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Review of Schindler's List (John Williams)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you're not afraid of being fundamentally moved by an
overwhelmingly emotional, artistic masterpiece, the most subtly potent
triumph in the storied career of John Williams.
Avoid it... only if the oppressive weight of the subject matter bothers you too greatly to be able to appreciate its undeniably powerful musical accompaniment.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. *****
TRACK LISTINGS:
1993, 1995, and 1998 Universal Albums:
Total Time: 64:36
(most track times on the 1993 packaging are incorrect) 2018 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 93:16
NOTES & QUOTES:
The packaging of the MCA albums includes the note below from Steven Spielberg.
The 1995 MCA album's back cover states, "Music Composted and Conducted by John Williams."
The insert of the 2018 La-La Land album contains extensive notes about the score and film.
"With dignity and compassion, John Williams has composed original and stunningly
classical music for Schindler's List in a collection of themes and
orchestral remembrances that will haunt you. The antihuman events beginning with
Kristallnacht (1938) to the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau (1944) posed a
deliberate challenge to both John and me: how to make the unimaginable factual,
and how to create not so much a motion picture but a document of those
intolerable times. The choice John Williams made was gentle simplicity. Most of our films together have required an almost operatic accompaniment, which is fitting for Indiana Jones, Close Encounters, or Jaws. Each of us had to depart from our characteristic styles and begin again. This is certainly an album to be attended with closed eyes and unsequestered hearts. Joining John in honoring the memory of the Shoah is the world renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. His and John's contribution to the musical literature of this project is significant. I want to thank them both for making Schindler's List the most deeply moving filmmaking experience of my life."
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1996-2024, Filmtracks Publications. All rights reserved.
The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Schindler's List are Copyright © 1993, 1995, 2018, MCA Records/Universal, MCA Records, Universal Hong Kong, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 9/24/96 and last updated 2/23/19. |
