At the age of 63, Philip Sainton wrote his first and only film score: a vigorous, atmospheric and poignant set of tracks for John Huston's 1956 MOBY DICK. The almost 50 minutes of music has always been one of my favorites, catching, I think, much of Herman Melville's turbulent meditation on God, Man and, perhaps, the Devil. The mystery of who Philip Sainton was and why he never wrote another score puzzled me for years. And how, in view of the popularity of movie sound tracks, was the music never recorded on CD?

Happy was I to discover that, in January of 1999, Marco Polo released in America Sainton's complete score for MOBY DICK (Marco Polo: 8.225050) -- 63 minutes worth! Most of the mystery has now been solved.

John Huston, as I detail in my full review of his *film, had dreamed for years of directing his father, Walter Huston (THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, Huston, 1948) in the role of Captain Ahab, the one legged, God-obsessed New Bedford whaling captain, who is willing to sacrifice his world and his duty to win revenge over an immense white whale, Moby Dick, who mutilated him. Walter Huston's death in 1950 ended that dream, but the plan was in motion. Scripts had been written, locations scouted, finances felt out. But in order to make the film, Huston was told by Warner Brothers, he must accept Gregory Peck as Ahab, not at the time an accomplished actor, and 20 years too young for the role, but an undoubted draw at the box office.

Peck would need all the collaborative support he could get to bring off what was really a part of classical weight and stature. (John Barrymore had struggled with two earlier versions.)

When Ray Bradbury, Huston's latest collaborator on the project, came to Ireland to work on the script, he brought recordings of Bernard Herrmann Suite for Orchestra on the subject, but Huston, in his always quixotic way, had something different in mind. Deeply appreciative of music, he had once heard on the radio a tone poem "The Island," by an obscure composer named Phillip Sainton, which caught for him the restless grandeur of the sea. Ascertaining Sainton was still alive, he sent Sainton an offer of a commission, if he would set to music Melville's hymn "The Ribs and Terrors in the Whale." On the strength of Sainton's result, Huston commissioned an entire score from him for MOBY DICK.

In their first meeting, according to Sainton, Huston told him, "that [he] must treat Moby Dick as if it were an opera and went so far as to describe the scene where Ahab first addresses the crew as 'Ahab's Aria.'"

[We can discern here, perhaps, the director's worry over how to establish Peck's dramatic weight in the film. Sainton's music for this particular sequence is superbly operatic, but unfortunately, Peck does not have the "voice" for it.]

The composer set to work.

Never having written music for Film, the aging, ill Sainton saw the task as one of grammar and punctuation. He attended the rehearsals at Elstree Studios, stopwatch at the ready, to catch the "commas and full stops" of the music. Over six months, from November 1954 through April 1955, he produced six themes, which upon the arrival of timing sheets in May, he fully orchestrated.

The finished work is a rarity: a piece of music that, for the most part, supports Huston's film, but can be listened to separately, a whole unto itself.

Sainton's MOBY DICK Soundtrack, as played on this Marco Polo CD by The Moscow Symphony Orchestra (William T. Stromberg, conductor), opens with a Main Title of the two major themes: 1) Ahab's obsession on trumpets and trombones; 2) almost immediately overwhelmed by the full orchestra rendering the Theme of the White Whale.

The film itself begins with Ishmael's trek from the mountains down to the sea, accompanied by Ravel and Delius influenced arpeggios of "Sea [or water] Music," scored with flutes, clarinets, harp, and celeste. After meeting sailors from Ahab's Pequod at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford, Mass., Ishmael (Richard Basehart) is surprised, asleep at the inn deep in the night, by the entrance of Queequeg (Frederich Ledebur). The comic conflict that ensues is celebrated by Sainton with bassoons, followed by a mock serious orchestra, and resolved by a single clarinet, to signify the beginning of a friendship between the Christian seeker and the South Sea head hunter.

The key Sunday sermon of Father Mapple (Orson Welles) is accompanied by a choral version of Melville's "The Ribs and Terrors in the Whale" which ends, "No more the whale did me confine." An orchestral reprise carries over to the resolve of Ishmael and Queequeg to ship out together, finally repeating the "friendship theme" of the previous night on the violin.

Then comes a series of short cues, integrated in this arrangement, covering the pair's signing up for a three year whaling voyage on the Pequod, meeting the prophetic Elijah and their going aboard. The spirited vitality of sea shanty-like themes are blended with melancholy strains of leave taking and foreboding. All of this music is an overture to The Pequod's Departure, a four and a half minute piece that scores one of the most evocative sequences in all film. Brave Clarinets, oboes, and trumpets represent The Pequod at departure contending with uncertainty and loss carried by the string section. Horns win out as she departs the women on the quay and heads for the open sea, all topsmen aloft.

A keyboard segues The Pequod into deep water. The orchestra swells and ebbs with the marking of the class system within the crew, and the first days at sea, until Ahab's Introduction, "the aria," which takes up six minutes, harking back to the darkly challenging chords of The Main Title, punctuated briefly by a theme for the crew. In their simple desire to serve the Master of The Pequod, they accept his pagan task to find and destroy The Great White Whale. That aria is further interrupted by the theme of Thar She Blows.

The succeeding tracks represent the excitement, bloodlust and orgy of the hunt, an orgasm of killing for the crew. Merrily at first, incorporating the traditional "Hill and Gully Rider," it ends with the disappointment that their Father and Savior is not satisfied. The Spirit of Ahab must be satisfied, and after a period of waiting, nervous strings and muted trumpets, then eerie "desert" music, The Great White Whale is sighted again. He is, announced by his theme in full reach, the musical climax of the film -- a nemesis to punish Ahab and his crew for their pointless killing.

The remaining 25 minutes of music alternates conflict and exhausted rest until the film's Apocalyptic conclusion. However, the finale offers compassion and hope in the rescue of Ishmael, who has survived to tell the tale.

According to the film's Co-Writer, Classic Sci Fi Novelist Ray Bradbury, "Moby Dick, the film, is Melville, and Sainton is both Melville and Moby Dick."

Sainton lived to tell the tale, too, but barely

Philip Sainton was born of a family with musical roots. His grandfather, Prosper Phillipe Sainton, a distinguished French violinist and composer, came to Britain in 1844 as a soloist for a Philharmonic Society concert conducted by Mendelssohn. A year later, he accepted a professorship at the Royal Academy of Music, and soon took over as conductor of the Philharmonic Society, and the Royal Italian Opera Orchestra at Covent Garden. In 1860, Prosper Sainton married English Contralto Helen Dolby, a favorite of Mendelssohn, who wrote several works dedicated to her. Subsequently, Prosper and Helen divided their time between Britain and France.

Prosper's grandson, Philip Sainton (born 1891, the year of Melville's death), was discouraged from following a musical career by his father, who said he had none of old Prosper's talent. Unhappy in school, Philip insisted on pressing on with his study of the violin in his teens, and despite discouragement, he was soon composing and was eventually admitted to The Royal Academy of Music. He mastered other instruments and became principal violist for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In addition to "The Island" admired by Huston, he created "Harlequin and Columbine," "The Dream of the Marionette -- a Ballet," in addition to his tone poems "Sea Pictures" and "Nadir," by which some of his MOBY DICK music is inspired.

Always doubting his talent, Sainton worked slowly, and in a darkly fitting touch, his performance income was ruined when third degree burns virtually destroyed his right hand as he attempted to repair an iron one morning during World War II. (Anyone who remembers British direct current can appreciate the fearsome power it had if disturbed.)

I cannot banish the notion that the ironic Huston might have been attracted to the vision of a lead violist, crippled by the modern counterpart of whale oil, composing music about a whaling captain who has had his leg torn off by a whale as white as lightning.

MOBY DICK's music was remarked upon, and Sainton seemed set for a new career in film composing, but his second project, preparing a score for Charlie Chaplin's 1957 come back movie, A KING IN NEW YORK, collapsed over "creative differences." (According to Sainton partisans, Chaplin wanted to take credit for Sainton's work.) He wrote little in the remainder of his life before his death in 1967.

Still, Philip Sainton left a considerable legacy in his score for MOBY DICK. His other music has recently been recorded on CD.

I recommended this CD.


Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Driving