Where would movies be without music? Sure, images, story and dialogue are all important. But cinematic soundtracks provide that human connection – the key to character motivation and emotional truth. Of course, many directors employ talented composers to write dedicated scores for their films, and we can all be thankful for such cinematic luminaries as Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams and Hans Zimmer. But directors often make use of existing music, too, from jukebox pop to esoteric jazz. And when visionary film makers choose a piece of classical music as the soundtrack for their scene, the result is often mesmerising.
So, we at BBC Music Magazine have put our heads together to come up with 12 unforgettable uses of classical music in film. To narrow the field, we’ve eliminated movies about classical music – if Amadeus, Hilary and Jackie or Maestro were eligible, we’d exhaust the list describing just the opening credits. Instead, we’ve chosen films exploring non-musical subjects – but where a piece of classical music has elevated the story to unforgettable emotional heights. So, stand by, everyone. Lights, camera, action… and music!
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra
Right from its opening notes (that bone-rattling fanfare of timpani, brass and organ), Richard Strauss’s tone poem becomes far more than a backdrop to Kubrick’s visionary cosmic journey through time. Though the film also uses music by Ligeti, Khachaturian and Johann Strauss II, it’s Also sprach Zarathustra that becomes its musical spine, a sonic metaphor for evolution, transformation and the unknowable grandeur of the cosmos. That ascending three-note motif captures the awe and terror of humanity’s first steps – whether taken by an ape wielding a bone or an astronaut approaching the monolith.
In the context of the film, Zarathustra evokes a sense of the sublime: man is dwarfed by forces beyond his comprehension, yet driven ever forward by curiosity and invention. Strauss’s original inspiration – Nietzsche’s philosophical novel – echoes subtly through the film’s themes of human potential and transcendence. But in Kubrick’s hands, the music becomes almost religious in effect, a window into the mysteries of time, space and consciousness. SW
Brief Encounter (1945) – Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2
David Lean’s 1945 masterpiece tells of a passionate love affair, never realised. Yet this heartfelt British romance, brought to life by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard from a script by Noël Coward, would be nothing without the film’s frequent use of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto – conveying all the emotion that the two married leads repress beneath their stiff upper lips. In their parting scene – cruelly interrupted by a busy-body acquaintance – the concerto’s Adagio sostenuto plays as they glumly sit in a station tearoom, knowing they will probably never see each other again. Later, as Johnson’s Laura returns home to her husband Fred, he notices her unhappiness and asks if he can help. ‘You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me,’ he says as she weeps in his arms, accompanied by the theme from the Allegro scherzando. Tissues ready… CS
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Apocalypse Now (1979) – Wagner ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre
‘Big Duke Six to Eagle Thrust, put on psy war op. Make it loud,’ instructs Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. ‘This is a Romeo Foxtrot. Shall we dance?’ And on goes the tape of Georg Solti conducting ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre as Kilgore and his fleet of Bell UH-1 Iroquois ‘Huey’ helicopters fly towards the mouth of the Nùng river – to the sound of Wagner played through airborne loudspeakers, a Viet Cong-held village is reduced to smithereens.
Kilgore’s Valkyrian assault takes place to enable Captain Benjamin L Willard (Martin Sheen) to head up the Nùng and track down US Army Special Forces Colonel Walter Kurtz who, in the midst of the Vietnam War, has gone rogue in the jungle. A combination of the ultra-cool, shades-wearing Robert Duvall as Kilgore and Wagner’s stirring music have given the scene iconic status, though it is not entirely a glorification of American airpower on director Francis Ford Coppola’s part – a shot of schoolchildren fleeing for cover as the choppers approach reminds us of the human cost. JP
Platoon (1986) – Barber Adagio for Strings
In slow motion, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) falls to his knees, arms raised up as he is gunned down from behind by Viet Cong soldiers. His US Army comrades can do nothing but watch in horror, powerless in their helicopter as they flee the scene, having barely escaped with their own lives. Barber’s already emotionally wrought Adagio drenches this devastating scene in swathes of unbearable despair. Director Oliver Stone had used the piece as temporary score, a guide track for the film’s composer Georges Delerue. The Frenchman created his own heart-wrenching music, some of which was very much inspired by the Barber. Stone ultimately found himself wedded to Barber’s original for this legendary moment, though, and asked Delerue, who conducted the Vancouver Symphony for the original soundtrack recording, to adapt it. MB
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The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – Mozart ‘Sull’aria ... che soave zeffiretto’ from The Marriage of Figaro
Five years into a life sentence at Shawshank State Prison for murders he didn’t commit, banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is browsing through a box of LPs in the prison library. He lifts out Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, takes one of the discs from its sleeve and blows the dust off it. With the guard on the toilet, Dufresne sees his chance – locking the doors, he puts the ‘Sull’aria’ duet on the turntable and then, lifting a microphone towards the record player, broadcasts it over the prison public address system.
Around the prison, inmates instantly stop, stand still and listen. ‘I have no idea to this day what those Italian ladies were singing about,’ reflects Dufresne’s friend Red (Morgan Freeman). ‘Those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream.’ In fact, those two ‘Italian ladies’ are the Austrian Gundula Janowitz and Swiss Edith Mathis, in a recording from 1968… over ten years after that scene takes place. We’ll not quibble, however, as the moment is uniquely beautiful. JP
Death in Venice (1971) – Mahler Symphony No. 5 – Adagietto
The tender, yearning Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is no mere musical backdrop here. More, it becomes a kind of internal monologue for Dirk Bogarde’s ageing composer, Gustav von Aschenbach, whose slow unravelling plays out in silence and longing glances. Mahler wrote his Adagietto as a love letter to Alma, but in director Visconti’s hands it becomes a reflection on the transience of beauty – and a lament for Aschenbach, a man haunted by unfulfilled desire.
Its aching, slow unfolding perfectly mirrors the film’s sun-drenched melancholy and the oppressive stillness of Venice in decline. At the core of Death in Venice is a tension between aesthetic purity and earthly passion: Aschenbach is cultivated and detached, which he struggles to reconcile with his longing for the angelic youth Tadzio. Rarely has a piece so hauntingly captured decadence, repression and yearning at the heart of a character’s soul. SW
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The Shining (1980) – Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta – Adagio
‘There ain’t nothin’ in Room 237, so stay out!’ Good advice from the mysterious Mr Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) for young Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd), who is left to his own devices at the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s unnerving horror based on Stephen King’s novel. Danny rides his trike around the empty corridors to the sound of the brilliantly creepy third-movement Adagio of Bartók’s work; the rolling timpani underlines our own sense of unease, while the high-pitched, whining strings build as the little boy stops at the door of Room 237 and can’t help but try the handle. The low angle Steadicam follows him through the endless maze of hallways, the music aiding our discomfort – each corner he rounds potentially revealing something we don’t want to see. And then with a crash of the gong, he rounds on twin girls: ‘Hello Danny. Come and play with us…’ MB
Manhattan (1979) – Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue
From Rhapsody in Blue’s unmistakable clarinet glissando to its exuberant, jazz-inflected crescendos, Gershwin’s music becomes not just an accompaniment to Woody Allen’s Manhattan but a character in itself – an embodiment of the film’s loving vision of New York. And few pieces of music have ever been as indelibly associated with a single cinematic image as the Rhapsody is with the movie’s sweeping, black-and-white opening montage. Composed in 1924, Rhapsody in Blue blends classical sophistication with the swagger of America’s Jazz Age. And this makes it the perfect musical metaphor for Allen’s Manhattan: cultured yet chaotic, cerebral yet passionately alive. As such, it becomes a sort of emotional narrator, expressing what Allen’s characters often cannot. SW
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The King’s Speech (2010) – Beethoven Symphony No. 7 – Allegretto
When Prince Albert (Colin Firth) turns to speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) for help with his stammer, Logue advises the future George VI to try reading Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech while listening to the overture from the Marriage of Figaro through headphones. ‘Bertie’ is sceptical, but listening back to the results prompts a change of mind. So Mozart gets a star role, but it is Beethoven who enjoys the limelight as this 2010 historical drama reaches its climax.
When, five years on, King George has to address the British people over the airwaves as World War II looms, the second movement of the Seventh Symphony accompanies him – this time, the king can’t hear the music, but the viewers can. Germany’s finest for such a moment? Not the most obvious choice, perhaps, but as a match for the slow, steady but growingly confident nature of the once-faltering monarch’s speech, the music works a treat. JP
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) – Beethoven ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto No. 5 – Adagio un poco mosso
Director Peter Weir’s taut period mystery, focusing on the disappearance of several students from an elite girls’ boarding school during a Valentine’s Day outing in 1900, plays on the ancient eeriness of the Australian landscape. Original music by Bruce Smeaton and traditional Romanian panpipe provides much of the spooky soundtrack, but interspersed in fragmentary form, before being revealed in full as the credits roll, is the Adagio un poco mosso from Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto, lending much-needed humanity to this terrifying – and unsolved – tale. Did the girls come to earthly harm, or was there something much colder and supernatural at play? As the ‘Emperor’ plays in the final minutes, a narrator intones: ‘To this day, their disappearance remains a mystery’. Chilling… and beautiful. CS
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Die Hard (1988) – Beethoven Symphony No. 9 – Finale, ‘Ode to Joy’
It’s Christmas Eve at Nakatomi Plaza and the office party is in full swing. Perfect timing for a terrorist heist, then, and even better timing for grizzled New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) to be visiting his estranged wife at her place of work. Alan Rickman’s cartoonish Hans Gruber is the German villain of the piece, so of course he’s scored with a bit of Beethoven. Michael Kamen created one of cinema’s great action scores for director John McTiernan’s classic.
He uses the most famous bit of Ludwig’s Ninth Symphony for a pivotal moment, building it slowly from solo cellos as the power is cut and Gruber’s flunkies rejoice as the electromagnetic seal on the building’s complex vault releases. Gruber gleefully looks on as the door opens and the Hollywood Studio Symphony steps up a gear, the Beethoven paused briefly for a festive bell or two – this is, after all, a Christmas movie. MB
Melancholia (2011) – Wagner Tristan und Isolde – Prelude
If the world is about to end, best go out in a blaze of Wagnerian glory. That Lars von Trier’s most humane, even sentimental, film depicts the destruction of Earth is a fitting irony for this intensely nihilistic director. The premise? The rogue planet Melancholia is on a relentless path to a possible collision with Earth, a mirror for the clinical depression of central character Justine (Kirsten Dunst). But the key to much of the film’s tragedy is its incessant, even obsessive, use of the Prelude from Tristan und Isolde, a musical signal not only for Justine’s inner anguish, but for her tempestuous relationship with her upstanding, apparently well-adjusted sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). As it becomes apparent that (spoiler alert) the collision will happen, the soundtrack is dialled up and up, to almost ear-splitting volume… until the inevitable. CS
Words by Michael Beek, Jeremy Pound, Charlotte Smith and Steve Wright
