Read on to discover just how talented Charlie Chaplin was as a film composer...
Charlie Chaplin... the 20th century's greatest film composer?
The most important film composer of the 20th century and beyond? Williams? Guðnadóttir? Steiner? I have another candidate: Charles Spencer Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in his films, from The Kid to The Great Dictator, and changed the iconography of the 20th century forever. But he was also a composer who wrote and controlled a great deal of the music for his movies, in and out of the silent era.
Chaplin wasn't trained to read music...
Yet for many, Chaplin’s work as a composer still requires a caveat: he didn’t actually ‘write’ the scores because he wasn’t trained to read music; and he needed a team of arrangers to realise his musical dreams. It’s an argument filled with hypocrisy: no one says to Paul McCartney that he’s ‘not a composer’ because he can’t read music; Hans Zimmer employs more than 200 people who are involved in producing his scores. Chaplin’s collaborative model of composition is simply what happens in Hollywood’s studios, then and now.
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Charlie Chaplin was in charge... creatively and compositionally
But Chaplin was in charge, creatively and compositionally, of everything in his scores: he knew music’s power to transform a scene and to amplify the emotional immediacy of The Tramp’s adventures. Take Modern Times, his 1936 movie that’s prophetic not only of the machine age but of our current debates about human agency in the face of artificial intelligence.
For the conductor Ben Palmer – one of the few musicians sanctioned by the Chaplin estate to lead live orchestral performances of his scores – Modern Times is Chaplin’s finest soundtrack, because of how the music satirises and comments on the action, and how it holds up a mirror to the dehumanisation of the factories and machines of modernity, but does it all with a smile on its face.
Chaplin's 'Smile'... influenced by Puccini and Tchaikovsky
And talking of ‘Smile’, that tune from Modern Times became Chaplin’s most famous song. It reveals how artfully Chaplin remakes his influences – from Puccini, from Tchaikovsky – and distils them into a melody that’s once heard, never forgotten. Chaplin’s range of musical reference was vast: at home in Switzerland in later life, he composed scores for his silent films, working by improvising and recording at his piano. Among his friends were Rudolf Serkin, Arthur Rubinstein and Clara Haskil. Chaplin was a musician’s musician.
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Charlie Chaplin and Igor Stravinsky... a match that was not to be
He once pitched a movie for him and Igor Stravinsky to make, a satire on the modern world’s attitude to Christianity, with Christ crucified at a nightclub, while businessmen cook up the art of a big deal at the tables below, and the only person who notices what’s really going on is a drunk who no one listens to. ‘Sacrilegious,’ said Igor – alas. What a collaboration that would have been!
The 20th century belongs to Chapin, on screen and in sound: and when you see the film with Chaplin’s score in full orchestral spelndour, you realise that his Modern Times are our times, too.
