The great night came. The place was crowded to the rafters with everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, plus not a few from New York, newspaper people and magazine reviewers. The hour came for the lights to dim and the curtain to rise. But no lights dimmed and no curtains rose. For some reason Griffith had become entranced by the music of a balalaika orchestra he had heard in New York, and nothing would do but that particular orchestra to play his idea of the only music for Broken Blossoms. The train bringing this orchestra to Los Angeles was late, delayed by some trifling accident or other. (…)

Finally the Russians, beards and all, dressed in their shabby traveling clothes and not in the proper black ties of any decent orchestra, began to poke their heads up through the little doorway that led into the orchestra pit. A sigh of relief swept through the audience. The Russians spread out, taking whatever seats were handy. There was no score. They were going to play their own music, learned by heart, under the direction of a leader I had never seen before. The houselights dimmed, but not entirely so. Instead of darkness, the entire auditorium was suffused with a strange, unearthly blue that seemed to come from everywhere – from the chandelier, from the spots ranged along the balconies, from the footlights. There was something eerily supernatural about it. The balalaikas began to whimper a strange, haunting, shimmering melody. I could not place it, although I knew Russian music quite well. It must have been some traditional folk tune not yet committed to paper and to the improvements of Western-trained arrangers and instrumentalists. The big curtain whispered upward, revealing the screen, which was not at all white but bathed in that strange, all- suffusing blue coming from the spots arranged around the inside of the proscenium arch. Then the picture came on in a slow fade that revealed the scene I had been released from the army to make – but with what a difference. I had seen it in a black-painted little projection room on a white screen with black edges and in silence broken only by the whirring of the projection machine. This was a vision of gold swimming in misty blue, a vision that seemed to reach on and on and on, far and away, as far as the mind could reach. The shimmering music echoed the shimmering of the wa- ter. The slow movement of the river was the endless motion of time itself. You could hear a gasp from the audience at the impact of pure beauty.

Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, Da Capo, 1973

This new score for Broken Blossoms was commissioned by La Cinémathèque Québécoise in the year 2000. The version presented this year at Il Cinema Ritrovato was written specifically for the occasion. The music of Broken Blossoms seeks to reflect as far as possible the suffering of the characters, alternating moments of tenderness with violence. The choice of a string orchestra is significant: it gives the score a uniquely homogeneous sound and guarantees all the expressivity required by the film. A solo violin adds to the sense of intimacy and the piano contrasts with percussive elements. The musical language used ranges from the romantic to the contemporary with a touch of folk Chinese music.

Gabriel Thibaudeau