GREAT BARRINGTON – On Sunday, November 2 at 4 p.m., Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) presents ““The Golem – A Vision in Sound and Cinema,” a screening of the 1920 silent file with a live version of the 1987 musical score conceived by Israeli composer Betty Olivero. The music will be performed by the Avalon Quartet and clarinetist Saerom Kim, with Jonathan Yates conducting.
The performance will take place at The Mahaiwe Theater, 14 Castle Street in Great Barrington.
This screening is another adventurous program for CEWM’s artistic director, Yehuda Hanani, who has collaborated several times with the acclaimed Chicago-based Avalon Quartet on Jewish-themed pieces despite none of its members being Jewish. Composer Olivero “weaves in Hasidic and Sephardi tunes” into the score, Hanani explains. “Growing up in Israel, after a while you stop distinguishing between them because you grow up in a culture that mixes both. She was a student of [experimental and electronic composer Luciano] Berio and is very much a contemporary composer. But this time, she uses a lot of klezmer tunes people will recognize and also a famous song with words by the poet Bialik about lost love, a very tender melody that resembles the chant for Eicha (Lamentations) a little bit. The clarinetist will be using all five different clarinets, from piccolo to bass, for different colors and that will be interesting in itself.”
The Golem story, with its themes of man overstepping the proper boundaries of his powers to create a force he cannot control, has all kinds of timeless and contemporary resonances, but Hanani also recognizes its darker themes. “The original story of the Golem, though not in the movie, is of a plot to destroy the Jewish community with a blood libel,” he says. “And what I see these days coming from the fake propaganda of the Palestinians is really a blood libel against Jewish people worldwide. We never, never thought that when we planned a year ago to have this movie, that it would come to this. But we need a golem today. We need some supernatural miracle to happen, to actually counter this wave of falsehood against the Jewish people. It's unbelievable what's going on. Never, never would I have believed that in America this would happen. But it is, of course, just a coincidence that we’re showing the movie at this time.”
He adds: “Also, Israeli movies are now being canceled in Portugal, in festivals, in Italy. So we are saying, ‘No, no, not here.’ We're celebrating an Israeli composer who wrote a fantastic score.”
Tickets for this performance are available at cewm.org.
Some Thoughts on The Golem
By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
The story of the Golem is the archetypal cautionary tale about what can go wrong when human beings summon, ostensibly for useful or beneficent purposes, powerful forces beyond their control. The narrative has been reconstituted in countless ways to illustrate the pitfalls of misapplied human ingenuity, be it magical (as in the Golem myths), scientific (Frankenstein most famously), or technological (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind). The story assumes that its overarching lesson – that something will inevitably go awry when man attempts to master a creation to which he has given a kind of life and a sort of consciousness – is one that will perennially need to be relearned the hard way. For example, consider these two headlines I encountered while surfing the Web – “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggests AI-powered 'robo-cops' help fight crime in San Francisco” and “OpenAI's 'smartest' model explicitly told to shut down - and it refused”. What could possibly go wrong?” Every age gets the Golem it deserves, I suppose.
A derivation of the word “golem” appears once in the Tanakh, in Psalm 139:16, and means “unformed” (‘Galmi re’u einecha’ – ‘Your eyes saw my unformed limbs’). The Mishna (Avot 5:9) uses the word insultingly, as it is in Modern Hebrew: “[There are] seven things [characteristic] in a clod (golem), and seven in a wise man.” In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b), Rabbi Yoḥanan bar Ḥanina describes God’s creation of Adam as a 12-hour process beginning with the gathering of the first man’s dust; in the second hour, “an undefined figure (golem) was fashioned.” Medieval Kabbalists studied Sefer Yezirah (“Book of Creation”) for instructions on how to create a DIY golem by fashioning a human figure and animating it in some fashion with God’s name (shem in Hebrew).
The first tales of the Golem featured a rabbi from Chelm, while the most famous version of the narrative involved the Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel) of Prague, who lived in the 16th century and who created the Golem to protect the Jewish community from antisemitic attacks. On Friday evenings, the Maharal would remove the shem animating the Golem so it could rest on the Sabbath. One erev Shabbos, he neglects to do so, resulting in a whole balagan. Versions of this story were collected by Jewish German folklorists in the mid-19th century. In 1915, Gustav Meyrink (the decidedly not Jewish illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler und zu Hemmingen, a Württembergian minister, and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheid Meier) published his novel, Der Golem, upon which the director Paul Wegener based three Golem films released between 1915 and 1920.
The Golem: How He Came into the World, which will be screened by CEWM on November 2, is the last of the three films and the only one to still exist. The film is considered by film historians as having created the visual template for horror movies – certainly, one recognizes its influences on the genre from the classic Universal monster movies of the 1930s right through to 2024’s spooky vampire story, Nosferatu. Contrary to what one might expect, this German film is ultimately respectful of its Jewish characters, doubly surprising considering that the director went on to act in Nazi propaganda epics during World War II. Wegener’s film (with groundbreaking cinematography by Karl Freund, a Jew who also filmed Fritz Lang's Metropolis and later fled to Hollywood and directed The Mummy, filmed Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and was cinematographer for six seasons of I Love Lucy) has it all: the occult, a hideous out-of-control monster with a heart that can be broken (a dangerous combination that), violence (lots of that), sordid sexual intrigue, and over-the-top scenes with a wildly gesticulating and emoting cast-of-hundreds exuding raw energy that still blasts out of the screen. This frenetic century-old action remains eye-popping even for a viewer accustomed to contemporary CGI effects.
The Golem story has gripped the imagination of composer Betty Olivero since her adolescence, when she toured Europe with an Israeli theater dance group who performed a version of the story. “When you have such extensive emotional experiences,” she says, the material “is something that stays with you for the rest of your life.” Years later on the streets of Munich, she by chance met Giora Feidman, “a very famous [Argentine-Israeli] clarinetist who dedicated almost his entire career to Jewish soul music, let’s call it. He was a great collector of archives, music that almost disappeared, like klezmer.” Olivero and Feidman discussed Der Golem, which about to be restored by the Munich National Film Museum. They approached the museum to propose that Olivero write a new score that could be used in place of the orchestral music that originally accompanied the film, and the museum commissioned the project.
Watching the silent film again and again on videotape, Olivero created three versions of the music, one for clarinet and string quartet that will be presented live at CEWM and that premiered in 1987 at the Silent Film Festival in Vienna, played by Feidman and the Arditi Quartet. She also developed a concert version of the music for clarinet and string orchestra, and collected some of the klezmer, folk songs and dances, and traditional niggunim (Chasidic melodies) she incorporated into the score.
Understanding Olivero’s quirky thought process in scoring Der Golem will add to one’s appreciation of the program. “When there was some narrative, the music was purely contemporary and original,” she explains. For the many “atmospheric scenes” that weren’t telling a story – crowds parading through the streets and the Rose Festival bacchanal at the Emperor’s palace – she decided to weave in traditional melodies. And as she worked on it, something strange happened.
“Watching the film for a long time with total silence at home,” she remembers, “I got into this mental state of mind [where] I started seeing choreography. The style of acting in silent films was so exaggerated. Our eyes, even back in the 20th century, were not used to it. So, I really started looking at the hands and the movement of the heads and all kinds of abrupt motion. I thought, ‘How about I write music imagining that the so-called ‘dancers,’ the actors in the film, would be listening to the music and would react to the music with their ‘choreography.’”
She adds: “When you compose, you look at the situation from a total, absolutely new perspective and point of view, upside down. The whole thing I was trying to imagine that I'm writing music that afterwards will be choreographed by the actors. I was working with time code and everything was synchronized and incredibly precise – unlike what happen in real silent movies, where you had musicians on stage that either looked at the film and improvised, or the other way around, when they had prepared music that they just played.”
While the musicians at the Mahaiwe will be challenged to stay in synch, they will also have several minutes in which they can lay out. When composing the score, Olivero asked herself, “How about I pay an homage to the silent movie as a concept? The concept is that there’s silence. That the movement, the acting, the story, would be immersed in a world of silence.” She chose the climactic moment of the Golem's creation, when he comes to life, approximately 30 minutes from the beginning of the film. “Just before this particular silence, the Rabbi and his assistant are immersed in smoke and fire coming from all directions. The Rabbi is crying out: ‘Ashtaroth! Ashtaroth, appear! Appear! Name the word!’ The clarinet plays a kind of screaming high melody like a shofar, then suddenly – the silence, while in the film there is a close-up on the Rabbi's face holding the Star of David. In there, I left five to seven minutes of total silence. I was hoping that we, as spectators, would become immersed in this silent world where we see dramatic, vocal screaming, but it’s not heard. And that was my little tribute, a concert concept of a silent movie.”