When Boris Karloff first appeared as the creature in James Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein,” there was no musical underscore beneath him.
The soundtrack carried dialogue, machinery, screams, and the creature’s grunts. For most of the film, the drama unfolds without a score. More than 70 years later, composer Michael Shapiro wrote one.
On Saturday, Aug. 29, Shapiro’s music will be performed live at Stissing Center in Pine Plains as the original film plays on screen. The Argus String Quartet and pianist Steven Beck will give the world premiere of Shapiro’s piano-quintet version. The evening begins with a Q&A featuring Boris Karloff’s only child, Sara Karloff.
Shapiro first wrote the score in 2002 for the opening of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville. Versions for full orchestra, chamber orchestra, wind ensemble, opera, and organ followed, and the score has now been performed more than 80 times internationally.
A Brooklyn-born composer and conductor, Shapiro studied at Columbia University and The Juilliard School and has written more than 100 works spanning chamber and orchestral music, opera, film, and television. His music has been performed by ensembles including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, LA Opera, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
For Saturday’s performance, five musicians will take the place of an orchestra.
“It has an intimacy that the larger forms, like a symphony or an opera, don’t have,” Shapiro said of the new composition.
His attention keeps returning to Karloff’s creature, whose bewilderment and vulnerability gradually emerge as the film unfolds.
“The creature starts as an empty canvas, but becomes very human and tragic as it goes on,” Shapiro said.
The screening is intended for people of all ages. Sara Karloff said her father believed children often understood the creature more readily than adults.
“Children seemed to get it,” she told the Herald. “The creature really had a soul. The creature really was the victim.”
At home, Boris Karloff was far removed from the frightening figure that made him famous. Sara remembers an avid reader and gardener who loved children and animals and once kept a pig named Violet.
“My father could not have been more different from the roles he played,” she said. “He was a typical British gentleman. He was a gentle soul.”
Sara did not see “Frankenstein” until she was 19, when she watched it alone on television. She has seen it many times since and still hears from fans about their own encounters with her father’s performance.
Making “Frankenstein” was grueling. Sara said her father lost 25 pounds during production, when he was still a struggling actor. His makeup took four hours to apply and three more to remove, and some working days stretched to 19 hours, she said.
Shapiro approached the film with a different problem. Whale, the film’s director, had been dead for decades, so the composer had to decide for himself where music should enter, where it should fall away, and how closely it should follow the action.
“What is the drama doing in that very moment?” Shapiro asked. “How can you make it even more clear and more resilient?”
Writing the score, Shapiro wanted the music to settle into the film so naturally that audiences would eventually stop thinking about the musicians playing it and forget they were there.
On Saturday, Sara Karloff will watch her father’s creature come to life once more as five musicians perform a version of Shapiro’s score no audience has yet heard.
“Frankenstein” will be screened Saturday, Aug. 29, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. in Banning Hall at Stissing Center, 2950 Church St., Pine Plains. Advance tickets are $30 to $40 and can be purchased online through Stissing Center’s website.