The Book
Actually, J.M. Barrie published three things about Peter Pan. The first was six chapters in the middle of a longer book from 1902, called The Little White Bird. That book is not a children’s book, but the chapters explain how Peter Pan grew from conversations with a child. Peter continued to thrive and grew into a play, which ran for 145 performances starting on December 27, 1904, and was called Peter Pan: Or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. It was so popular that Barrie republished the original six chapters as its own book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1909, and then in 1911, a novelization of the play, now called Peter Pan and Wendy. If you have never read Peter Pan, you can start with either the play or the novelization (and I include here a link to the LibriVox search page that offers both as audio books as well); they are pretty similar. The Little White Bird may also be worth reading in full – I have not yet done so. If you do, let us know what you think!
The Movie
Barrie himself wrote the screen play for a live action silent film of Peter Pan. However, as a fantasist, his expectations of special effects were… a little high. Also, even after the first run of the play closed, it was so popular that it continued to be mounted at least annually for many years, and was adapted for Broadway, where the woman (Maud Adams) who created the character of Peter continued to in the lead role.
In 1924 the stars aligned. Famous Players-Lasky Corp., who had bought the film rights long before, determined that Maud Adams was not interested in starring in the film, which simplified casting. In the end, the only stage actor who played in the film was George Ali, in the rather specialized roles of Nana and the Crocodile, still spry after 20 years in the part. Barrie also gave up on having his screenplay accepted, though he retained control over casting, supplied nearly all of the titles (mostly from the play, but he also wrote the opening title card “on the acting of a fairy play”), and continued his requirement for special effects that at least exceeded what could be done on stage. In fact, the flying is still a little weak (very effective in the learning to fly sequence, but not so much as the children fly out the window). However Tinkerbell is an absolute tour de force. The first time the twinkling ball of light resolves into a tiny, gauzily dressed harridan, you’ll gasp.
It was therefore Barrie who cast the lead role in the film, and it went not to one of the stars of the day, though several were among the contenders (and Pickford specifically squashed a rumor that she was among them), but to an unknown teenager, Betty Bronson. She was in fact a perfect choice, and plays the role with the grace, innocence and nonchalance required. Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook was also an inspired choice; he chews the scenery from beginning to end.
The settings and narrative also follow the play quite closely, and likely the scenery as well, certainly the Underground Home. There are some differences; the film omits the entirety of Act III (plays were allowed to be longer than films) in which Peter and Wendy rescue Tiger Lily from Marooner’s Island and are subsequently rescued themselves, but includes small sequences (Michael being bathed by Nana, Nana interrupting a dinner party with the alarm that the children are leaving) that would have been difficult to insert into a play.
I cannot offer a free link to this film with Dr. Carli’s score because it is still for sale by Kino-Lorber, but you can see it here for $4.99 (and lest you think this is shameless promotion, the pay for producing the recorded score was a flat fee). As the image has now entered the public domain, you can see the film silent on the Wikipedia page on Peter Pan. Comparing the two will show very directly what music adds to a film!
The History
Fairies have a very long history indeed, but the fairy story Peter Pan evolved through Barrie’s personal history. His vulgar, vulnerable fairy Tinkerbell is more human-like than Peter himself, while Peter has all the old essential fairy characteristics – beautiful, fascinating, remote, elusive, dangerous. The play and the book emphasize Peter’s otherworldly quality more than the film does – both Paramount and (later) Disney were more concerned with wide public appeal than Barrie was.
Or maybe Barrie just knew better than they did what will appeal to a wide public. There is a reason for fairies. They help us express that connection between what is beautiful and what is lawless that we all see in our own selves, when we are at our most honest. The danger in exploring that connection is real, and it is likely that Peter grew, among other things, from the effect on Barrie’s life of the accidental death at age 14 of his elder brother David – a boy who would indeed never grow up. There is speculation that this early grief led to an avoidance of emotional commitment, referred to in The Little White Bird, that stunted Barrie’s emotional life and darkened his relationship with the boys with whom he concocted the Peter Pan tale.
The play, meanwhile, is embedded in another historical context, that of the Christmas pantomime. Cross dressing, including a hero played by a woman (known as the “Best Boy” in panto lingo), spectacular stage effects, and people dressed as animals are the most familiar aspects of pantomime that show up in Peter Pan, along with its scheduling at Christmas time. The play was supposed to open shortly before Christmas in 1904 (12/22) but was delayed until 12/27 due to problems with the flying harness.
Finally, the survival of the 1924 film has a very interesting history of its own. James Card, the first curator of film at the George Eastman Museum describes in his autobiography, Seductive Cinema, how on a visit to Rochester around 1947 he heard that a staff member at the Eastman School of Music had a cache of old films and would show them on request. Card requested. He discovered that the cache was of films used in the Silent Film Accompaniment department before that department was closed for good in 1930, on the advent of sound film. And the film that he was most excited to see, which he described as being at the top of his list of lost films, was Peter Pan. He managed to make sure that the Eastman School films were added to the collection at the nascent George Eastman House archive. It is only for this reason that we are able to see the film today.
The Score
Peter Pan was, like all films of its day, distributed with an orchestral score, and that score continued in use with the newly rediscovered print. However, The Eastman Museum restored the film in 1996, using tinting information from a second print discovered in the Disney Collections by David Pearce, who also (amazingly!) managed to convince the Disney Corporation to license public viewing rights on the 1924 version (whose copyright they had bought when they made their animated version in 1937). In 1996 the Eastman Museum also decided that the somewhat pedestrian original score would not do the restored film justice, and commissioned Philip Carli, already working there as staff accompanist, to produce a new score for small orchestra.
This was Mr. Carli’s first orchestral commission. Fortunately, he already had the orchestra, having started The Flower City Society Orchestra in 1993. He also had considerable knowledge of orchestration and deep familiarity with repertoire, as well as previous experience with writing for small orchestra, and of composing accompaniments for silent film. However, composing and orchestrating a hundred minutes of continuous music – and then producing and printing the parts, all on a deadline… that was quite a trip for us both.
First, we discovered that one of the music engraving software packages, Finale, had a feature that allowed a composer to sit at a midi piano and improvise while the software simply recorded what notes were pressed, how fast, and how hard. So we bought a midi piano and Finale, and figured out how to use it. Turning the piano recording into notes on paper was quite another learning curve for me, since I was working on that for some cues while Philip was still recording others. It involved listening to the recording while tapping out beats on a piano key, leaving the software to decide what notes would go on what beats. To this day the resulting piano part, which Philip used in orchestration, was mostly gibberish that only the composer could read. (I’ve gotten better at it since then!)
The next step was the orchestration, which Philip did long hand, since he was not about to try to learn how to use a new computer software package at the same time he was trying to compose and orchestrate. We hired a bunch of Eastman composing students to transcribe the handwritten orchestration back into the computer. I still remember the stunned look on Philip’s face when he realized that he had just completed the orchestration of the final cue. The handwritten score was 700 pages long.
The final step was using the software to “extract” the individual parts and print them out to go on the stands. I learned a lot about music engraving very quickly. For instance, at the first rehearsal I handed the second cornetist a part that consisted of 119 unbroken bars of rest before his first entrance. Try counting that!
Needless to say, the parts went through several revisions, between fixing transcription errors, adding in phrasing, articulation, and dynamics, and making sure that that page turns fell before a rest long enough for the performer to have one hand free. The only 24-hour all-nighter (9 am one day to 9 am the next) that I ever pulled was the day before the orchestra left for Italy, where the first performance was taking place. Robert Holland (one of the performers who also happened to be savvy with Finale) and I did the final extractions and print of the parts at the computer center at the University of Rochester Rush Rhees library, burning through copy cards like falling leaves. At the very last moment there was a problem with one of the cues. The orchestra was boarding the bus, and that cue ended up getting faxed to Italy. (This was 1996.) As I recall, a lot of the staff lines did not come through on the fax. I think the performers must have added them themselves.
Sadly, I was not able to come along on the trip; I was at that point nearly 8 months pregnant, and they would not let me on the plane. But I heard the stories that came filtering back including how Philip rehearsed the orchestra on the bus in Italy in a greeting to Paolo Cherchi-Usai, the Eastman Film Curator who also helped to run the Giornate del Cinema Muto where the film was premiered, and who had commissioned the score. “Il tuo seno è come i meloni della Toscano” came from a book of joke translations, and supposedly meant “I am pleased to meet you!” When the orchestra delivered it in careful chorus on arrival, he nearly fell over laughing.
The film and score were both very well received at the festival, and have remained so. Since that premiere I have been able to attend several performances in the US, and to see audiences literally leap to their feet after the final crescendo. I treasure the comment of one film collector, who said after a performance at the Cinesation festival in Columbus, OH, “I have seen Peter Pan a few times before, and thought it was an ok film. But this performance was one of the highlights of my filmgoing life.”
In 1999 the score was recorded, again by the Flower City Society Orchestra, for its video release by Kino (now Kino-Lorber, who still distribute the film with that score) and in 2015 Philip was commissioned by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra to enlarge the score for full orchestra. This meant mostly replacing the atrocious piano part with a full string section, and adding harp, more percussion, and a few more winds. Unfortunately, the new score has yet to be recorded, and between the economic woes of orchestras and the pandemic, has not yet had wide performance. So let your favorite orchestra know you’d like to hear this production!
Composer's Commentary on the Score
Commentary for the 1999 Kino video recording
Peter Pan is a deliberately “theatrical” film, and so it seemed logical to me to adopt a very “theatrical” compositional style derived from 19th century opera and theatre models. Not necessarily Wagner and Puccini, though; Peter Pan is so very English that English models fit it best. “What English models?” you might ask. I have spent much of my life studying English operatic and dramatic music, and Victorian and Edwardian composers did fine work; Arthur Sullivan comes to mind first, of course, but Michael William Balfe before him was equally famous (and still is, in an odd way: you may remember Laurel & Hardy’s version of Balfe’s 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl, while Enya’s pop recording of “I Dreamt that I Dwelt In Marble Halls” from that opera’s third act was a top 40 number about ten years ago) while Edward German carried on and enriched Sullivan’s legacy after Sullivan’s death in 1900. Also, the English musical stage was nothing if not eclectic: many European composers wrote works for London theatres, including Weber, Verdi, and Beethoven’s star pupil Ferdinand Ries, and these “domestic imports” furnished models for English composers.
The stage play Peter Pan is a pantomime, colloquially, a “panto”. Pantomimes are fantasy plays, often based on fairy tales, with broadly drawn characters, a leading male part played by an actress (called “Principal Boy” in the English theatres), elaborate scenic effects, and audience participation; they are usually staged at Christmastime. Peter Pan was a stage panto for Christmas1904, and the film was Paramount’s 1924 Christmas release; therefore, I wrote broad, theatrical “pantomime” music, working at the same time to evoke the delicate whimsy of Barrie’s play and Brenon’s film. The poignancy and yearning in Peter Pan – the enormous regret we feel at losing an idealized childhood – is much of what has made the story a part of popular culture, and those emotions struck me very strongly. Also, the impossible but extraordinarily gentle romance between Peter and Wendy seemed a crucial element of the film’s tone, and one which I tried to support appropriately in my music. Writing for pirates and stage Indians is just fun; you get to use lots of clichés and you don’t have to apologize for it. (If you want the source for the pirate music, it’s an amalgam of the first act pirates’ chorus from Balfe’s 1858 opera Satanella and my memories of innumerable childhood trips through Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride, usually with my parents bellowing “Yo ho, Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me” in the back of the boat.) I also saw the rambunctious fight between the Lost Boys and the pirates as an excuse for a rollicking early-Romantic sonata-rondo à la Weber/Mendelssohn, though noisier. (Come to think of it, it’s more like the finales of Schumann’s Second and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth symphonies retrospectively viewed by Weber and Mendelssohn’s ghosts and then arranged by Theo. Moses Tobani – composer of “Hearts and Flowers” and the ubiquitous arranger of thousands of theatre orchestra arrangements for Carl Fischer in the 1890s.)
As to the reasons for the admittedly old-fashioned harmonic and melodic idioms I employ, I felt they best suited the film’s sense of place and time, as well as the cultural implications of the drama; also, tonal euphony and melody are highly meaningful to me. The central determinant of any film accompaniment to me is that it complement the film and strengthen the image without calling attention away from the screen. I must admit that I feel uncomfortable about calling my work “art”, as I have been a theatrical pit musician for over twenty-five years and simply believe in giving the best of my training and imagination to whatever I do, without attaching the pretension that so often corrupts creative endeavors. My music for Peter Pan is work, and craft, and I take pride in that and hope it accomplishes its purpose; whether it is any more than that is not for me to say.” P. Carli, 1999
2 thoughts on “Peter Pan”
What fun to read all this. Thanks for creating this site, which I look forward to investigating further in coming weeks.
All success with your livestreams and other work!
Best always Donald
Hi Donald,
I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! I need to spend more time this month working on more content – last month was mostly flailing at promotion… Well, slowly but surely! BTW, Philip said you’ll be in town on the 5th for a film. I’m sad to say I think we’ll be missing you! That’s Mercury’s birthday (and the birthday following their finally getting their driver’s license), and we’ve made plans meet them down in PA. But sooner or later!
Alice