With its perilous stunts, many of them performed aboard trains, Buster Keaton’s The General continues to command attention nearly a century since its 1926 premiere. Stephen Prutsman’s piano quintet score for the silent film — commissioned by the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this year — had its West Coast premiere at Noe Valley Ministry on Sunday, Dec. 1.
A projection screen had been installed in front of the large stained-glass window at the rear of the sanctuary, with about 100 audience members in attendance. Accompanying the film, the composer, on the 9-foot Steinway Model D acquired by the Noe Music series last September, was joined by the Telegraph Quartet, on a homecoming visit to its city of origin (the ensemble is currently in residence at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance).
This is the fifth collaboration between Prutsman and the Telegraph on silent films, four of them Keaton classics. “Steve draws on the vaudevillian musical style of the era as inspiration,” Telegraph violinist Joseph Maile told The Strad. “He … amplifies the ingenious comedic effects … and is always inserting fun musical Easter eggs.” The Telegraph, which includes violinist Eric Chin, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw, has also performed classical repertoire with Prutsman, who’s based in Aptos.
Piano and strings were acoustically and temporally well coordinated within the responsive environment of the sanctuary, as they began with Prutsman’s setting of the opening credits, as elegant as Carl Davis’s 1987 score for The General.
“The two great loves” of protagonist and railroad engineer Johnnie Gray (portrayed by Keaton), announced in title cards, are conveyed by Prutsman in a pair of motifs: the propulsive chugging of the titular locomotive and the romantic lyricism associated with Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), Johnnie’s intended.
In that same tradition of acoustic illustration in silent film accompaniment, Prutsman sets piano and strings to evoke the drumrolls and bugle calls of the story’s military setting (the plot is loosely based on William Pittenger’s 1889 Civil War memoir The Great Locomotive Chase).
The story has Johnnie’s locomotive, named The General and on a journey from his home in Confederate Georgia to the North, hijacked by Union soldiers, who engage the train in a plot to burn Confederate railroad bridges and thus interrupt the resupply and reinforcement of the Confederate Army. Annabelle, traveling to meet up with her wounded father, is taken prisoner by the Yankees, and Johnnie sets out to both rescue her and take a stand against the Union Army.
Conveying a war story in a comic mode was both a challenging and brilliant artistic achievement by Keaton as actor and co-director (with Clyde Bruckman), all the more impressive because of the endless series of breathtaking physical comedy stunts. Prutsman propels the comic intention faultlessly, interspersing minor-mode tremolos with madcap ragtime ditties and prompting glissandos and extended technique from the strings, who throughout performed with gusto and warmth. In calmer scenes, a winsome theme on piano passes prettily to the quartet and back. Shifts in the score’s pacing follow those on the screen.
Even when Prutsman deploys Brahmsian solemnity in scenes of danger or sorrow, evokes the tension of Richard Strauss as Johnnie spies on Union plans, and positions the strings in a polytonal arrangement with the keyboard as the action goes awry, the score never draws too much attention to itself — the virtuosity of its performers notwithstanding.
With an ear to period and place, Prutsman artfully seasons his score with elements of hoedown and bluegrass. In the culminating scenes of the burning of a bridge, the collapse of a train into a river, and an ensuing battle between troops from North and South, the composer quotes George Frederick Root’s Union anthem “The Battle Cry of Freedom” (which was later adapted by the Confederacy, used in presidential campaigns, quoted by composers Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Charles Ives, and of course incorporated into an epic Civil War documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns).
This is the 15th of Prutsman’s scores for silent film. In an interview with SF Classical Voice in 2022, he recounted how he’d frequented a silent movie playhouse as a child in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. “The music wasn’t necessarily tailored for the action you’d see on the screen,” he said.
He and the Telegraph corrected that problem marvelously, eliciting an extended standing ovation at Noe Music.
