Buddenbrooks - Silent Film Concert

Buddenbrooks

The film Buddenbrooks (1923) by Gerhard Lamprecht, freshly restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek on the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann's birth, will be presented live for the first time at SoundTrack_Cologne with its new music by Marco Brosolo. This first film adaptation of Thomas Mann's famous novel about the decline of a merchant's family is given a new emotional depth by Brosolo's composition. With Marco Brosolo (drums, synths, electronics), Kristina Lösche-Löwensen (theremin, synths and piano) Johannes Marx (piano, synths, electronics).

Participation with a SoundTrack_Cologne accreditation is free of charge. 

It is also possible to attend the concert independently of the congress by purchasing a ticket.

Ticket price: €20 / €12 for students

In cooperation with Deutsche Kinemathek

The Film

The film magazine Filmdienst writes about The Buddenbrooks: “This film established Lamprecht’s reputation.” Lamprecht was just 26 years old when he tackled the literary material—the novel published in 1901 by an equally 26-year-old Thomas Mann. Lamprecht’s feature film marked the first adaptation of Mann’s debut novel. With The Buddenbrooks, German literary and film history come together in a moment of dense significance.

The film focuses on the storylines of the siblings Thomas, Christian, and Tony, drawn from Mann’s masterpiece about the titular merchant family from Lübeck. Unlike later Buddenbrooks adaptations, Lamprecht’s version lifts the plot out of Mann’s original 19th-century setting and places it in the present of the production time. By relocating the story to the year 1923, Lamprecht is able to address the rampant inflation of the time. A film from and about the Weimar Republic, which—one hundred years later, in the midst of a new inflation crisis—feels strikingly relevant.

The Film Music of Buddenbrooks

Statement from Marco Brosolo: 

In developing the music for the Buddenbrooks, I tried to maintain my own style while also drawing inspiration from the music of the era in which the film is set, the 1920s. All of this was then arranged for a live ensemble of four multi-instrumentalists.

Since the film is relatively conventional, I sought an acoustic-compositional correspondence between images and sounds. I not only favored muted tones with analog filters, but also attempted to identify atonal harmonic forms, even within popular compositions of the early 20th century (e.g., Otto Reutter), as a way of approaching dodecaphony (microtonality/clusters), which can be highly effective in cinematic scoring.

Artists such as Angelo Badalamenti, Moondog, John Carpenter, Terry Riley, and Einstürzende Neubauten on the one hand, and Luigi Russolo, Oskar Sala, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern on the other, served as sources of inspiration.

Certain instruments influenced my work due to their unique characteristics: the intonarumori, the Trautonium, the Theremin, the sequencer, and the sampler. I also took into account the orchestrations of Giuseppe Becce, to whom I often referred for timbral choices. On top of that, I tried to incorporate elements of digital electronics: wavetable synthesis and granular synthesis.

For the percussion parts and concrete sounds, I used gongs and various metals, while drums of different kinds proved essential in highlighting dramatic and dynamic peaks in the story.

The rhythms, often orchestrated into strange polyrhythms, exist in a tension between shuffle and straight patterns à la Kraftwerk, between human performance and robotic precision.

The composition work was done primarily on a "felted" piano (muted with felt), and for the arrangements, I aimed to carry the dark and mysterious character of the felted piano over into the entire orchestration. The pieces are designed to be performed by an ensemble of four musicians, all of whom are multi-instrumentalists.

The musical material stylistically spans krautrock, serial music, electronic music, new music, musique concrète, jazz, avant-garde pop, minimalism, and ambient.

Marco Brosolo - Composer

Marco Brosolo, born in 1972 in Pordenone, Italy, is an artist and musician.

Brosolo is a creative boundary-crosser. In the past, he worked as a performer for La Fura dels Baus (Spain) and composed several pieces for the French company Kali&Co.

As a visual artist, he has pursued a style since the late 1990s that blends comic art with conceptual art. In his video works, he explores synesthesia.

Since 2006, he has been developing a multisensory instrument, which was first presented at Transmediale in 2010.

In 2009, Marco Brosolo co-founded Moving Silence, a platform of international musicians, artists, and filmmakers dedicated to the live scoring of contemporary silent films. Their mission is to bring the poetry of cinema’s early beginnings back into the spotlight and to explore the identity and potential of silent film today.

As a musician, Brosolo has released several albums, including Cadremo Feroci (2015), featuring international guest artists such as Barbara Morgenstern, Robert Lippok, Rudi Moser (Einstürzende Neubauten), and others. His musical oeuvre often engages with the works of poets—for example, his recent concept album nubi, inspired by Pasolini.

Brosolo has been invited to numerous music, theater, and art events across Europe. He became a member of the choir at the House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) under the direction of Barbara Morgenstern. In 2019, he founded the music duo Paranoia Godard with Godehard Giese. Brosolo lives in Berlin.