Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer improvises soundtracks as the teams play, capturing the sport’s high drama, and sometimes its slapstick comedy.
“Football is a simple game,” the legendary Scottish soccer manager Bill Shankly once said. The sport, he added, is “made complicated by people who should know better.”
He probably had a point: Two teams, two goals and a ball. Around such a simple framework, a multibillion-dollar global industry revolves, with the top players catapulted to fame and riches, and entire countries practically shutting down for the biggest matches.
But 10 years ago, the German musician Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer looked at the game and saw it in a different light: as a silent film in need of a musical score.
“With soccer there are scenes of success, of tension, of great passion; all the emotions that come from watching films also come from watching soccer,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin recently.
During this year’s World Cup, Mr. von Bothmer has again been bringing his particular brand of silent film improvisation to a live audience, playing the organ in the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Berlin to accompany select matches. He has been doing similar accompaniments to games at major international soccer tournaments since 2008.
Mr. von Bothmer has built a reputation, both at home and abroad, for his silent film concerts, events at which he plays a church organ — or one of the two theater organs left in Berlin — to classic movies.
By his count, he’s scored nearly 1,000 of them, including German masterpieces such as “Metropolis” and “Nosferatu,” and comedies by Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. One weekend in 2007, he played along to the German director Ernst Lubitsch’s entire oeuvre in a near-30-hour marathon.
The idea for doing something similar with soccer came during the prelude to the 2008 European Championship. As bars, restaurants and beer gardens prepared for raucous public screenings of the matches, Mr. von Bothmer was in talks with a Berlin church about putting together a program of organ concerts.
“I’m not sure who said it first,” he said, “but this idea came up that films and soccer are very similar, and should be accompanied.”
They began talking about the possibility of Mr. von Bothmer giving soccer the same treatment as the movies, watching the games with the audience while simultaneously improvising a soundtrack. He said that he had been convinced they were on to something unique, but that he had also wondered whether staunch soccer fans would take a chance on such a strange idea.
He need not have worried: When he arrived at the church, he said, “there were eight people standing at the door an hour and a half before the show. When it started, there were about 500.”
Since then, his European and World Cup performances have drawn viewers from a wide spectrum, including many who are neither silent-film fans nor even particularly ardent soccer followers.
What they experience is Mr. von Bothmer playing the Darth Vader theme from “Star Wars” as referees call fouls and flourish yellow and red cards. They hear the score of a spaghetti western as a player dodges and feints. And they get Mr. von Bothmer’s rendition of a team’s national anthem at particularly triumphant moments.
The running musical commentary gives the games an air of high drama, slapstick comedy and the various gradations in between.
While Mr. von Bothmer usually watches a movie several times before accompanying it in public, taking notes on crucial plot twists and moments of melodrama, he said he still partly improvises in those shows. With soccer, of course, he has no choice but to wing it.
“When you’re a normal film composer, you’re only reacting to the film,” he said. “Here, the audience reacts to the game, but also my music. And I react to the game, but also the audience.”
That feedback loop was evident during the Iceland-Croatia match last week, which Mr. von Bothmer accompanied at the Church of the Twelve Apostles, the fourth of eight performances that he was to give there. At one point, he played a few bars of a Strauss waltz as players flitted across the pitch. At another, the organ joined the audience in the church, echoing the onscreen spectators as they performed the characteristic gestures and whoops of the Icelandic “Thunder Clap” chant.
Once it was clear that the Iceland team was done for, Mr. von Bothmer took out a harmonica to play a plaintive blues melody. This got a laugh and a standing ovation as the audience filed out into the still-bright Berlin evening.
The next afternoon, Mr. von Bothmer had a chance to see just how well he could rally the fans of a losing team. He was booked to play the decisive Germany-South Korea game at a private screening for inmates at a prison in Berlin. He supplemented the prison chapel’s electronic organ with two of his own Korg synthesizers. The roaring crowd of prisoners was loudest, he reported, “when the camera panned across the stadium and showed beautiful women in the audience.”
It was a tough gig. In a huge shock, Germany lost to South Korea and crashed out of the tournament at the group stage. Not surprisingly, the crowd at the prison was none too happy, but Mr. von Bothmer said he thought the music had helped keep the game in perspective.
“With the music, I’m able to steer their attention to the game, so that the guests look more closely and pay attention,” he said. “Somehow this makes the loss easier to bear, because it’s more about the sport than it is about winning.”
During the second half, when Germany was chasing a goal, Mr. von Bothmer said he played some “techno-esque, psychedelic music” to mirror the frantic search for a breakthrough.
Faced with the unenviable task of narrating a national disappointment, Mr. von Bothmer said he had also drawn inspiration from a game at a previous World Cup.
“Back in 2010, the Germans played so incredibly badly, I was kind of frantic,” he said. “When there are absolutely no goals at all, what do you do? Someone actually screamed at me, ‘Go faster!’ — as if the Germans would run faster if I played faster!”
It was an affirmation that the illusion was complete: In the audience’s mind, soccer and organ accompaniment had become one.
