This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Sound, Act, Presence Pre-Existing Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman Neumann, Anyssa Charlotte Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 07. Oct. 2021 Sound, Act, Presence: Pre-Existing Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman Anyssa Charlotte Neumann 1040312 King’s College London December 2016 A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music ABSTRACT This thesis explores the appearance, function, and meaning of pre-existing music in the films of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), with an emphasis on works from the Western classical canon. Active as a director, producer, and writer for sixty-one years, Bergman used his love of music to fuel his films in both form and content, largely eschewing traditional soundtrack scores in favour of pre-existing music used sparingly but precisely, incorporating music into the lives of his characters, and finding artistic inspiration in the works and lives of the composers. This study’s primary focus is to trace patterns of musical usage in Bergman’s oeuvre through a series of case studies that link film-specific events to broader cultural traditions. Chapter One focuses on Bergman’s relationship with music, sketching his musical life from childhood to his early years as a director and examining how he used the history and language of music to enhance his own biographical legend, interpret his cinematic techniques, and justify his artistic choices. Using The Silence (1963) as a case study, Chapter Two considers the onscreen representation of listening to music (music as sound) and explores how the act of listening can create for Bergman’s characters a channel of communication between listeners and with a larger cultural history, mediated through technology. Chapter Three traces the dynamics of onscreen musical performance (music as act) back to a broader tradition of ritual humiliation, using Music in Darkness (1948) and Autumn Sonata (1978) as case studies. Focusing on In the Presence of a Clown (1997) as a case study, Chapter Four draws upon theories of the Gothic and the uncanny to illuminate how music becomes a haunting presence, enabling Bergman’s characters to transgress the boundaries of fantasy and reality, past and present. The conclusion looks at Bergman’s last film, Saraband (2003), which weaves music through its structure, soundscape, and narrative and offers a glimpse of music at its most transcendent, a gateway to the beyond. 2 CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES 4 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5 CHAPTER ONE Ingmar Bergman: A Musical Auteur 16 CHAPTER TWO Music, Mediation, Meaning: Acts of Diegetic Listening 65 CHAPTER THREE The Rituals of Humiliation: Patterns of Onscreen Performance 116 CHAPTER FOUR In the Presence of Schubert: Musical Haunting and the Reimagined Past 164 CONCLUSION Saraband: One Last Glimpse 209 APPENDIX: A List of Pre-Existing Music in Bergman’s Filmography 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgment. 3 LIST OF FIGURES 2a. Waiting Women, Gluck on the radio 2b. Port of Call, Christmas scene 2c. Summer with Monika, jukebox scene 2d. The Silence, Ester’s hands 2e. The Silence, Anna in the café 2f. Five frequently used cross configurations 2g. Bar 1 of Variation 25, Goldberg Variations 2h. First five melody notes 2i. Passus duriusculus bass line of Variation 25, Goldberg Variations 2j. Passus duriusculus bass line of the Crucifixus from Mass in B minor 2k: Religious iconography 3a. The cycle of humiliation 3b. The Seventh Seal, outdoor stage performance 3c. The Seventh Seal, rural communion scene 3d. The Naked Night, circus ring 3e. To Joy, Stig’s violin concerto performance 3f. Music in Darkness, alone at the piano 3g. Music in Darkness, Bengt auditions for Kruge 3h. Music in Darkness, in the restaurant 3i. Autumn Sonata, mother and daughter 3j. Autumn Sonata, Chopin Prelude, version 1 3k. Autumn Sonata, Charlotte talks about Chopin 3l. Autumn Sonata, Chopin Prelude, version 2 3m. Autumn Sonata, the “nose to nose” close-up 4a. Bars 1-8 of “Der Leiermann” 4b. Franz Schubert or Carl Åkerblom? 4c. Rops’ Pierrot 4d. Bergman’s Rigmor 5. Chart of music in Saraband 4 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first encounter with Ingmar Bergman came, appropriately, in a small, dark theatre at the Film Forum in New York City in 2005. I no longer remember the film screened that afternoon, but I can still see and hear the images, voices, and music from the Saraband trailer shown before the feature. As a 20-year-old pianist at the Manhattan School of Music, three years into my Bachelor’s degree, I fancied myself rather cultured, having advanced far beyond my humble beginnings in Sacramento, California, where few people (I thought) watched art cinema. At this point in the story, the magnitude of my naïve self- delusion reveals itself in my eye-rolling response to the Saraband trailer that day at the Film Forum. Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish master of cinema? Never heard of him. A film about a cellist, with Bach as soundtrack? Movies about musicians were always rife with obvious mistakes and fake playing, a misuse of serious music. I was an instant sceptic. A few months later, Ingmar Bergman popped up again, this time in a class at the Manhattan School of Music. I no longer remember the context, but I remember watching the famous double-performance scene of Chopin’s A minor Prelude in Autumn Sonata on a wheeled-in television. You could write a whole essay about this scene, our professor said. Then, a year and a half later, on 30 July 2007, two of the world’s great directors died – Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films I loved, and Ingmar Bergman. Curious, I read Woody Allen’s tribute in The New York Times and shortly afterwards saw Autumn Sonata, my first Bergman film, at St George’s English Bookshop in Berlin, where I had moved for advanced piano studies. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience, watching a film about a concert pianist whose career came at the expense of everything else – happiness, love, and even her children’s well-being. I too was a concert pianist, a young one; was this film to be my future? That autumn, back in New York City, I decided to apply for graduate school for both piano performance and musicology. Having gone to conservatory, however, I was required to play a public recital in order to graduate, not write an undergraduate thesis. So when the musicology applications asked for an undergraduate thesis-length sample of academic writing, I had to start from scratch. I remember throwing around ideas and coming up with a vague notion of something to do with Glenn Gould, the Goldberg Variations, and the idea of oblivion. One early Sunday morning at my piano church job on 5 the Upper West Side, I mentioned this idea to a guitar player named John, who was a doctoral student in English literature. I don’t even remember his last name, but what he said would change the course of my life: “If you’re interested in the Goldberg Variations and oblivion, you should watch Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence.” And so, armed with books from the New York Public Library, mostly written in the 1970s, I began a 9,000-word essay on Bergman’s use of Bach in The Silence. In my first attempt at Bergman scholarship, I discovered two things: that I had a lot to say about classical music in Bergman’s films and that nobody else had said it yet. This PhD is the result of that initial foray: an in-depth study of the presence and function of pre-existing music in the films of Ingmar Bergman. In 2007, nearly all the Bergman scholarship available had been published more than 30 years earlier, during the heyday of Bergman’s popularity in the 1960s and 70s. Written predominantly by English-speaking, non-Swedish scholars, these texts offered close examinations of Bergman’s major films from psychoanalytical, religious, philosophical, and occasionally cultural standpoints but did not venture into the more interdisciplinary aspects of Bergman’s cinema, leaving his connections to other influences and art forms, including music, untouched. With the publication of Bergman’s autobiographies in the 1980s and 90s, scholars adapted their thinking to encompass Bergman’s biographical legend in their work, reigniting discussions of auteur theory and viewing his films in light of his authorship, even as his popularity declined.