The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films

A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible evocations of a Transylvanian vampire on the prowl: a reverse-negative image of Nosferatu’s carriage clattering through a forest; majestically disquieting sequences of a pestilential ship gliding across the frame; the vampire toting his coffin through the deserted streets of a German town; his shadow seeping along the wall of a stairwell, bony fingers outstretched. Film societies, symphony orchestras, and alternative venues show “Nosferatu” on a regular basis, especially around Halloween. Remakes by Werner Herzog, in 1979, and Robert Eggers, in 2024, have further boosted the fame of the original, although neither matches its sinister lyricism. The appearance of the word “symphony” in the title highlights the revolutionary musicality of Murnau’s style, his way of turning images into silent song. But how to handle the music itself? Although “Nosferatu” came out five years before sound came in, the composer Hans Erdmann supplied a score that ensembles could play at larger theatres. Much of Erdmann’s music later disappeared, and the surviving fragments, humidly late-Romantic in style, don’t suggest a lost masterpiece. In the absence of a fixed soundtrack, hundreds of alternatives have been devised, variously, by classical composers, film composers, rock bands, doom-metal groups, jazz ensembles, and noise collectives. Just before Halloween, the vocalist and composer Haley Fohr, who performs as Circuit des Yeux, supplied a gloomily atmospheric accompaniment for a screening of “Nosferatu” at the Philosophical Research Society, in Los Angeles-a blend of guitar drones, spectral vocals, and churning minimalist figuration. In my experience, though, “Nosferatu” is most convincing when backed by organ. Battles with the unholy thrive on churchly tones. In late October, I went to San Diego to see the film at the Balboa Theatre, a century-old movie and vaudeville house. Its prized possession is a 1929 Wonder Morton organ, a four-manual instrument that once resided at a cinema in Queens. The performer was David Marsh, a thirty-year-old musician based in Mission Viejo, California. Marsh, an enthusiast of French organ improvisation, brought no written music to the gig, though he had a plan of action. He told me beforehand, “ ‘Nosferatu’ allows me to use everything I’ve got. There are romantic, sentimental moments, as when the young hero leaves his wife to go to Transylvania, and those call for an Old Hollywood sound. But it’s also horror, and that allows me to be an absolute madman-dissonance, chromaticism, cluster chords.” In the idyllic early scenes, Marsh deployed a Korngoldian theme with rising intervals of a fifth and a sixth, then shifted it to the minor mode as a Transylvanian chill descended. When Nosferatu showed his corpselike face, the Wonder Morton’s Vox Humana (human voice) and concert-flute pipes buzzed together in a shrill cluster. Relentless ostinato figures underscored Nosferatu’s voyage by boat. The sunrise finale had a touch of M-G-M Messiaen. The audience exploded in applause before Marsh was done, and rightly so....

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