ABSTRACT
Michael Slowik has suggested that, in American practice, these compiled scores rarely attempted to match small-scale on-screen actions, and that because the music ‘emerged from an orchestra that was visible in the theater, diegetic/non-diegetic distinctions would have held little meaning.’ Meisel’s score incorporates many close narrative scoring practices that were later associated with the development of non-diegetic scoring in Hollywood’s early sound films and those from the later ‘golden age’ by, say, Max Steiner and Erich Korngold. Meisel’s score to Der heilige Berg has remained largely neglected because of this association with Nazi ideology. The German film historian Werner Sudendorf has described Der heilige Berg as an anomaly within Meisel’s (mostly left-wing) oeuvre, a score written purely for financial reasons and prestige.
