Silent movie and live piano: Christoph Wünsch

Charley Chase:  LIMOUSINE LOVE

(USA 1928, Director: Fred L. Guiol, Production: Hal Roach, approx. 23 min.)

Charley Chase: DOG SHY

(USA 1926, Director: Leo McCarey, Production: Hal Roach, approx. 25 min.)

Charley Chase was not a simple slapstick comedian, but rather coined a form of situation comedy in which he usually appears as a shy, nervous everyman or as a youthful daredevil. In his day, Chase was very popular and also successful at the box office. His two-act plays, which he did in the mid-twenties, very effectively butcher stories in which Chase gets into embarrassing and increasingly convoluted situations.

LIMOUSINE LOVE, for instance, is also stunningly funny: Chase, driving to his own wedding, must suddenly discover that there is a naked, perfect stranger in the back seat of his car …

In DOG SHY he plays a young man who has had a panic fear of dogs since childhood. Once again “on the run”, he ends up in a phone box where a woman’s crying sounds from the receiver. When she tells him that she is to be married to a stranger, he wants to save her, arrives by chance at her home as a butler and causes a series of confusions and comical situations …

The Music

for LIMOUSINE LOVE was commissioned by the Bielefeld Silent Film Festival for piano and computer-controlled piano sounds, the music for DOG SHY was commissioned by the Würzburg International Film Weekend for salon orchestra and later adapted for piano and computer-controlled piano sounds. The computer makes it possible to combine characteristics of the two instruments that were originally used to provide musical accompaniment to silent films: piano and cinema organ. From the piano come the timbres (partly processed with sampling technology), from the cinema organ the principle of reproducing several timbres and musical levels simultaneously. The live piano is accompanied, so to speak, by an oversized mechanical piano …