Orson Welles showed glimmerings of genius from an early age, but at first his talent seemed to be for music. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a skilled pianist who had studied with the Polish-born pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky. She arranged for Orson to receive piano and violin lessons, and the boy demonstrated sufficient ability that he was treated as a wunderkind in his home town of Kenosha, Wisconsin. As I noted in my recent article on Welles, he apparently made his stage début as Dolore, or Sorrow, the infant in “Madama Butterfly,” in a performance at the Ravinia Festival. (The archives of the Chicago Tribune contain an amusing account of one unnamed child performer’s troubled outing in “Butterfly.”) Orson disliked practicing, however, and once threatened to throw himself out of a window if he had to play another scale. “Oh, just tell him to go ahead!” his mother replied.
Although acting and directing soon claimed Welles’s attention, he remained a passionate, knowledgeable listener, and in his theatre, radio, and film projects he manipulated sound with an expert hand. As a music critic with cinematic leanings, I’ve long been fascinated by the musicality of Welles, which is integral to the spell his work casts. In his final completed feature, “Filming ‘Othello,’ ” Welles likened editing to composition: “There’s a rhythmic structuring to that; there’s counterpart, harmony, and dissonance. A film is never right until it’s right musically.” The pleasure of being carried by the flow of Wellesian images—the dreamily gliding ball scene of “The Magnificent Ambersons” is perhaps the supreme example—has much to do with this layering of editing rhythms. Yet Welles also used sound to complicate and even contradict the image, heeding principles that had been laid out by Sergei Eisenstein and other radical Soviet thinkers. In the “Ambersons” ball, Bernard Herrmann’s bittersweet waltz score matches what we see, but in the original final scene—a bleak boarding-house tableau, now lost—a vaudevillle routine by the blackface act the Two Black Crows would have emanated from a Victrola, at once trivializing and deepening the tragedy.
Patrick McGilligan’s new biography, “Young Orson,” contains delightful vignettes of Welles’s early musical activities. Among other things, he had a brief career as an opera critic, writing a column for the Highland Park News. McGilligan quotes a distinctly impressionistic review of a performance of Montemezzi’s “L’Amore Dei Tre Re”: “The effects [conductor Gennaro] Papi got out of his orchestra! Music as Montmezzi wrote it to be. All the beauty and the horror of a great romance wrought from men and instruments by a master of directors. And the encomparable Lazzari. The Mansfield of modern Opera he should be called.” This is nimble nonsense—a precociously knowing manner with little knowledge attached. The comments on staging are sharper: “The acting just got by! And that’s all! I am afraid, however, that the audience, the largest of the year, was far from disappointed.” Welles was thirteen.
Strangely, he never directed a full-scale opera, although he did oversee, in 1937, the première of Aaron Copland’s school opera “The Second Hurricane.” In later years, Welles received many inquires from opera companies, but refused them. In conversation with his high-school mentor Roger Hill, he declared that opera directors should be unobtrusive presences, serving the conductor, the performers, and, above all, the composer. The man who helped to originate conceptual staging, with his historically displaced productions of “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar,” felt that such radical transpositions had no place in opera. In a sense, he may have been captive to his early operatic memories, to the lingering Gilded Age milieu in which he got to know the art.
On his home turf, however, Welles handled music with freewheeling brilliance. Averse to conventional illustration, he favored cues that penetrate the mind almost unconsciously, through minimal means. In an early play called “Bright Lucifer,” he called for an ostinato of “devil drums”—a flourish that would resurface in the Voodoo “Macbeth.” In his Fascist “Caesar,” a plaintive air by Marc Blitzstein created an oasis amid encroaching darkness. On the radio, Welles joined forces with Herrmann, who forged an incisive, insinuating style that often involved the hypnotic repetition of brief motifs. For an unnerving demonstration of the Welles-Herrmann effect, listen to a Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air broadcast of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “The Hitch-Hiker,” in which a man is followed everywhere by a spectral figure who makes him question the reality of his life. “At every other mile I’d see his figure, shadowless, flitting before me,” Welles rasps, as Herrmann dwells on a corkscrewing pattern that would evolve into the main title of “Cape Fear.” (Most of the Mercury Theatre broadcasts can be found at archive.org.)
Audio: An excerpt from “The Hitch-Hiker.”
In his feature-film début, “Citizen Kane,” Welles encouraged Herrmann to work on two levels, matching the film’s kaleidoscopic variety of perspectives while hinting at a deeper, fateful unity. He pointed Herrmann toward Pepe Guízar’s perky tune “A poco no,” or “Not just a little”; an early memo indicates that it could be used as the “theme of the picture.” Herrmann made it so; the Guízar tune is recast as the vaudeville-style song “Oh Mr. Kane,” but it also bears an oblique resemblance to the Rachmaninovian theme of fate that broods at the beginning of the film. The musical moment that everyone remembers from “Kane,” though, is the catastrophic opera début of Susan Alexander Kane. For the occasion, Herrmann concocted a clangorous French verismo opera called “Salammbô,” fulfilling Welles’s request for a “parody on [a] typical Mary Garden vehicle.” The chaos surrounding her performance—frantic preparations, a hyperventilating vocal coach, sneering stagehands—is at once over the top and true to life. It remains the finest opera scene ever put on film.
In an ideal world, Welles would have gone on working with Herrmann for decades, but their partnership ended after the fiasco of “Ambersons.” (Herrmann was supposed to write music for Welles’s 1947 “Macbeth,” but backed out when it became evident that Welles would not be present for post-production; he correctly anticipated interference from the studio.) Welles struggled to find a collaborator of equal gifts. The eminent French composer Jacques Ibert contributed a vibrant score to “Macbeth,” but it lacks a specific relationship to the images; indeed, it appears that Ibert wrote without having seen the footage. Heinz Roemheld’s noisy, kitschy music for “The Lady from Shanghai”—imposed by Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures—comes close to ruining the movie. Welles got back on track when Francesco Lavagnino scored “Othello.” The angular, chilly theme for Othello’s funeral sets the tone for the film much as Herrmann’s motto theme did for “Kane.” At first, Lavagnino used a lavish orchestration, but Welles rejected it as “Tchaikovsky touring in Italy.” Instead, Lavagnino recalled, the director asked for a smaller, darker-hued ensemble, and proposed that the piano part be conjoined with a closely miked harpsichord.
Welles did not need a first-class score to produce a striking soundtrack. During his endless hours in the editing room, he toyed with the music track as he did with the visual component, seeking his characteristic blend of atmosphere and distancing. In the noir masterpiece “Touch of Evil,” set on the U.S.-Mexico border, a variety of popular sounds, from traditional Mexican music to Afro-Cuban rhythms and stylized rock and roll, blare from street speakers, jukeboxes, and a motel radio—a sonic montage that echoes the cultural entanglements of the story. (In the amended version of “Touch of Evil” that was released in 1998, these effects are more apparent, notably in the ticking-bomb tracking shot that opens the film.) For “The Trial”—which Richard Brody recently picked as his Movie of the Week—Welles used Albinoni’s Adagio as a leitmotif, subjecting it to manipulations that he likened to avant-garde techniques of musique concrète: the tape was slowed down, sped up, distorted, and otherwise defamiliarized, in keeping with the Kakfa source. And in “The Immortal Story,” a quietly entrancing work of his later period, he filled the soundtrack with melancholy piano music by Satie—a gesture that soon became clichéd but that was quite new in 1968. “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles’s unfinished seventies film, would probably have been treated in similar fashion: the scripts call for various kinds of jazz.
Jazz was, alongside classical music, Welles’s other great passion. He had a particular love for old-school New Orleans jazz, which, in accordance with the Moldy Fig philosophy of the nineteen-forties and fifties, he held to be superior to later varieties. On the 1944 radio show “The Orson Welles Almanac,” he promoted what he called “real jazz,” featuring an “All-Star Band” that included Kid Ory, Jimmie Noone, and Zutty Singleton. The Kid Ory track “Blues for Jimmie” was written immediately after Noone’s death and first performed on the “Almanac.” Welles also felt a strong attraction, musical and personal, to Billie Holiday. John Szwed’s book “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth,” drawing on suppressed sections of Holiday’s memoir, confirms what has long been rumored, that she and Welles had an affair.
In 1941 and 1942, at the brief zenith of his Hollywood career, Welles made plans for a film called “The Story of Jazz.” It was to have been part of his omnibus picture “It’s All True.” The project advanced to the point that Welles had signed contracts from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington; Armstrong was cast as himself, Ellington was to have supervised the score. (Ellington’s memoir, “Music Is My Mistress,” contains a delightful portrait of Welles in unstoppable whirlwind mode.) In the Welles archive at the University of Michigan—a paradise for Welles fanatics, to which much new material has lately been added—you can see a provisional script, by Elliot Paul, which delivers a quasi-mythic account of Armstrong’s life and at the same time comments satirically on jazz’s popularity among snobbish French intellectuals and “white jitterbugs.” One of the latter exclaims: “Man, was that solid! That doghouse—was that righteous the way he laid it on!” As in the Brazilian sections of “It’s All True,” which I describe in my piece, Welles intended to portray the appropriation of non-white music by white audiences.
Whether the context is opera or jazz, music is never idealized in Welles’s work; it quivers within a web of social interaction and control. A newspaper tycoon forces opera into the private fantasy he is imposing on his wife; Afro-Brazilian and African-American musicians negotiate a treacherous landscape of idolization, condescension, and repression. Welles’s peculiar childhood, surrounded by noted opera singers, instrumentalists, and donors, may have given him an early and heightened awareness of the contingencies of musical expression. Watching from the wings, mature beyond his years, he saw a world at once bewitching and bewitched.
