Edmund Meisel was born in Vienna but moved to Berlin as a child. Little is known about his musical education, but he was working as a violinst in Berlin orchestras while still in his teens. The vibrant theatrical life of Berlin in the Weimar years provided his first work as a composer, writing incidental music for the agitprop stage productions by Erwin Piscator and including at least one project with Bertolt Brecht (a radio adaptation of Mann ist Mann). It was thanks to his association with Piscator that Meisel became involved with composing the score for the silent film Battleship Potemkin. In 1925, the Soviet Central Committee asked Mosfilm to make a new film to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, the film is based on a real historical event. It is set in 1905 aboard the Imperial Navy battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea port of Odessa. Sailing out of port with the red Socialist flag, the other Imperialist ships refuse to open fire and cheer the defiant sailors of the Potemkin. On its release, Battleship Potemkin was a great success in the Soviet Union and it was quickly distributed to other European countries. In Britain its central themes of promoting revolution and social change worried the film censors, but in Germany it was a huge success, distributed by Prometheus Films.

Prometheus decided that for the film to make its fullest impact, it needed a musical score to accompany the silent images. Meisel was asked to compose the score and was given less than two weeks to write it, as the German release date was already announced. Eisenstein was enthusiastic about the idea of adding music, and even made specific suggestions to Meisel, asking for the inclusion of some revolutionary songs (from Russia, France and elsewhere) and also to produce music of ‘deafening fury and stark rhythms’ for moments of the greatest dramatic power.

So it was that a Viennese-born Berliner composed the score for Eisenstein’s Russian classic. He did so without any of the synchronisation tools used by more recent film composers, and a tight budget meant that as well as time pressure, he was also limited to an orchestra of 16 players. Meisel’s remarkable achievement in Battleship Potemkin has been well summarised by the film music critic Craig Lysy: ‘In every way [Meisel] succeeded in empowering Eisenstein’s narrative with inspired music which helped earn the film the accolade as one of the greatest films in cinematic history.’

Meisel’s pioneering score started a trend for new large-scale film scores in the final years of the silent era. In 1927, Eisenstein asked Meisel to provide a score for his film October: Ten Days that Shook the World, and Gottfried Huppertz composed his score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Major figures in European symphonic music also became involved in writing for epic film dramas: Arthur Honegger composed a score for Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his music for New Babylon, a Soviet film set at the time of the 1871 Paris Commune.

In other words, Meisel should be considered one of the great innovators in film music history, producing a specially-composed score for a full-length film in which images and sound were integrated to create – together – a vastly richer dramatic effect. Previous scores had usually been pot-pourris of existing music, strung together to be an approximate match for the on-screen action. Meisel broke with that tradition, creating a score whose architecture (and detail) matched Eisenstein’s montage-like construction. In 1934, the commentator Ernest Borneman wrote about Meisel’s technique in an article for Sight and Sound: ‘Meisel analysed the montage of some famous silent films in regard to rhythm, emphasis, emotional climax and mood. To each separate shot he assigned a certain musical theme. Then he directly combined the separate themes, using the rhythms, emphasis and climaxes of the visual montage for the organisation of his music. He wished to prove by this experiment that the montage of a good film is based on the same rules and develops in the same way as music … By far the best result was from Eisenstein’s Potemkin.’ Meisel’s own career as a ground-breaking composer of film music lasted barely five years: he died in 1930 at the age of 36.