwoman by Otto Langey, Pleading Love Theme by James Bradford, Appassionato by Irénée Bergé, and Pomposo by Gaston Borch, to mention but a few. The vast majority of works in this category are easy, with uncomplicated textures, composed in keys with simple key signatures, out of brief segments that may easily be repeated. These qualities make the music suitable for a vista performance (since there is no complicated material to study) but also – easily adjustable to the needs of any given scene. Classical music lovers will most likely not recognise the composers’ names since their output has not stood the test of time. We now have little information about these artists, who dedicated themselves to composing functional pieces that have only survived as sheet music.

The third category comprises popular music such as dances (galops, foxtrots, one-steps), song arrangements, and excerpts from Broadway musicals. The following numbers made their way to Mirskey's compilation for A Kiss for Cinderella: Felix Powell's Pick up Your Troubles, Hugo Frey's Zip, Dave Kaplan's Pickins, Dorothy Forster's Rose in the Bud, Milton Ager's A Young Man's Fancy, and Carrie Jacobs-Bond's Just A’Wearyin’ for You. Works from this category usually introduce an additional layer of meaning. This is especially true of well-known songs which, though performed without vocals in the movie theatres, made the audience recall the lyrics to which the main melody was sung, and thus carried associations related to the song's topic.

The fourth and last category consists of national and patriotic songs and melodies, including anthems, as well as traditional tunes. Mirskey's music for the film under study incorporates, among others, the British patriotic song Rule Britannia, US patriotic march Stars and Stripes Forever, the French national anthem La Marsellaise, and the German folksong Im Wald und auf der Heide. Pieces from this category emphasise the local colour of individual film scenes as well as providing a geographic and national identification of events or, as in A Kiss for Cinderella – of the protagonists. We know from historical records that such music was frequently used to accompany the newsreel, which included both domestic and foreign news. It also worked well in comic contexts, when certain situations were parodied on the screen.

Sources such as those in the Mirskey Collection are extremely valuable in that they make it possible faithfully to reconstruct historical silent film scores. A Kiss for Cinderella is but one of many movies that can be subjected to analyses based on the surviving sheet music material. The resulting compilations can later be used to prepare actual scores for live performance during film screenings. Such reconstructions not only reflect the historical realities of the age, but also, by following Mirskey's own guidelines, imbue a given film presentation with the artist's individual character. Frequently praised in the press, Mirskey himself thus used to describe his personal manner of testing the quality of his musical programmes:

‘How did you like the picture’ he will ask a patron as the man leaves the theatre. ‘Fine.’ Answers the man. ‘It was a great story.’ ‘And how did you like the music’ asks Mr Mirskey. The man looks embarrassed, and then says diffidently. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Mirskey, I didn't pay any attention to it. I'm sorry.’ Mr Mirskey smiles happily when the answer is in this vein. ‘I know that my musical score is good,’ he said. ‘It is only when they notice the music that the orchestra is playing that I am disappointed. The best musical scores are those which interpret the picture so closely that the picture and music seem an inseparable unity.’ ⁽¹⁷⁾

Since the number of handwritten comments in the Mirskey Collection is relatively small, it would be interesting to see what material can be found in other similar archives compiled by orchestral conductors working in movie theatres. The most important of these include the collection of violinist and conductor Alvin G. Layton (1899–1987), head of the Curren Theatre orchestra in Boulder, Colorado. This set of ca 2,400 musical works is now kept at the University of Colorado in Boulder. ⁽¹⁸⁾ The collection of Ben Rader, director of movie theatre orchestras in Saint Louis, Missouri, included, among others, ca 3,000 pieces published specifically for the needs of film accompaniment, now in possession of Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. ⁽¹⁹⁾ The Fred D. Valva (1878– 1934) Collection of Theater Orchestra Music (acquired by Princeton University from Worcester Public Library), which belonged to the long-time conductor of movie theatre orchestras in Worcester, Massachusetts, comprises 134 boxes that contain several thousand titles. ⁽²⁰⁾

Apart from the above-mentioned archives, some individual libraries that once belonged to movie theatres as well as many smaller-scale collections accumulated by organists working in cinemas have survived to our time. They are all listed in Kendra Preston Leonard's extensive publication titled Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources. ⁽²¹⁾ Catalogues of many such collections are now accessible online, which allows researchers to survey the repertoires used in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is, however, only through a detailed study of handwritten notes found in the sheet music that we can shed more light on how that repertoire was handled in actual practice. An in-depth study and comparison of such notes, found scattered in different collections of silent film music can, I believe, lead to a better understanding of musical practices current in US movie theatres in the heyday of silent motion pictures.