Franz Waxman is perhaps one of the finest movie scorers and composers ever to have walked this earth. His collaboration with several directors is seen as being extremely important and in films such as The Bride of Frankenstein he achieved a certain amount of notoriety for using advanced techniques in his musical scores which made it hard for the audience to accept at first but which also demonstrated that he could wield his influence greatly without any qualms or restrictions.
The score for the Bride of Frankenstein is also similar to other contemporary 1930’s scores such as those from Wuthering Heights and Rebecca where the theme of doomed love is also a potent force. Waxman is similar to Alfred Newman who also uses strings to great effect and identifies characters through special themes (Timm p 96).
Waxman felt that the very nature of cinema itself required music, but what marked him out from older film composers was his choice of what to illustrate musically. Rather than
portraying or commenting on what was on screen with snatches of melody and little
thematic reverences (like a flurry of sea-shanties for a shot of a sailing-ships), he concentrated on the psychological state of the characters, almost to the exclusion of everything else. A Waxman film score can be dominated not only by one character’s neuroses, but also by a single sound world, such as the monochrome string orchestra (Timm p 98).
Long stretches of the films scored by Waxman have no dialogue, and we find ourselves anxiously watching a single character while the music winds up the tension to an unbearable degree: in The Bride of Frankenstein, the music associated with Dr Praetorius introduces an amount of strings and woodwind which recall a certain sense of horror and anticipation.
The score for The Bride of Frankenstein opens with a staccato reference to the horror theme which recurs quite often in the movie. The themes are more often than not interlinked and also contain an amount of reflection as the strings are also used quite often especially in the manner with which they describe the main characters of the film which are Dr Praetorius and the monster himself.
Probably Waxman’s greatest achievement, The Bride of Frankenstein tells the tale based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where a woman becomes the bride of the monster in a happy ending. The film received rave reviews and was a huge commercial success although this did not really have much to do with the music score by Waxman. Most of the time, the music is an integral part of the film and the strings are used extremely imaginatively with a number of staccatos and diminuendos. The music used by Waxman observes several actions from the film and is almost continuous in certain parts it is also crucial and very important to the whole storyline.
Waxman also uses certain instruments to emphasise effects such as the cymbal clash at the beginning of the film which focuses on the name of the director while the use of the strings is also very much in keeping with Maria. As a follow up from the 1931 film, Frankenstein, Waxman also introduced several secondary themes which use the staccato effect very well especially in the concluding section of the film. This is mixed with the musical staccato effects but when Maria enters the scene, more often than not, her love theme recurs and shows that there is a palpable scene of emotion in the air
Director James Whale also uses some deserted locations which are emphasised by Waxman’s score for example the cemeteries where Dr Paraetorius forages to find limbs to build the monster’s mate. The fantasy and obsession with death is another important apex of the movie which eventually leads us to believe that the woman is dead as she has thrown herself from a bridge. Yet again the music plays a very important part here as it seems to precede what is going on all the time and this shows Waxman’s instinctive facility to pre-empt those pressure points of the film which are the parts when everything comes to the fore.
The audience is also tricked into believing that the monster will eventually find love with his mate but nothing of the sort happens. Waxman skilfully shows this doomed love with a shrieking succession of string diminuendos, staccatos and eerie woodwind effects. This links inextricably with the scenery as the monster is once again haunted and manages to escape his tormentors. The music makes us believe that they are intrinsically the same person although this is not the case.
The scene with the monster and the shepherdess is also very beautiful as it demonstrates that the monster can be kind and emphatic. Waxman creates a number of romantically charged themes to accompany this scene and here one can find the kernel of the movie music which is perhaps the most important part of the film score.
Works Cited:
Timm L: The Soul of Cinema, An Appreciation of Film Music New York, Longman 2008 Print
Curtis, James (1998). James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters. Boston, Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19285-8.
Gelder, Ken (2000). The Horror Reader. New York, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-21355-X.
Gifford, Denis (1973) Karloff: The Man, The Monster, The Movies. Film Fan Monthly.
Goldman, Harry (2005). Kenneth Strickfaden, Dr. Frankenstein's Electrician. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-2064-2.
Johnson, Tom (1997). Censored Screams: The British Ban on Hollywood Horror in the Thirties. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0394-2.
