5 Questions With: Professional Composer and Associate Professor of Music, Donnacha Dennehy
5 Questions With is a recurring feature where we sit down with a special guest to get their unique perspective. In this installment we talk with Donnacha Dennehy, professional composer and Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University ahead of his discussion for Wings of Desire (Presented as part of our Prof Picks series — Playing at the Princeton Garden Theatre Thursday, April 25th at 7:30pm).
Why did you choose Wings of Desire as a Prof Pick?
Very simply because I love the film, although it’s a long time since I’ve seen it. In fact, so long that I decided that it was best that I refresh my knowledge by watching it again the other night, and I still found it still as moving as when I first saw it. There is a beautiful calm seriousness about the film that is so unusual.
As a composer, you have collaborated with authors Colm Tóibín, Paul Muldoon, and Enda Walsh. How have these experiences shaped the way you view the relationships between music and dialogue in film?
To be honest, I don’t often think of the relationship between music and dialogue in film, unless there’s something extreme about it, like its absence in Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). My collaborations with these authors however have very much deepened the way I think about words, especially in a dramatic context. Also the way setting words to music adds a whole new level of subtext. My collaboration with Enda Walsh in particular has been very extensive. We are completing a trilogy of operas together. His way of thinking of theatre like a kind of weather system has left an indelible mark on the way I think of the way we move through time, either dramatically or musically.
The first cut of Wings of Desire relied on harps and violins for its score, but after viewing the movie, composer Jürgen Knieper wrote a different score that included a wider variety of instruments and vocals. How do you think the current score interacts with the film, and how would this have been different with the first score?
I think that his first instinct would have resulted in something pretty awful and kitschy. Not that kitsch can’t be fun of course. It is not the score per se that draws me to the film. It’s more the way that the film as a whole is structured like a piece of music, a kind of symphony to an intriguing, compelling, fractured city: Berlin. But there is one moment in the score that instantly made an impression on me, and has always stayed with me, and that’s the scene in the library where the score compiles sounds from all the reader’s thoughts with sung voices in this shimmering, almost ecstatic texture. Just viewing and hearing it again the other day, this scene still struck me as forcefully as when I first encountered it.
The theme of angels or spirits helping humans on Earth is one that filmmakers regularly return to. Why do you think people are continually drawn in by this motif?
I don’t know in a general sense. In this film, it’s crucial though. It allows Wenders, the director, to dispense with any banalities or circumlocutions in ordinary, everyday dialogue, and get straight to some very serious stuff, the stuff that reverberates in our heads but is left unsaid. I’m Irish, and I can’t imagine an Irish person making a film like this. We need all the tragicomic circumlocutions for the fun of dancing around the topic, even if it is deadly serious. Think of Beckett even. I admire these mid-European continentals for just getting straight to it.
In Wings of Desire, the angels see in monochrome and the humans see in color. How does this choice affect how you view the film?
Oh that choice, even though so simple, is so beautiful. It perfectly captures the joy of tangibility that the angel Damiel so desperately seeks.
Wings of Desire is presented as part of our Prof Picks series, and plays at the Princeton Garden Theatre on Thursday, April 25th at 7:30pm. For more information on our upcoming Prof Picks screenings, view our lineup Here.
