“Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc was premiered in April 1928 in Copenhagen about a week later in Paris. We do not know what music accompanied the screening in Copenhagen, but the music that accompanied the Paris screening was written by two French composers, Leo Pouget and Victor Alix. For some obscure reason, a piano/vocal score and four string parts for this screening were published not by a French music publisher but by the American firm, Editions Musicales Sam Fox of Cleveland and Paris, and they have deposited for copyright at the Library of Congress. (Not the string parts, only the piano/ vocal score is preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale).

Unlike many films scores of the silent era which are divided into numerous small sections, the ninety minute score is divided into 13 major parts, which underscore the overall or underlying mood of each major structural sequence in the film. The score is written in the style of pseudo-Gothic (many open fifihs in the chords and the Gothic-like harmonic cadential formulas), late nineteenth century French dramatic music.

Especially when realized for full orchestra, soloists, and chorus (which was how it was first performed), this broadscale musical treatment places the score squarely in the dramatic tradition of the romantic era, and to some seems antithetical to the timeless intimacy of the photography which is done mainly in close-ups. Today’s performance uses reduced forces, piano, organ/synthesizer, two violins, cello, bass and six singers and hopefully al least is in keeping with the intimacy of the film’s close-ups.

(Gillian Anderson)