One of the most obscure and little-known records in pianist, composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin’s extensive discography is the dramatic cantata The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968). The film-music label Dragon’s Domain has recently reissued this long-forgotten curio on CD and streaming services, marking its surprising first-ever reissue.
But there is a strange and fascinating story behind the rise and fall of this particular oddity, a rare dud in Lalo Schifrin’s extensive canon of historic and well-loved jazz, film and TV music.
To be clear, though, the music under discussion here is a cantata, not a soundtrack. Schifrin actually did score the three-hour David Wolper production of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” that aired on ABC-TV over three nights in March 1968.
There, Schifrin employed small ensembles of percussion, strings and military brass to accentuate the footage, taken from over 200 hours of film Wolper himself collected from the Library of Congress.
“It was very dramatic,” Schifrin said later in a video interview. “There’s no mystery: if they are showing concentration camps, you do something funereal; if there are Nazis marching, you do marching music; if there are battles, you do war music.”
Schifrin had contracted with Wolper to score the TV documentary, based on William L. Shirer’s 1960 best-selling historical account, in late 1966 – the same year Schifrin scored the Wolper productions “The Making of the President: 1964” and the National Geographic TV episode “The Hidden World of Insects.”
In his autobiography, “Mission Impossible: My Life in Music” (2008), Schifrin said that the executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was “very impressed by my score” to the documentary and proposed that he compose a cantata based on the score for soloists, chorus, orchestra and narrator.
The cantata, though, actually predated the TV production by nearly a year.
Schifrin’s first cantata, “They Shall Not Learn War Anymore” (a.k.a. “You Shall Not Make War Anymore”) was commissioned earlier in 1966 but did not premiere at the University of Judaism in Hollywood until March 1968 – nine months after the Hollywood Bowl premiere of TRAFOTTR and the very same month that both the MGM record of TRAFOTTR was released and the documentary was broadcast on TV.
It’s hard, then, to imagine how the LA Phil guy could have known about either the TRAFOTTR score or Schifrin’s first cantata commission.
II.
Schifrin had already written for such wartime TV shows as “Blue Light” (1966) and one episode of “Jericho” (1966-67: one cue Schifrin wrote for the episode was said to be the basis for TRAFOTTR’s “Prologue”). And, of course, there is also Schifrin’s famous martial cue from the cold-war TV show “Mission: Impossible” called “The Plot,” which, too, is partially recycled for the cantata (“Nazis March”).
As notes writer Jon Burlingame points out in the CD, Schifrin accepted this assignment while he was busy working on the hit TV shows “Mission: Impossible” and “Mannix” as well as his memorable scores to the films Cool Hand Luke and The Fox, both of which earned the composer Academy Award nominations.
But opting to score this Faust story – itself, an unusual musical choice (Ferruccio Busoni’s rarely-performed opera “Doktor Faust” [1925] is one of the few others) – as a cantata was either foolhardy or brave. Either way, the result is a provocation.
Cantatas are usually reserved for religious subjects and this one is undeniably profane: a recounting of the utter damage spawned by inhuman evil.
Schifrin struggled most to choose a librettist – the one who writes the words to be sung – especially situated in Hollywood during the swinging sixties. He settled on Alfred Perry (1910-92), a refugee who, himself, fled Germany in 1933 and had previously composed the libretto to George Antheil’s third opera, “Volpone” (1953).
By the time Perry came to this project, he, too, had become a Hollywood insider, providing the German songs for The Guns of Navarone (1961) and serving as musical supervisor on many episodes of TV’s “Burke’s Law,” “Honey West” and “The Big Valley.”
The text tells of how the Devil, in the guise of a German businessman after World War I, makes a Faustian pact to restore the Teutonic war gods in return for the souls of the German people. He then installs Hitler, and history tells the rest of the horrific tale.
Schifrin knew, however, even before the cantata’s premiere, that the project was doomed. “My collaborator had the technique,” wrote Schifrin in his autobiography, “but his ideas were obsolete.” The composer had no love of the English-language words that he had to set to music and responded with as much enthusiasm as his great talents would allow.
One can hardly blame Schifrin.
Perry’s text is awkward, unduly melodramatic – despite the ever-serious subject matter – and too often cliché-ridden. Despite Perry’s deep connection to the material and his conviction to the story, the language feels stilted, lacking in poetry and verse and struggling to tell a commanding story.
III.
Actor Laurence Harvey (1928-73) was cast as narrator (actor Richard Basehart [1914-84] narrated the original documentary), while the singing parts went to tenor Richard Cassilly (1927-98) as “The Devil,” contralto Lili Chookasian (1921-2012) as “The Earth,” and the 80-piece (!) Gregg Smith Singers as “The Gods.”
TRAFOTTR premiered at the Hollywood Bowl on August 3, 1967, at the end of a program featuring Beethoven’s Egmont overture and Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony.
The cantata was said to have transformed the venue “into a symbolic Nuremburg,” of sorts. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Lawrence Foster (b. 1941), who was, at the time, the orchestra’s assistant conductor under Zubin Mehta (TRAFOTTR is among the earliest of Foster’s recordings).
The cantata received a notably frosty reception: “Lalo Schifrin’s ‘Third Reich’ has risen and fallen at Hollywood Bowl,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Martin Bernheimer1 in one of the paper’s only comments on the cantata, “and few of the memories that linger on are happy.”
“’3rd Reich’ More Fall than Rise,” wrote the Long Beach-based Independent Press-Telegram. “It is a work which succeeds neither in telling a story nor in creating a sympathetic response in its auditors.”
“Lalo Schifrin’s dramatic cantata,” wrote the Venice-based Evening Vanguard, “probably will not find its place in the heights which are the abode of the Teutonic gods.”
Indeed, it did not.
Schifrin himself later said, “Even during the rehearsals I realized that things weren’t working. . . The result was a failure so big that I wanted to leave town.”
IV.
Over the course of the next two days, the same cast of musicians and Harvey assembled in the studio to record the cantata. (Although some sources indicate that the orchestra was recorded on June 7, while Harvey’s narration was overdubbed on September 7.)
The original record was first released on the MGM label in March 1968 – not 1966, as several Discogs listings indicate – in the same week that the three-hour MGM-TV documentary originally aired. The Los Angeles Philharmonic – which, at the time, was contracted to London Records – was forced to be credited here as “The MGM Studio Symphony Orchestra.”
It is the first of Schifrin’s classical or concert works to ever have been issued on record. The next, “Dialogues for Jazz Quintet and Orchestra,” was issued in 1970 by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. But it wasn’t until the nineties when Schifrin’s classical work started appearing more regularly on disc.
The TRAFOTTR LP was lavishly annotated and featured a striking cover, replete with Len Weiss’s remarkable photograph and a commanding use of typography. But to all too-little avail. The release received little to no notice and, subsequently was largely ignored.
Some two decades later, I picked up the record because Lalo Schifrin’s name was on the cover. I also assumed it was a Schifrin soundtrack because record stores, to this day, always store it in their soundtrack sections.
It was one of the very few Schifrin records I only listened to a couple of times: truth be told, there is not much that is memorable here. I predicted, then, that such an obscure and forgotten piece of music was unlikely to ever find its way on to CD.
But, all these years later, the Dragon’s Domain label ended up proving me wrong. After no less than 57 years, Schifrin’s forgotten cantata has surprisingly made its first appearance on CD.
It’s hard to imagine anyone other than a hard-core Schifrin fan – guilty, as charged – waiting for something like this. But here we are. It’s no fluke, either; this is the real thing. There are, however, several differences between the two releases to note.
The beautiful cover art of the MGM release is gone altogether, replaced by an illustration and typography that looks like it comes from a video game release. Apparently, that’s a thing for the Dragon’s Domain label.
Also, the credit to the Los Angeles Philharmonic has been rightfully restored. Laurence Harvey’s overly-pretentious narration was removed (apparently at Schifrin’s request). And, wisely, the snippet of Hitler’s speech that Schifrin deliberately wrote in to the cantata, which so jarred – and likely alienated – listeners at the Hollywood Bowl is gone.
The album’s original liners are replaced here by a thoughtful and incisive new note by author and journalist Jon Burlingame, who has written notes for many Schifrin discs, including the career-spanning collection Lalo Schifrin: My Life in Music (2012). The program, which previously did not have section names, has also been wisely broken in to 15 individual tracks.
V.
It’s difficult to know how much of Schifrin’s documentary score overlaps with the cantata, but I suspect it’s not that much. Indeed, Schifrin later regretted how much of the cantata’s music underscored and overemphasized the libretto’s clichés. Even the documentary’s main theme doesn’t correspond to anything in the cantata.
Schifrin seemingly approached the cantata as he might a disaster movie score (think Voyage of the Damned) or a horror film like The Amityville Horror.
“Two idioms,” Schifrin said of the cantata in the original program notes, “are in constant opposition: neo-classical . . . and polymodal. The superimposition and interpolation of these two musical idioms is calculated to create a hallucinatory atmosphere.”
That could just as easily describe any number of Schifrin’s soundtracks – especially the non-jazz ones – except that, here, Schifrin too often underscores the narrative rather than enhance it. The one exception here is the instrumental “Prologue,” a lush and subtle introduction that is far more satisfying than the documentary’s main theme. The soundtrack-y “Mother Earth Mourns” is also musically notable.
While it would have been nice to have had the libretto reproduced in the CD, as it was on the original MGM release, Perry’s words are ultimately negligible, and sometimes just downright silly. Anyone who bothers to listen to this will just want to hear Schifrin’s music anyway.
With the CD’s removal of Harvey’s narration (“Destruction and Sorrow,” “Madness and Murder,” “The Allies Rally”) and Hitler’s speech (“The Devil’s Spawn”), that’s much more of a possibility now.
The track titled “The War Begins” was mysteriously left off the original LP release (even though that part of the libretto is provided in the MGM album). It fits neatly between where the first side of the LP ends and second side begins.
Here, Schifrin has crafted less of a threnody than an outright horror story – a genre Schifrin all-too rarely scored. But his masterly work in The Exorcist (1973 – rejected) and The Amityville Horror (1979) proved that he was more than up to the task.
The 45-minute piece might have worked better as an instrumental presentation or, better yet, with the splash of jazz that made his 1965 “Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts” (later just “Jazz Mass”) so exciting.
Schifrin was reported to have conducted the cantata with the Buenos Aires National Symphony in the summer of 1968, while a performance of the work was apparently scheduled in Moscow in October of that year.
It is unclear whether either of these performances ever occurred. Indeed, it’s not known if the “Third Reich” was ever performed again anywhere after the Hollywood Bowl.
But in his autobiography, Schifrin cited the cantata as one of two of his own compositions that he considered a failure: “I had forgotten that music and words should be integrated in an organic and functional way and I paid the price for that amnesia.”
The other work he cited as a failure, the 43-minute “Pulsations” for Symphony Orchestra, Jazz Band and Electronic Instruments (1970), was the next – and last – commission Schifrin received from, of all places, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Regardless of the artistic merits of a work such as this, it is well worth reflecting on the subject at the heart of this well-meaning cantata: “[W]ith the rise of fascism around the world in our time,” Jon Burlingame wisely points out in his notes to this CD, “’The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ is relevant all over again.”
Special thanks to Mark Cathcart for additional research.
Endnotes:
- Bernheim, in the July 30, 1967, Los Angeles Times, interviewed Schifrin about “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “the only world premiere” on that summer’s Bowl prospectus (“The Devil and Adolph Hitler [at Hollywood Bowl]”). Even there, he seemed skeptical of this cantata. The above photo of Lalo Schifrin – “Airplanes welcome at the premiere” – comes from that article. ↩︎