INTERVIEW: This composer gave life to Frankenstein’s score
Image courtesy of Michael Shapiro / Provided by Crossover Media with permission.
It has been 18 years since composer Michael Shapiro’s score for the original 1931 movie Frankenstein first premiered, and almost two decades later, it still entrances audiences and has morphed into several different versions. He has found success with a chamber version of the score, plus one for a full orchestra. Then there’s an edition for a wind ensemble, and he is putting the finishing touches on an operatic rendition as well.
It has been monstrously fun for Shapiro.
“It’s been going on now for 18 years,” the composer said in a recent phone interview. “You know, I wrote the score in 2002, and it’s received 50 productions worldwide from Russia to Canada and the United States. It’s crazy.”
Shapiro has even recorded his efforts with the City of Birmingham Symphony in the United Kingdom, and he’s hoping for the operatic version to premiere in a couple of years in Los Angeles.
“I conducted for 16 years the Chappaqua Orchestra up here in Westchester County, New York, which is a professional orchestra, and there was a theater that opened up in Pleasantville,” Shapiro remembered about the early days of the project. “It’s called the Jacob Burns Film Center. … It’s what we used to call an art movie theater, so I met the director, the person who created it, Steve Apkon, in 2002. I just started at the Chappaqua Orchestra. I said, ‘We should collaborate.’ He says, ‘That’s great.’ I had some ideas he wasn’t crazy about, and then I came up with the thought, you know, I’ve been watching monster movies since I was a kid on TV in New York. And Frankenstein doesn’t have a score. … We did it with 15 players at the Jacob Burns Film Center, two performances, and since 2002 it has taken off.”
Shapiro’s score for Frankenstein has now become one of the most successful scores of its kind. Each year its impact keeps growing, from that original chamber version to a performance with a full orchestra in Birmingham, England. Then came the Dallas Winds who wanted to perform the piece for a winds ensemble.
“And then it’s been done by countless universities,” he said. “Michigan, Texas Tech, University of Memphis, Kennesaw State in Georgia, Bowling Green. I can keep on going. It’s a long, long list of colleges that have done it in the orchestral version.”
The new operatic version is an interesting “creation” (to steal a line from the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff). The libretto is actually the Latin Requiem Mass — at least the tragic words of the Mass. “So, for example, the scene with Maria at the lake,” he said. “I have a soprano singing the music. … It’s perfect.”
He added: “It’s very powerful, and throughout the whole score and the movie there’s ample opportunity to use the words for the Latin Requiem Mass. It doesn’t interfere with the emotion that’s going on in the film. It’s just background noise kind of, but it’s very eerie.”
Eerie is exactly the type of score that works for Frankenstein.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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