A Milestone in the History of Film: Paul Hindemith's film music written for "In Sturm und Eis"
A recently found copy of the 1921 silent film Im Kampf mit dem Berg (I. Teil: In Sturm und Eis) by Arnold Fanck offers, together with Hindemith's film music written for it, new insights into the history of the silent film.
In the summer of 1921 a momentous encounter between Paul Hindemith and the mountain film pioneer Arnold Fanck (1889-1974) took place. Just a few weeks previously, Hindemith had attracted supra-regional attention for the first time with the premieres of his one-act operas Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Das Nusch-Nuschi in Stuttgart. Arnold Fanck was working on the final montage of his mountain film Im Kampf mit dem Berg (I. Teil: In Sturm und Eis). This was to become the first part of a mountain film trilogy which, however, was never completed. A camera had been used in the high mountains for the first time during the shooting of this film, which documents the climbing of the approximately 4500m-high Lyskamm in the Valais Alps.
According to Arnold Fanck's reminiscences, Hindemith, who was his guest in Freiburg for several weeks, was fascinated: "What you're doing there is pure music," he supposedly remarked. He spontaneously decided to compose film music for salon orchestra and had completed, within just a few weeks, an extensive score for an 87-minute film. This composition is one of the earliest documents of original film music to a silent film. However, it was probably never performed together with the film. At the premiere on 22 September 1921 in Berlin, the film music conductor Willy Schmidt-Gentner rejected Hindemith's score, explaining that his orchestra could not learn the music, and preferred to use his own compilation of pieces, a practice which was customary at that time.
Hindemith's autograph score has been handed down undamaged and complete in his estate. On the other hand, the film lost its original form already during the 1920s, being changed a number of times through abridgments, editing and new intertitles. A coloured-in (virage) nitro-copy was recently found in the Austrian Film Archive; this copy is longer than the two previously known copies from the Moscow Film Archive Gosfilmofond and the Federal Archive – Film Archive in Berlin, and has almost all the original intertitles. Taking Hindemith's score as a basis, it was possible to almost completely reconstruct the lost version from this material.
The reconstructed version of the film will be presented at the hr Broadcasting Hall on 10 May 2013. The hr Symphony Orchestra will perform Paul Hindemith's original music conducted by Frank Strobel.
Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt