this story about The composer of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, Volker Bertelmann, first appeared in the “The Race Begins” issue of the awards magazine TheWrap.
The new German version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” is one of the most harrowing and brutal war (or anti-war) movies ever made, and the music has a lot to do with it. Sometimes brutally high-pitched drum hits come out of nowhere and seem to assault the audience; other times, three huge, menacing chords explode and linger, an unholy Dies Irae hanging in the air.
The film’s director, Edward Berger, has said that he wanted music that would attack the images on screen, and to provide that attack, he turned to his longtime collaborator, Volker Bertelmann (who often composes under the name Hauschka). Bertelmann has scored three films for Berger, as well as five episodes of “Patrick Melrose” and three of “Your Honor.”
When the director approached him about “All in Silence,” Bertelmann deliberately did not return to Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 World War I novel, which he had last read in school at age 18. “It’s a world classic, and the (1930) movie is also a very powerful movie,” he said. “But I didn’t read the book again. I wanted to take the film as a new work of art.” He saw a draft of the new “All Quiet” in a Berlin cinema, but subsequent conversation with Berger was minimal. “It kind of reminded me of a conversation with my father that sometimes is only two sentences long,” he said with a laugh.
But Berger was more detailed during the discussions that led up to the score’s aggressive drumbeats. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to have a normal score in the movie,’” Bertelmann said. “So when we were talking about military sounds, of course we were talking about drums. But we wanted to find something that wasn’t like this rolling snare in a marching band. We wanted the sound of a gunshot or something disturbing. It’s interesting to say: ‘All we give you is this drum. We are taking everything else. That’s unsettling, and once you get used to it, it’s almost a character in the movie.”
For the score’s other signature sound, the huge chords hanging in the air, Bertelmann turned to an old harmonium, a type of pump organ once owned by his great-grandmother. He had it overhauled a long time ago but hadn’t used it, but for “All Quiet” he ran it through a stack of distorted Marshall amps and boosted the bass. “When I played it, I felt like maybe this is the one,” said Bertelmann, who deliberately withheld the operating sounds as if his knees were pressing against the instrument. He even put microphones inside the harmonium to amplify the mechanical sounds. I think that made it very much like a moaning ship, and I really loved the sound of it.”
When he sent an mp3 of the track to Berger, the director’s response was immediate: “That’s Led Zeppelin!”
Bertelmann tried to stay out of other scenes, such as a member of the German high command having dinner while listening to opera or a performance of a Bach piano piece. But he used the frequent pauses in the film to stop at the bucolic countryside where the brutal war was taking place.
“I was born in an area that is exactly like the landscape in the movie, where there are a lot of forests and fields and a lot of fog in the morning,” he said. “Sometimes it looks like a landscape from a fairy tale, and it has a very deep impact on your soul and on your nature as a human being. Every time I saw it, it reminded me of home, and I had the feeling that this is the only thing these boys have left.
“So I wanted to find music to express this kind of longing. From time to time there was light shining through the trees, and that might help you accept the duration of the torture, in a way. And that’s what I helped with, I think, also with the music.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
