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| Williams |
Schindler's List: (John Williams) Based on the
novel by Thomas Keneally and a screenplay by Steven Zaillian,
Schindler's List is the powerful World War II story of factory
owner Oskar Schindler and his evolving plight to save Jews from the
horrors of Nazi Germany, first for the purposes of the profits of his
own factory and eventually for the sake of saving as many people from
extermination as possible. Shot mostly in black and white, the film's
balance between audacious presence and passionate restraint is the
mastery of Steven Spielberg, who maintains that
Schindler's List
was his most emotionally charged professional directorial project. The
film swept the Academy Awards, among other ceremonies, for 1993, giving
Spielberg his overdue statuettes and proving that any terrible and vivid
madness, no matter how terrifying, can be elegantly portrayed in a
dignified fashion on film. The brutality of the killings conveyed on
screen occupies a place in your memory that will be challenging for any
viewer to purge. One crucial element in the success of
Schindler's
List is its application of original music despite early discussions
that the film could be serviced solely by source applications. Spielberg
inevitably turned to trusted collaborator John Williams, however. The
two were in the process of completing
Jurassic Park together,
from which the film and its score brought endless riches and popularity
throughout the year. Despite the monumental success of
Jurassic
Park that led Williams to immediately feature its suite at the end
of his conducted concert performances during 1993,
Schindler's
List would ultimately overshadow the previous score with such an
enormous memorable impact that
Jurassic Park came dangerously
close to being classified as a "forgotten" or "underrated" score a dozen
years later. It has been argued that
Schindler's List is
Williams' greatest score in his lengthy career, and while nobody with a
decent film score collection will dispute its title as Williams' best
emotionally "artistic" effort, it's really difficult to objectively
compare it to the classic horror and adventure scores for which Williams
had earned his previous Academy Awards.
Regardless of context, the music for
Schindler's
List is a force to be reckoned with, and its success on screen and
album exists in Williams' ability to precisely mirror Spielberg's own
passionate restraint in the production process. Often, this careful
approach led to the decision not to include any music at all for long
sequences in the film. For the relatively short score, the maestro was
forced to write its major cues while on vacation away from his Los
Angeles area home due to the director's pressing of the release date
forward by six weeks. He later admitted that being in a rented home with
a beautiful view inspired him during his process of writing the lovely
themes for this score. To simply describe the technical elements of the
Schindler's List score would not do justice to its effectiveness
as an overall product. So much of what makes the score a gripping
emotional enticement is intangible, stemming often from significant
influences in its heartfelt performances. Much credit needs to be
awarded to Williams, however, for keeping it simple. The complex layers
of frenetic activity that collectors had begun to hear in Williams'
writing in the early 1990's, including
Jurassic Park fresh in
memory, is completely absent from
Schindler's List. Instead, like
Spielberg, Williams approaches the horrors on screen with a beauty so
primordial that the score is dripping with romantic heartbreak at each
of its harmonic turns. Williams creates three themes to accomplish this
addictive loveliness, two of which expanded upon with enough attention
to merit concert performances. The primary theme is the unparalleled
success story, meandering about an octave as smoothly and gracefully as
any in modern history. Each lush progression of the main theme, famous
for its teasingly near-octave alterations, takes advantage of
heart-wrenchingly simple harmonic progressions, ironically combining to
form a theme that, despite these very basic movements, is a unique and
lasting memory for many listeners. A secondary theme is introduced in
"Remembrances," an identity written first by Williams for the picture
and meant to commemorate the Holocaust from a modern perspective. While
the primary theme was later devised as a companion for the tragedy of
the events as they unfolded, the "Remembrances" theme is more robust
because its performances often muster a fuller ensemble.
Structurally, the two themes of
Schindler's List
contain many of the same chord progressions, allowing them to interact
easily in counterpoint, an ability that Williams unfortunately uses
sparingly in the score despite the phenomenal beauty that results when
he does so. Both of these themes receive multiple concert arrangements
on the albums for
Schindler's List, including a lengthy
back-to-back presentation at the end. A third, less heralded theme is
announced in "Jewish Town," and it serves as a procession piece for
Schindler's factory workers. It's the working class theme, set to a
churning bass rhythm and replacing the elegance of the other two themes
with a mechanical sense of movement through the same lens. This rhythmic
presence later informs the slowly accelerating and intensifying
"Schindler's Workforce." As with any score for which simplistic beauty
is the key,
Schindler's List relies upon the careful choice of
instrumentation and the solo performances in front of the ensemble. This
score united Williams with famed violist Itzhak Perlman, and it was the
pleasure and success of this collaboration that would lead Williams and
other prominent composers to seek the services of similar top-flight
soloists for their film scores thereafter. Many people credit Perlman's
performances for making
Schindler's List what it is, and while
Perlman does have a dramatic impact on the score, to limit its
attractiveness to his performances alone would be a disservice to the
plethora of other intriguing and integral performances in the score. The
airtime for Perlman is actually quite minimal; he performs on less than
half of the major cues featured on the original album, with other
soloists, a choir, or the entire ensemble replacing him in other cues.
When he does perform, the sincerity of his street-corner style of lament
cannot be questioned, especially when moving to the high ranges of the
instrument over the Boston Symphony Orchestra's musicians. While the
violin, a historically accurate representative of the Jewish plight, is
offered with sparse context at the outset, many of
Schindler's
List's most poignant cues include the violin as an accent to the
flawless whole of the ensemble. That group flourishes with the layered
strings of the "Remembrances" theme, taking the lush romanticism of the
end titles of
Born on the Fourth of July and slowing them to a
melodramatic crawl.
Equally effective in
Schindler's List is
Williams' alternation of his soloists with the ensemble in secondary
positions; Perlman rounds out "I Could Have Done More" and "Give Me Your
Names" as a counterpoint agent. Another noteworthy set of solo
performances is delivered by a recorder, and fans of Williams'
Harry
Potter scores will recall Richard Harvey's fantastic solo
integration into the third entry in that franchise. In
Schindler's
List, the recorder performs all three themes throughout the score,
carrying the main one at the end of "Immolation" and the "Remembrances"
theme in "Stolen Memories." In both these cues, Williams also employs a
choral element. The former cue offers the only outward tragic horror
chant by the chorus, briefly providing layered adult singers that
suggest the later
Amistad, while the latter cue presents the
chorus as a background contributor in much the same fashion as the
fantasy theme in
Jurassic Park. Williams' own piano solos grace
the majority of "Theme From Schindler's List (Reprise)" before a somber
conclusion is afforded to strings. If there exists any disappointment
with this score, it resides in the fact that Williams rarely layers his
soloists over the full depth of either the Boston or Los Angeles
ensembles he employed for the symphonic passages; the composer's piano
solos, for instance, could have been enhanced even further by elegant
low string accompaniment. Despite the nobility of the title character's
action, there is very little outwardly heroic touch in
Schindler's
List. Only in "Making the List" does Williams shift the attitude of
music towards defiance, both through the use of brass and by instructing
the violin and flute soloists to emphasize the main theme with more
force. The darkness of the topic prevails in only a few cues, including
its inherent hints in the "workforce" theme. The mechanical thematic
battle between string and woodwind in "Schindler's Workforce" plays over
a percussive and ethnic rhythm of sharp, muted intensity. As the only
outwardly malevolent cue on album, "Auschwitz-Birkenau" presents Perlman
in his only dissonant moments, with the cue serving as the sole
detraction from the hypnotic flow of the album's listening experience.
Two traditional Jewish songs were recorded with choirs in Tel-Aviv,
Israel, and both are short enough to fit into Williams' surrounding
score; "Nacht Aktion" foreshadows much of the same faint, droning
baseline and style heard later in
Munich, one of the surprisingly
few connections between the related soundtracks.
Overall, even Williams himself would find himself hard
pressed to succeed to the level of
Schindler's List again. In all
of his collaborations with solo artists thereafter, including Perlman's
performances in
Memoirs of a Geisha, the result was never as
overwhelmingly effective. The use of the violin in
Schindler's
List, so symbolic in its historical prevalence to the topic, as well
as the evocative performances of Perlman and the ensemble, were a
formula of perfect timing and execution. The original album was arranged
well, and the solo performances (and the recorder in particular) are
mixed with great care. Unfortunately, the original mastering of the
album suffered from the inclusion of studio noise, including
distractingly creaking chairs at 1:35 in "Immolation" and at 1:25 in
"Remembrances." The packaging of the original MCA album is also
incorrect in its credit notation as well as in its listing of track
times. A 24K gold-plated version of MCA's album with identical contents
was released in 1995, enhancing the sound quality but leaving the
artifacts in place. In 2018, La-La Land Records re-issued this same
presentation and mastering as the first CD in a 2-CD set that
unfortunately allows the studio noise to persist. (It is possible the
label was not allowed to alter the contents of that first CD.) The
second CD includes under 29 minutes of additional, previously unreleased
material, a surprisingly low amount of music given that 3-CD bootlegs of
Schindler's List's recording sessions have long circulated. These
additional tracks include the film versions of "Schindler's Workforce"
and "I Could Have Done More," the first cue adapting the lengthy
crescendo of the music's rhythm for an additional three minutes,
including another lovely recorder passage. A harp is the soloist of
choice for "Remembrances (Alternate)," an otherwise flowing ensemble
performance. The duo of "Reflections" and "The Perlman Family" are
gorgeous but short expressions of the two primary themes, the latter
offering the acoustic guitar once again. The "Theme for Recorder" track
is precisely that: the main theme for only a lonely recorder and no
accompaniment. Only in "I Could Have Done More" on the second CD does
the solo violin return, and its merging with the ensemble is sublime.
With only 10 to 15 minutes of truly engaging new material on the 2018
set, the original remastering on the 1995 product may suffice for many
listeners, especially with the studio noise not corrected by La-La Land.
No matter the albums' minor flaws, however, the
Schindler's List
score is a nearly unparalleled artistic masterpiece, the most subtly
potent triumph in the storied career of John Williams.
***** @Amazon.com: CD or
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