The Berliner Philharmoniker play film music
As Hans Christian Andersen once said, “Where words fail, music speaks”, so it is no surprise that even silent films were accompanied by music. Later, greats such as Kurt Weill, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich wrote music whose fame even outlasted that of the films they were composed for. Today, sophisticated soundtracks such as those by Hollywood legend John Williams are indispensable for stirring up emotions in cinema – and have become an art form in their own right. Our playlist features soundtracks that tell their stories without images, performed by the Philharmoniker with Kirill Petrenko, John Williams and others.
Opera composers such as Richard Wagner skilfully exploited the fact that they could evoke emotions through music without having to concretise them in the sung text or the actions of the actors. A short leitmotif, for example, can hint at danger through its sequence of notes alone, which only manifests itself much later on stage. Film music composers have perfected this technique – Bernard Herrmann’s creepy music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, for example, can make you shudder even though the scene on the screen is still completely harmless.
Whether yearning for love, heroism, sadness, hostility or comedy – the repertoire of moods in film music is almost limitless. It is often not at all obvious how exactly an atmosphere is shaped by sound. In his soundtrack to Harry Potter, for example, John Williams succeeds in making the magic of the wizard’s story audible in an astonishing way: the bell-like sound of the celesta is both enchantingly beautiful and mysterious. Together with glockenspiel, harp and high strings, it creates shimmering cascades of sound that glitter like fairy dust between the – harmonically charmingly “bewitched” – (wing) beats of the melody of Hedwig’s Theme. However, as with any good magic trick, it is advisable not to look too closely at the magician’s sleight of hand when it comes to film music, and instead, just let yourself be carried away by the magnificent effects.
