For one night, on Feb. 1, the Napa Valley Opera House takes its audience time-traveling back to the heyday of the two-reel comedy, with three short films featuring the classic clowning of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.

Made between 1917 and 1921, the three pictures will be screened with their original musical scores performed live by Rick Benjamin’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, the nation’s only performing group dedicated to restoring historical film music.

Keaton’s “The Playhouse,” Lloyd’s “Get Out and Get Under” and Chaplin’s “The Immigrant” are “high-water” films from “the toniest days of silent comedy,” in Benjamin’s words.

But, as Benjamin knows better than anyone, these pictures were never made to be “silent.” Each one had its own film score, originally performed live by movie-palace orchestras.

When the “silent” era ended with the advent of synchronized soundtracks, those scores were packed away and forgotten for more than 60 years — until Benjamin began performing them, beginning in 1986.

“We unearth and discover forgotten bits of America’s musical heritage, dust it off and present it,” said Benjamin, who formed the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra at New York’s famed Juilliard School to perform vintage scores from the Victor Talking Machine Company.

The Paragon’s mission got a boost in 1992 with a call from the chief librarian of the Washington, D.C., public library, which was moving to a new location.

“I love calls like that,” Benjamin said. In the basement of the old library lay more than two dozen dusty trunks of orchestral film scores, formerly owned by one of the district’s biggest movie palaces.

“In a Woolworth version of King Tut’s tomb were 26 trunks full of motion picture music,” Benjamin recalled. “It was almost a bottomless mine of really wonderful things,” including a wealth of comedy scores.

“The library said they would donate the material to Paragon with the proviso that we develop programs for the public,” Benjamin continues.

Sixteen years later, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra has given more than 550 performances; the group has released several recordings over the past two decades, as well as a new DVD restoring the score to the 1920 film “The Mark of Zorro,” with Douglas Fairbanks.

Having the original score is only part of the challenge of presenting films as they would have been enjoyed when they were new: Benjamin’s orchestra uses period instruments to achieve the proper sound.

“The sound timbre the instruments make has changed so much,” he explained. For instance, instead of a trumpet the Paragon uses a short-model cornet, which sounds more like a flugelhorn.

“The flutes and some of the woodwind instruments were made of wood, not of metal,” he said. “That gives them a darker sound.”

Even the group’s drum set is an original from 1910. And the performers also dress the part with clothing from the period.

“It’s very much like the Orpheum or the Rialto,” Benjamin said, naming picture palaces of days gone by.

The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra will not be hidden in an orchestra pit, but visible from about waist up so that viewers can switch their attention between the comedy onscreen and “the machinery in action as we valiantly struggle through to cue 37,” he jokes.

“We want to amuse and amaze our audience.”

For more information: Napa Valley Opera House, 226-7372, www.nvoh.org or visit www.paragonragtime.com to hear music samples.

Clown Princes

Napa Valley Opera House

Friday, Feb. 1, 8 p.m.

Tickets: $30/$15 students with ID

Box office: 226-7372

www.nvoh.org