As an "auxiliary", or at any rate complementary, art form, music accompaniment of silent films revitalized old questions about the correlation between music and the representation of extra-musical imagery. With this article, I set out to utilize a crucial concept of music theory at the turn of the century, musical hermeneutics, to "frame" the arguably most significant cinema music collection and theoretic work of the silent period in the German-speaking world: the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik.