He couldn’t avoid church music, but that doesn’t mean he had to totally embrace it. Writing the score for Edward Berger’s thriller “Conclave,” set inside the Vatican during the election of a new pope, composer Volker Bertelmann knew that any film that takes place within those walls would have to find a way to nod to the sound of ecclesiastical music over the centuries. “It absolutely needed to be part of it,” said the German composer. “This is one of the oldest places in Christianity, and the seat of power and mystery. I wanted to find music that was reflecting the holy halls. And obviously, the first thing you might want to do is use a choir or organ music.”
But Bertelmann, who has worked in the fields of hip-hop and classical music as well as almost two dozen albums of his often experimental compositions, didn’t want to go too deeply into the expected musical terrain. For Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” he famously used an old harmonium type of organ for doomy low notes, and won an Oscar in the process — so for their next collaboration, he took a similar approach.
“Maybe I was inspired by ‘All Quiet,’ because I found the harmonium as an instrument that was tonally very good for the score. I was thinking that maybe I need another instrument for ‘Conclave’ that could set the religious tone. I was searching for an acoustic instrument, but also one that sounds like a synthesizer or something electronic.”
The search led him to the Cristal Baschet, an instrument developed by two French brothers in 1952. “It’s an instrument with glass rods that you rub,” he said. “It has a similarity to glass harp, but this one has also metal cylinders that transport and amplify the sound, and suddenly these glass rods begin to transform into a distorted sound. That is the sound that you hear in the reflective moments in the film.
“The Cristal Baschet theme is celebrating a religious feeling and inner strength and belief as something that is important for humans. But at the same time, I can also use it to go nasty in certain areas.”
As they did on “All Quiet,” Bertelmann and Berger were conscious of when not to use music. But more than in that previous film, the score in “Conclave” feels as if it is part of the conversation in a very talky movie, dropping in to punctuate certain moments, then receding but keeping a persistent presence.
“The procedural music and the repetitive string arpeggios, I had the feeling that they had to sit very tight, and Edward is a big fan of that,” he said. “So when a door locks, the music starts to kick off, or when something falls down, the music stops and there’s a little bit of an after shadow of the music.
“We also placed a lot of music in dialogue, but very subtly just with little awkward crescendos of cello so that you always feel like there’s something destructive happening. I try to figure out these sounds to make sure that we can actually place the sounds in between the dialogue without losing connection with each other.”
Between “All Quiet” and “Conclave,” Bertelmann has been extremely busy, writing scores for a handful of movies, including “One Life,” “The Crow” and the documentary “Hollywoodgate,” as well as the TV series “The Day of the Jackal” and “Dune: Prophecy.”
“Since the Oscars [in 2023], I’ve never had a break,” the composer, whose work might have once been considered too adventurous for mainstream cinema and TV, said. “I know that there are a lot of colleagues that had harder times because the industry is quite slow at the moment, but I didn’t feel that at all. In the end, you know, what is wonderful is that I don’t have to explain myself anymore.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
