He rubbed shoulders with Stravinsky and dreamed up beautiful film scores in his sleep. So why don’t we know more about Chaplin’s love affair with song?

It might seem odd to claim that one of the most universally popular entertainers in the world is underrated. But Charlie Chaplin is. Not necessarily as a comedian, actor or director, but as a composer. Most people know the themes Smile, Eternally, and This Is My Song, but they probably don’t know that Chaplin wrote them – for Modern Times, Limelight and A Countess from Hong Kong, respectively. Film buffs might know that from 1931’s City Lights onwards, he composed the scores for all of his films, and that as an old man he wrote new music for his earlier films. Yet he is never mentioned in talk of the great film composers, and in a recent Radio Times poll of top film themes, Chaplin’s name was nowhere to be seen.

That might change this year. Many of the celebrations marking the 130th anniversary of Chaplin’s birth are focused on his music. His passion for music began as a young boy when he heard a tune with harmonica and clarinet in a pub in Kennington, south London, as he wrote in a 1922 memoir My Trip Abroad: “Its beauty was like some sweet mystery … I only knew that I loved it and I became reverent as the sounds carried themselves through my brain via my heart.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chaplin with Tippi Hedren in A Countess from Hong Kong, 1966, for which he wrote This Is My Song. Photograph: Universal/REX/Shutterstock

The son of music-hall entertainers, he first sang on stage age five. As a teenager, he taught himself the violin and cello. Stan Laurel, who shared digs with him when they were part of Fred Karno’s company in 1910, recalled: “He carried his violin wherever he could. He had the strings reversed so he could play left-handed, and he would practise for hours. He bought a cello once and used to carry it around with him. At these times, he would always dress like a musician, in a long, fawn-coloured overcoat with green velvet cuffs and collar and a slouch hat.”

Chaplin kept up his violin playing even when he hit it big in Hollywood. Journalist Charles Lapworth wrote in 1918: “It will be unusual if Charlie does not pick up the fiddle and the bow, and accompany your remarks with an obbligato from the classics.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He carried his violin with him wherever he could,’ said Chaplin’s friend Stan Laurel. Photograph: Picture Collection/Getty Images

The advent of sound might have meant the end of silent movies that had made Chaplin a star, but it gave him the chance to compose his own scores. And what scores they are: full of charming and catchy tunes, the perfect timing and contrasts that make his comedy so affecting, clever use of motifs and wide-ranging magpie influences that make for rich variety. This was the man, after all, whose fame allowed him to rub shoulders with Debussy, Schoenberg and Rachmaninov, and who almost wrote an opera with Stravinsky.

Technically, he didn’t compose – he couldn’t read or notate music. Rather, he described the process of writing it as “la-la-ing” to the arranger. David Raksin, who worked with Chaplin on Modern Times, said: “Very little escaped his eye or ear, and he had suggestions not only about themes and their appropriateness, but also about the way in which the music should develop.”

He had learned from his music-hall days how music could affect the emotional or comic impact of the plot. “I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension,” he wrote in his autobiography. Musical arrangers, he said, “wanted the music to be funny. But … I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grave and charm, to express sentiment.”

He certainly had an ear for a good tune (he claimed to have dreamed them in his sleep), and violinist Philippe Quint – first off in the Chaplin 130 celebrations – has put a selection on CD. Quint grew up watching Chaplin films in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. “We had only three channels. Most broadcast government meetings. In terms of films, everything was censored, but Chaplin was different – they played his films all the time,” he says. “Everyone talks about him as a great comic, but we don’t hear about him as a great director, producer and scriptwriter, and his music is such an important factor. The music told the story in his films.”

His scores are full of references – some direct quotes, some pastiche, some just moods – to composers as diverse as Debussy, Brahms and Elgar. Quint points out how often Chaplin paid homage to Gershwin, noting that the scene of the ship sailing in Modern Times touches on Rhapsody in Blue. And Quint has no time for those who dismiss his music as sentimental. “A Russian would say, What is wrong with that? Tchaikovsky is very sentimental, too! It’s all about love. Chaplin was a loving man who loved to fall in love. Of course his songs are sentimental.”

And, naturally, many of Chaplin’s key climactic moments involve his own instrument. “The violin in his movies always represent the most emotional moment, starting with City Light’s flower-girl theme … it was the instrument of his heart,” says Quint.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chaplin reading the papers the morning after his Academy Award win for Limelight, in 1972. Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

But there is so much more to his scores than mere sentiment. Think of some of his most iconic scenes: when the Kid, played by Jackie Coogan, is torn away from the Tramp by the authorities; or when the Tramp comes face to face with the flower girl at the end of City Lights; or the moment he unwittingly gets involved in a workers’ march in Modern Times. The emotion is always ramped up by his music, proving his unerring sense of theme, structure and timing.

Chaplin was awarded three Oscars. At the very first Academy Awards, in 1929, he was given a special statue for The Circus, and in 1972, 20 years after his exile from the US amid dubious claims he was a communist, he returned to receive an honorary Oscar and a 12-minute standing ovation. But the only Oscar he won as a nominee was for Limelight in 1973 – for best score (the 1952 film only screened theatrically in Los Angeles in 1972, at which point it became eligible for Academy Award consideration). Maybe with the Chaplin 130 celebrations, the world can pick up where the Oscars left off in appreciating this aspect of his genius.

• Chaplin’s Smile: Song Arrangements for Violin and Piano by Philippe Quint is out via Warner Classics.

