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07 February 2024 Bolzano (Italy)
Cinema Haydn Kino: City Lights
Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento conducted by Timothy Brock - Auditorium
Program Info: Charles Chaplin - “City Lights” director: Charles Chaplin, USA 1931 Editing: Timothy Brock
In this homage to silent cinema, the Haydn Orchestra conducted by Timothy Brock tackles one of Charlie Chaplin's greatest masterpieces, City Lights, playing its soundtrack during the screening. A very popular chapter in the adventures of the tramp known as Charlot, City Lights is a romantic comedy with an ironic and melancholic character, in which the tramp falls in love with a poor blind flower girl, who mistakes him for a millionaire, and decides to help her get well. After various vicissitudes, including a boxing match and the rescue of a real millionaire, Charlot will manage to find the money to treat her flower girl and allow her to regain her sight, thus fulfilling his dream of love. The film is well known, but much less known is that the soundtrack to City Lights, as well as that of several Chaplin films, was composed by Chaplin himself. Coming from a poor family of actors, music was a lifelong passion for Chaplin, who as a child taught himself to play an old cello and when he had enough resources he got a violin which he pounced on at night. Chaplin wrote songs and various melodies, but also dances of the most disparate cuts, which he then distributed liberally in his soundtracks. That of City Lights, Chaplin's first, was arranged and orchestrated by Arthur Johnston and Alfred Newman under the watchful eye of Chaplin so as not to overdo the comic aspect, risking distorting the simplicity and lightness that the artist he wanted to evoke. There is everything in Chaplin's music: there is jazz, there is the waltz, there is the mambo, there is Puccini, there is La Violetera by José Padilla, there are hints of Liszt, Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov. But in the end, what unites everything is Chaplin's genius and his ability to paint without the use of a single word the entire expressive world of a character. Even through music.
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