The principle underlying film music is simple: Make the music such an integral part of each scene that it contributes emotional dimension without being noticed. The last part is more important than one might think.
If music distracts from a scene by outweighing it emotionally or being too interesting in and of itself, it can do more harm than good. Leonard Bernstein’s score to “On the Waterfront” (1954) comes dangerously close to this in the famous taxi scene where Marlon Brando utters the famous line, “I could’ve been a contender.” Luckily, Brando’s presence was so compelling that it balanced Bernstein’s symphonically complex music.
Only one Hollywood film score, in my estimation (not including musicals, of course, where music is expected to be front and center), manages to be a full partner with the script, the direction, and the cast in not only underlining the movie’s intellectual and emotional content, but in helping to create it, and even to alter what otherwise might have been the screenwriter’s intent: John Barry’s deeply powerful music for 1968’s “The Lion in Winter.”
One cannot help but notice Barry’s intensity, and, in this case, that’s a good thing. The music doesn’t distract; it comments on the script with music’s uncanny ability to say something without words.
Royalty as Family
To understand the music, we need to outline the script by James Goldman, adapted from his play:
King Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, meet for Christmas at Chinon in France, which is part of Henry’s kingdom. Henry usually keeps Eleanor “dungeoned up” for fear the potential power she wields could be used to overthrow him, but has decided to have her join him and their three sons for the Christmas holiday. The main bone of their contention, masking a deeper, interrelational agony, is which of the sons will succeed Henry as king: Richard, Geoffrey, or John. (As history played out, both Eleanor’s favorite, Richard, and Henry’s favorite, John, would become kings in turn. Only Geoffrey was left uncrowned.)
The story is an emotional tug-of-war between Henry and Eleanor over succession and, more generally, the demands of marriage and of royal governance. These two are, however unlikely it seems to us now, related. Kings and queens ruled as emblems of family; their subjects saw in them the elevated embodiments of their own lives and concerns. So, when Goldman’s characters fight and make up and fight again, it is everyone doing so. And when their fighting is absorbed beneath a divine message of hope, everyone’s is.
This sort of thing unites the universes of royalty and bickering relatives, but in doing so loses the epic, historical feeling one expects from a movie about the first Plantagenet king and his famous queen. And that is where the music comes in. The genius of Barry’s answer to this somewhat jarring contrast of the regal with the sarcastic was to grasp that, while the characters shift from monarchs to mundanities, they are always epic inside. There is not a note of irony in Barry’s score, only majesty and drama of the highest order.
Choral music is prominent throughout the film. Over the opening credits, after a blast of regal brass music, we hear a darkly intoned Latin chant that translates as, “Righteous king of kings, near is the Day of the Lord, the day of wrath and vengeance.” This is modal music, apt for evoking the Middle Ages, and it will persist wherever there is conflict and despair. Woven into this are three original Christmas songs, one in each of the languages that might have been spoken at Chinon: French, English, and Latin. They are deliberately anachronistic, cast in the modern major-scale tonality that catches the ear of the listener unawares. The listener knows something is different but doesn’t know why. This is crucial to the musical meaning of the final scene.
Unexpected Hope
At film’s end, Eleanor leaves as she arrived, barging back up the river, but now without the regal music. Christmas has been a disaster. And yet, as she departs and Henry yells his boisterous goodbyes, Barry gives us the most optimistic, most hope-filled musical track we have yet heard, by far. At the core of it is, of all things, an ascending major scale: do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do! This is the joyful anachronism of the Christmas songs come round to the story’s end. After all the struggle and despair, there is glory after all, brought by Christmas and the promise of a Western world that will outgrow its medieval darkness and find a way into a brighter and sweeter future. The glory of a crown is also a stop on the way to freedom. Without Barry’s final track, we would not feel this. It is created solely by his music.
The score to “The Lion in Winter” stands alone among Barry’s output: He wrote nothing else even remotely like it. For that matter, he almost didn’t write “Lion.” Studio execs demurred at hiring the composer of music for James Bond movies (“Goldfinger,” “From Russia with Love”) and the pop-ish title tune to “Born Free” to create the atmosphere of a dark comedy (if that’s what “Lion” is) set in the 12th century.
Indeed, nothing in the composer’s background yelled “medieval drama.” Prior to writing movie music, Barry had fronted a small-time rock ‘n’ roll band in rural England. But director Anthony Harvey believed in him, and Barry felt that drawing on his childhood experience of Roman Catholic chant could produce a score evocative of the era and of the striking personalities in the script. He was spectacularly right. Barry’s music for “The Lion in Winter” won him his third Oscar (he’d won two for “Born Free,” both the song and the incidental music) and he would win two more, one each for “Out of Africa” (1985) and “Dances with Wolves” (1990), before dying in 2011, age 77.
Barry is remembered today primarily for his James Bond scores and “Out of Africa.” In “The Lion in Winter,” he achieved something that merits a closer look: the creation of a film score that not only supports dialogue and action, but becomes a part of both.
