Chaplin Project: City Lights

Charlie Chaplin’s celebrated film comes to L’Aquila. In this tribute to silent cinema, the Haydn Orchestra conducted by Timothy Brock takes on one of Chaplin’s greatest masterpieces, City Lights, performing the score live during the screening. One of the most beloved episodes in the adventures of the Tramp—known in Italy as Charlot—City Lights is a romantic comedy that balances irony with melancholy. The Tramp falls for a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a millionaire, and he resolves to help her regain her sight. His journey takes him through a boxing match, the rescue of a true millionaire, and, at last, the desperate search for money to pay for her operation—making her dream, and his own dream of love, come true. Though the film itself is world-famous, fewer people know that the City Lights score—like those of several other Chaplin films—was composed by Chaplin himself. Born into a poor family of actors, he nurtured a lifelong passion for music. As a boy he taught himself to play on an old cello, and later, once he could afford it, he bought a violin that he practiced on late into the night. Chaplin wrote songs, melodies, and dances in the most varied styles, freely weaving them into his film scores. The City Lights score, Chaplin’s very first, was arranged and orchestrated by Arthur Johnston and Alfred Newman under his close supervision. He insisted that they not overplay the comic elements, for fear of undermining the simplicity and lightness he sought. His music embraces it all: jazz, waltzes, mambo, Puccini, José Padilla’s La Violetera, with hints of Liszt, Debussy, and Rimsky-Korsakov. What binds it all together is Chaplin’s genius—his gift for painting the entire inner world of a character without a single spoken word. Even through music.