It will come as little surprise that Beethoven’s Eroica, the symphony he originally dedicated to Napoleon, looms large in Carl Davis’s mammoth score for this silent film classic from 1927. It has been some journey to have arrived this far, from a previous partial representation of the score on disc with the Wren Orchestra in 2010 to last autumn’s screening at the BFI with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Davis.

The director Abel Gance intended to film Napoleon’s life in full, but having spent the budget for all six episodes on the first, his epic finishes with Napoleon’s entry into Italy, when the screen widens across three panels (a precursor of Cinerama), as the image of an eagle, Gance’s motif for Napoleon’s driving ambition, spreads its wings across all of them. Davis created a new theme for the Eagle as well as a ‘love theme’ for Napoleon and Josephine, but for the most part this is a clever re employment of contemporary works that include the Allegro from Haydn’s La Passione Symphony (No 49) with ‘rasping and snarling’ from the brass section added at the request of the producer, Mozart’s early G minor Symphony (K183) to accompany a snowball fight and the opening of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, which plays during a violent rainstorm at the battle of Toulon. The brooding accompaniment to Josephine’s later imprisonment is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op 10 No 3 Piano Sonata and the evil figure of St Just is drawn from Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor, BWV582.

Folk music, opera and ballet from lesser figures such as Grétry, Monsigny and Gossec – his Tambourin in a riotous arrangement – are played in scenes away from the battlefield. The most touching sequence comes with the slow variation from the finale of the Eroica, which accompanies the preparations for the wedding night of Napoleon and Josephine. Davis’s skill at matching music to cinematic techniques manifests itself in such passages as the rapid cutting montage in ‘Future General’ (disc 1 track 3) and his inspired choice of the 32 Variations for piano – that Eroica theme again – to complement the quickly unfolding events in Gance’s narrative in ‘Fragments’ (track 9).

The Philharmonia Orchestra have this music at their fingertips and the recording, a trifle coarse-grained on the ear after those beautifully honed Chandos CD film issues, is adequate. The two discs come in a hardback-style book with a foreword by the film historian Kevin Brownlow and an extensive interview with Carl Davis.