Volker Bertelmann On Bringing the Drama to the Papal Election of ‘Conclave’

Whenever I saw Edward Berger’s Conclave at this past Toronto International Film Festival, I walked out being gobsmacked by the Volker Bertelmann’s score. Throughout the film, we are watching an election that will change the course the world’s soul, and Bertelmann’s music heightens the action in a grand, major way. We have entered a world that only a select group are allowed to witness, and this composer wraps us into an unforgettable experience.

Bertelmann won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on Berger’s All Quite On the Western Front, a brutal retelling of the survival of one soldier during World War I. He also composed the score to Joe Penna’s Stowaway, a thriller about a mission to Mars that is compromised by an unexpected additional passenger in addition to Max’s Dune: Prophecy and the Oscar shortlisted documentary Hollywoodgate. Bertelmann explains that he doesn’t always seek out stories from a singular perspective.

“It’s a happy coincidence,” Bertelmann admits. Ed [Berger] loved to film out of the perspective of a singular perspective to make an experience much more linear, so you feel like you are moving with that person. With Stowawy, it was a different thing, because that was at the beginning of my scoring career, but when I did All Quiet on the Western Front–and with Lion with Dustin O’Halloran–I learned the protocols like with cue sheets and all that. I wanted to say yes to everything, because the stories were so interesting in their perspective.”

Bertelmann once said in an interview, ‘I like sound that I can touch,’ and some might be curious as to what that means. The more you listen to Conclave‘s score, the more you feel you can grasp it, as if the tense mystery at the center of Berger’s film is slipping from your fingertips. These are characters who are trying so depserately to maintain control, but they are witnessing it being taking an unwanted direction. Bertelmann explains that proximity to the instruments was essential in the variety of the sound.

“I want to get to the material of the sound,” he says. “I want to get you so close that you can feel the viscerality of the sounds, so you can feel the scope of the film in a big way. For example, I wanted to get close to the crackling on a bow and then you need a microphone and you zoom into the sound of the hair that you are moving over to find that feeling. I recorded mostly everything very close to the instrument and then a bit further away and then a lot wider. I want you to feel like you are sitting next to the violinist or next to the cellist so you can think of how raw it is.”

There is a constant, strange sound throughout Conclave, and we don’t even know that Bertelmann has introduced us to a new instrument. The Cristal Baschet looks like an instrument on an alien ship, but the sounds ring through a clarity that you can’t quite place. Once he heard it, Bertelmann knew that this was the only instrument that he wanted to underline Ralph Fiennes’ character’s emotional and intellectual struggle.

“I knew that I wanted to replace the organ and the choir and that means you have a steady note that is, in a way, cycling that creates an ethereal soundscape,” Bertelmann says. “I was looking into the glass harp, but I thought it was too clean. This instrument, though, has crystal bowls that are turning around and the water is running over them. The principle is always the same that you use on the edge of a wine glass but with the Cristal Baschet, you rub the glass rods with wet hands or fingers. The metal plates are at the end of the instrument, and they resonate as cymbals but starts to distort and it becomes almost like an awkward synthesizer. It’s an otherworldly instrument, and it sounds almost holy in the beginning but then it expands into something that is weirder and more destabilizing. And modern. I used it a lot for the idealistic religious idea whenever Father Lawrence had a doubt or whenever he was thinking about his role in the church.”

Conclave is available on Digital platforms and Blu-ray to watch at home this holiday season.