Who owns Napoleon? This is the hot question currently being debated in the usually uneventful world of film music. It concerns the rights to one of the undisputed masterpieces of the silent cinema, Abel Gance’s five-hour epic
Napoléon (1927), which both Universal Studios and the British Film Institute (BFI) say they possess. Their rival claims have led to a legal battle over whose music may accompany screenings, including that due to take place this weekend at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The BFI version has remained loyal to a score put together by the composer and conductor Carl Davis, Universal’s to music by the late Carmine Coppola, father of
The Godfather director Francis Ford, and the Coppola clan is out to protect its own.
“They can stop us but we can’t stop them,” says Davis bitterly. “It’s about territories. They’re saying that any showing anywhere in the world now has to have the Coppola score. It’s Italian family stuff. You can’t blame them in a way. It’s just that they hadn’t argued this before. It’s only since the old man died in 1991 that they have become insistent on their rights.
“Previously, you put what you liked with the film. It is a silent movie, after all. It doesn’t have a soundtrack. It has a live orchestra. That’s the nub of it. My music is as valid as any other.”
And how. When I first saw Napoléon with Davis’s score performed live, I was knocked out by the film’s emotional power; the exhaustive, indulgent and draining length; the physical beauty of the photography; the wit, imagination and visual poetry in the director’s eye; and the racing excitement of the music that was spearheading the momentum of the whole, like Liberty Leading the People. Napoléon is an epic on the grandest scale, an art film that is a masterpiece — and Davis’s score complements it perfectly.
The last time that Davis conducted Napoléon was in 2001, at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival near Venice. The Coppolas, he says, objected at the time, and then relented. “But now they have written to the BFI saying that they do not wish the performance in December to go ahead with my music. The BFI has asked them to prove their link of ownership back to the maker, but they have so far remained silent. Like the film.”
I speak to Davis at his gracious home in Reigate. He has hurt his foot, and is wobbling around rather precariously wearing an orthopaedic ski-boot — I have not only to take notes from him, but also to catch him if he falls. This is not unlikely as the house is spaciously open plan, and has no banisters on the stairs between the levels. It was at a similarly unsteady event that we first met, when he was a guest and I the researcher on the Time Out Chat Show, a rather boozy event hosted by Arthur Smith and Muriel Gray in a cold, damp tent at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival. It did not go well.“It was a rough night,” Smith recalls. “I called him Carl Lewis by mistake and had to fend off a lot of drunken heckling. I’m afraid it wasn’t really an audience to talk about the history of film in front of, though they were all right when a then unknown called Ruby Wax, part of the troupe Girls on Top, came on and joked about shagging Michael Grade in the green room.”
The boorish, unappreciative, philistine multitude has always dogged Napoléon. It was issued in the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Gance’s revolutionary special effects — colour, montage and triptych screens 20 years before Cine-rama, multiple images 74 years before the television series 24 — proved to be no match for the gimmick of the talkies. Napoléon sank almost without trace. In the 1950s the British film historian Kevin Brownlow, who had developed an obsession with the Napoléon myth, pieced the film back together can by can from repositories all over the Western world. He earned the gratitude of the dying Gance, who gave him the UK rights, which Brownlow then passed to the BFI.
It is, however, claimed that such rights were not Gance’s to give, since he had earlier sold them to the director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, 1966), through whom the Americans stake their claim. They planned a screen premiere in January 1981, with Brownlow as a consultant and a live band playing Coppola’s score. Meanwhile, back in London, Thames TV — for whom Brownlow was working with Davis on a series coincidentally about “silent Hollywood” — granted the BFI £20,000 to mount a single performance and beat New York with a screening in November 1980. Davis was asked to do the music.
“I thought that we had better have a pretty good reason not to use Coppola’s score,” says Davis.
Two were given: the Coppolas were not going to screen the whole film; and they were going to run it too fast (at 24, not 20, frames a second). This matters to a musician. Davis’s concept of matching the film to extracts of music by Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Gretry and Dittersdorf, as well as by himself and Arthur Honegger (Gance’s music director in 1927), would not have worked with Napoleon charging around Europe like a Keystone Cop.
“It’s the way it would have been done at the original 1927 screening,” says Davis, who is a leading authority on film music and its history. He has made the art of conducting in counterpoint to film his own, and has just completed a 19-year sequence of scores for silver screen classics commissioned by Channel 4.
“Honegger set the scene by stitching together familiar works from the period. If there were gaps, he would fill them himself. I have incorporated the music that Honegger wrote, and composed some themes myself, in particular a motif for the eagle, a recurring image in the film. Probably, Coppola worked in this way as well — pastiche, looting from the classics, original composition — but I’ve never heard his score for fear of compromising myself.”
Although Davis has trawled for the film the entire spectrum of works written in Europe as the 18th century became the 19th, the composer he uses most often is Beethoven, who once idolised Napoleon. The artist and the general were contemporaries. Beethoven, who was infusing his music with a personal and self-conscious passion that had already begun to characterise an entire artistic movement, saw Napoleon as a romantic genius. All of Beethoven’s music of this period bears this stamp and Davis extracts from many works, but one opus in particular makes this interdisciplinary connection explicit. Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, giving it the name Bonaparte. Beethoven’s admiration ceased, however, when the diminutive Frenchman proclaimed himself emperor in 1804. He went back to the score full of regret, scratched out the title and called it instead The Eroica or Sinfonia Eroica — composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand uomo, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man (with the emphasis, one feels, on the word memory).
Gance’s film stops short of fulfilment, too. The existing five hours chart the life of Napoleon only until 1798, the year that he became a general. Astonishingly, it constitutes a mere one sixth of the projected total. Gance proposed a celebration of the memory of Napoleon that was positively Wagnerian in scope.
“There never has been anything like this film before or since. I feel privileged to have been associated with it,” says Davis. “I am hugely proud of the score, and flattered if anyone says that they were moved by it. For me, it gave birth to so much, and I don’t just mean the music. It saddens me that unless the Coppolas back down, this may be the last time anyone hears it.”
Napoléon is being screened at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020-7840 4242), on Saturday and Sunday at 2.30pm
