The first time I recognised John Williams, I thought he was someone else. Two people, in fact. As a child I was one of those tragic cases who gets to know their parents’ classical CD collection back to front, and when I went to see Hook, its fantastically vivid score rung a few bells.
During the scene in which Julia Roberts’ Tinkerbell flies in through the window, knocks over the furniture and swats Robin Williams in the face with a rolled-up newspaper, my smarty-pants 10-year-old self’s ears pricked up: those surging strings and fluttering flutes in the background were from Stravinsky’s The Firebird!
How wonderful, I remember thinking, that the filmmakers had managed to find just the right pieces to match those moments from the entire historical sweep of classical music.
I share this memory not to illustrate what a ghastly little nerd I once was, but because it pinpoints one of the things about Williams’s work I treasure most: as a child, I was able to appreciate his genius before I even knew his job existed. Williams’ announcement this week that his score for the forthcoming Indiana Jones film will likely be his last heralds what will surely be the saddest retirement in cinema this year – though also, considering he turned 90 in February, one for which we should have been braced. (Brad Pitt has also announced that he’s in “the last leg” of his career, but that seems less significant.)
This is end-of-an-era stuff in a way that doesn’t apply to any other living film composer: to my generation, Williams’s music is simply what great cinema sounds like. His scores for Star Wars, the 1978 Superman, Home Alone, plus his collaborations with Steven Spielberg during the pair’s two-decade run from the mid-1970s to mid-90s made amply sure of that.
Once you’ve heard Williams’s music in context – once you’ve realised it’s telling stories just as evocatively as the images it’s accompanying – it becomes second nature to find stories in those precursor works. Listening again to The Firebird after seeing Hook, I could actually hear Tinkerbell in.
Steven Spielberg praises John Williams
George Lucas knew Williams’s music was so integral to Star Wars that he made it the very first thing we experience from that universe – even before our eyes have had time to take in the title, our ears have already been treated to that triumphant opening chord.
But the DNA of Williams’ Star Wars score goes far beyond cinema itself. Remember the heart-attack ostinato that accompanies the early Star
Destroyer flyover? Have a listen to the closing minute of Mars, from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. As for the heat-haze of woodwind that accompanies shots of the Tatooine desert? There’s Stravinsky again.
There’s also Bach in Jurassic Park; Strauss in Superman; Chopin and Wagner – so much Wagner – in The Empire Strikes Back. None of this means Williams has spent the last 50 years coasting on glorified mix tapes, though. Every great composer reworks his forebears’ ideas. The sheer range of Williams’s influences, often within a single piece, it shows his extraordinary command of the symphonic palette.
Either consciously or by instinct, he marshals centuries of musical ideas – including (in the case of Stravinsky) one so raspingly avant-garde it provoked an actual riot at their premiere – into a form that’s not just accessible but spiritually transporting for listeners of all ages. Williams hasn’t just brought great music to cinema: for so many of us, he brought great cinema to music.
