Siegfried and its sequel, Kriemhild's Revenge, stand as an oustanding achievement of spectacular silent cinema, but are also of interest because of the music score used for the original showings.
Silent films often had special scores composed for the premieres and the biggest cinemas, but these were usually cobbled together from bits of Liszt and Mendelssohn. Even well into the 1930s film music was fairly primitive - honourable exceptions being King Kong (Max Steiner) and the 1933 Alice In Wonderland (Dimitri Tiomkin) - until Erich Wolfgang Korngold's symphonic scores for Captain Blood (1935) and other swashbuckling epics completely revolutionised film music.
For Die Nibelungen, ten years before Korngold, Gottfried Huppertz wrote a remarkable symphonic score, somewhat in the style of Wagner though not using any of Wagner's themes. Though not as complex in its construction as Korngold's scores, the themes are used in a Wagnerian manner for the various characters, and the music supports the very slow acting and gives it an epic strength and excitement - seen without the score the action often seems ponderous but the score supports it and makes it flow. It's a remarkable achievement for the period: Huppertz also scored Lang's Metropolis, but his Nibelungen score stands out as the first great film score.
Fortunately both films are available on Blu-Ray in excellent transfers and restored to their original length, together with the complete score.
Silent films often had special scores composed for the premieres and the biggest cinemas, but these were usually cobbled together from bits of Liszt and Mendelssohn. Even well into the 1930s film music was fairly primitive - honourable exceptions being King Kong (Max Steiner) and the 1933 Alice In Wonderland (Dimitri Tiomkin) - until Erich Wolfgang Korngold's symphonic scores for Captain Blood (1935) and other swashbuckling epics completely revolutionised film music.
For Die Nibelungen, ten years before Korngold, Gottfried Huppertz wrote a remarkable symphonic score, somewhat in the style of Wagner though not using any of Wagner's themes. Though not as complex in its construction as Korngold's scores, the themes are used in a Wagnerian manner for the various characters, and the music supports the very slow acting and gives it an epic strength and excitement - seen without the score the action often seems ponderous but the score supports it and makes it flow. It's a remarkable achievement for the period: Huppertz also scored Lang's Metropolis, but his Nibelungen score stands out as the first great film score.
Fortunately both films are available on Blu-Ray in excellent transfers and restored to their original length, together with the complete score.