Category: Daily Dispatch

I would venture to guess that most admirers of Aaron Copland are unaware that, as a young man in Paris, he wrote a vampire ballet.

That’s right, the composer of “Billy the Kid” and “Rodeo,” who basically codified the sound of the American West, first tipped a toe into the world of dance by way of the undead.

It was Copland’s teacher, Nadia Boulanger, who suggested he undertake a ballet to cash in on the success – or notoriety – of recent Ballets Russes premieres like the riot-inducing “The Rite of Spring.”

It was F.W. Murnau’s new film, “Nosferatu,” freely based on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” that provided just the inspiration he was looking for. Just as Murnau tweaked Stoker’s novel – enough, he thought, to skirt the possibility of a lawsuit from the author’s estate (he was wrong) – Copland and his scenarist, Harold Clurman, jettisoned most of Murnau, but hung on to the Expressionist elements and some of the Gothic iconography.

It’s been observed that the ballet’s narrative shares more in common with another German Expressionist classic, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Either way, Copland’s first ballet is very far away from high-kicking buckaroos and Appalachian springs.

Copland and Clurman created as their antihero Grohg, a necromancer, a “sorcerer who loves the dead and vainly seeks affection among them. He can make them dance in so far as he does not touch them.”

Like Nosferatu, he bears a hooked nose and bulging eyes. He is a figure of desperate yearning. The four dead he calls forth to dance for him are an adolescent, an opium-eater, a streetwalker, and a beautiful young girl.

When he loses control and gently kisses the latter, she awakens from her trance and repulses him, and he’s set upon by his servitors. Grohg hurls the streetwalker into the mob and then wanders into the shadows gloomily. It seems like a scenario that Béla Bartók would have loved. (Bartók was already at work on “The Miraculous Mandarin,” but his ballet would not receive its premiere until 1926.)

Copland’s ballet, composed between 1922 and 1925, was never produced. He and Boulanger played through the score at the piano, and he cannibalized portions of the music for other works (including the even more obscure ballet “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!”).

Eventually, the score was lost, and the only bits that could be heard were those recycled in Copland’s concert pieces “Cortège macabre” (1923), which the composer withdrew, and the “Dance Symphony” (1929). “Grohg” was finally rediscovered, miscatalogued at the Library of Congress, and given its first performance in 1992, two years after the composer’s death.

The original title of the piece was “Le Nécromancien.” According to Copland, the spelling “Grohg,” with the peculiar inclusion of an “h,” was “to avoid an alcoholic connotation.”

So the first orchestral work by a figure who came to be known as the “Dean of American Composers” was inspired by a vampire movie released 100 years ago.

This year, for its centennial, special showings of “Nosferatu” abound. This weekend, organist Brett Miller will accompany a screening at The Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

The Colonial gained notoriety for its use in the 1958 film “The Blob,” when the title menace oozes into the theater, setting off a panic, which is reenacted every summer during Phoenixville’s Blobfest. (FUN FACT: the film-within-a-film, shown during that sequence, is “Daughter of Horror,” also known as “Dementia,” which features a demented film score by Trenton’s own George Antheil.)

The Phoenixville showing of “Nosferatu” will take place this Sunday at 2 p.m. On Saturday, Miller will accompany a showing of the film at the United Palace, 4140 Broadway, in Washington Heights, New York City, at 5:56 p.m. (sundown!).

For more information, follow the links.

In NYC

https://unitedpalace.boletosexpress.com/nosferatu/66149/

In Phoenixville

https://thecolonialtheatre.com/events/theatre-organ-performances/nosferatu-1922-with-live-theatre-organ-accompaniment/

Aaron Copland’s “Grohg”

Happy 100th, “Nosferatu”!