Edmund Meisel (2015)
⭆ Research | The most famous forgotten film composer
2002–2015 | Initiator, Researcher, Editor | Together with Thomas Tode and in cooperation with UdK Berlin, Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, Austrian Film Museum, ARTE, University of Vienna, Technisches Museum Wien (TMW) | DVD and publication, 2015 |
Edmund Meisel (1895–1930) will be forever associated with a masterpiece of Russian silent cinema. In 1926, the Viennese composer wrote the score for Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin that became a film music classic overnight. Four years later, Battleship is shown in the cinema again – this time as a talkie. Suddenly the mutinous sailors start speaking German – with the voices of Piscator actors! – and the sound of Cossacks’ whip cracks issues, true to life, from the loudspeakers. In 1930 this spectacular sound version of the film becomes the talk of the town in Berlin and Vienna, not without reason.
At the turn of the millennium and exactly 70 years after it was made, historian Martin Reinhart discovers the needle-tone records with Meisel's original soundtrack in the Technical Museum in Vienna (TMW), which had long been regarded as lost. With some detours the find leads to the reconstruction of the so-called Viennese version, which premiered at the Austrian Film Museum in 2015 and, at the same time, was also released on DVD for the first time ever. This media-history milestone dating from the transition period of silent to sound film is also examined from different angles in the publication Potemkin–Meisel by Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode.
For the background story read the interview Potemkin Reborn (with Sound) and have a look at our 2015 book Potemkin-Meisel. For a detailed biography of Edmund Meisel check Werner Sudendorf’s comprehensive article in German language dating from 1984.