Nosferatu (1922/1998)

The death of James Bernard in 2001 ended not only a brilliant career in music composition for film, but what could have amounted to an equally brilliant second career after composing this new score for Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1998. Now, the primary composer for a series of silent films on the BBC's Channel 4 has been Carl Davis, whose score for Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera is so perfect that it’s better than the original. What if Bernard had lived and been able to score more films in the BBC series, silents like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Hands of Orlac, Faust, or even more tantalizing, a score for Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr? If his results on Nosferatu are any indication, it would have been magnificent.

One frequently repeated myth is that there were never scores composed specifically for silent films. Not so. Many later silent films--especially the big-budget films--had scores specially commissioned for them and orchestrated for any number of instrumentations. The same score often was written out for orchestra, small bands, and even solo piano or organ, so that it could be played in venues of all different sizes. (The book Film Music by Roy M. Prendergast is an excellent resource on this point.) And, in fact, Nosferatu had a score written specially for it by Hans Erdmann. Now, unfortunately, that "original" score was mostly lost. What fragments that remained were pieced together and filled out with Erdmann's other film music for a Nosferatu score on RCA conducted by Gillian B. Anderson. The same thing was done with Giuseppe Becce's fragments for Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on Koch, and both are worth seeking out.

Ironically, with all of the numerous versions of the actual film on DVD finding the best overall copy of Nosferatu remains problematic. The Image Entertainment and Kino International versions contain by far the best visuals of the film itself with completely restored footage and appropriate color tinting; unfortunately the titles are not as good as other versions and the Kino is accompanied by the worst soundtrack of any version available. Far and away the best soundtrack is on the Kartes Video Classics VHS version which is no longer in print, but a treasure if found used--though the titles have been changed to Dracula, and it suffers from a poor black-and-white transfer of the film which can be a strain to watch at times. For an in-depth comparison of the DVD editions check out Gary Johnson's article in Images Journal.

For fans of Bernard's work on the Hammer films his Nosferatu is a must have. Far more mature and interesting than some of his earlier work, it nonetheless retains the elements that made his scores so exciting in the first place. I would rank it among his best work in the genre. Unfortunately, though it’s been almost fifteen years since the score was written, it still hasn’t been released on DVD in the United States. The only issue with Bernard’s score is a PAL version, a 10-minute snippet of which was posted on YouTube several years ago but now appears to be gone. It’s a shame, because it’s certainly the definitive version with the Bernard score.