4 1GT Friday August 7 2020 | the times
cover story
H
e left it late, but in
January this year
John Williams added
another achievement
to a body of work
that includes more
than 100 film scores,
dozens of symphonic
works and 52 Academy award
nominations. Just a few weeks shy
of his 88th birthday he made his
conducting debut with the Vienna
Philharmonic in the ornately gilded
Golden Hall of the Musikverein.
The concert, filmed and recorded by
Deutsche Grammophon and released
next week, was remarkable for several
reasons. According to Williams, this
venerable orchestra had never played
a note of his music before. It certainly
made up for lost time, delivering
extracts from more than a dozen of
Williams’s scores, including Star Wars,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the
Harry Potter films, Jurassic Park, ET,
Jaws and Schindler’s List.
And the Viennese musicians
weren’t the only ones venturing into
unfamiliar territory. “Although I’ve
done a lot of concert work in America,
I had never conducted publicly in
Europe before,” Williams admits,
speaking down the phone from his
Los Angeles home. “And I never
really intended to. It always seemed
a long way from California. When this
invitation came, however, I thought,
‘Well, if I’m ever to conduct a concertIn a concert hall far, far away
The composer John Williams tells Richard Morrison
about his decades-long career — including the time
he helped out a struggling LSO with ‘some sci-fi film’
Below: John Williams
and Steven Spielberg at
the premiere of The
BFG in 2016. Above:
Close Encounters of
the Third Kind (1977)
and Christopher Reeve
in Superman (1978)in Europe in this lifetime, I’d better
get on with it.’ And there’s no greater
honour than being invited to conduct
in the Musikverein.”
Was Williams aware of the history
of the hall as he walked out on to that
famous platform? After all, in his
remarks from the conductor’s podium
he referred to his soundtracks for the
Star Wars films — all nine of them
— as “a nice round number”,
a remark clearly picked up by
the Viennese audience as an
allusion to the number of
symphonies written by
Beethoven, Schubert,
Mahler and Bruckner.
“Absolutely,” he
replies. “For any
composer, to visit Vienna
is a spiritual journey. It’s as
much of a Mecca as we
musicians have. Especially
if, like me, you revere Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
Brahms, Mahler. Just the
chance to breathe the same
air as Haydn — one of the
purest, most instinctive
talents in the history
of music — was more
than I could resist.”
Which of those composers
would Williams most liked to
have met? “Oh, Beethoven of
course,” Williams says. “I still
read through his scores for the
pleasure of what I hear in myhead, and for the beauty I find in their
craftsmanship. And I think he might
have been interested in film if he’d
lived 200 years later, though he
probably would have been horrified
by having his music drowned out by
the noise of spaceships flying past.”
And how did the Vienna
Philharmonic take to Williams’s
epic film scores? “They rose to the
challenge brilliantly,” the composer
says. “To be honest, I was a bit
concerned before I got there. I know
they have this fabulous romantic
sound, and they can seem to turn on
19th-century style more genuinely
than any other orchestra — but I
had worries about the rotary valve
trumpets [a more old-fashioned
form of trumpet, still favoured in
German and Austrian orchestras].
I was concerned about so much
upper-register work being
played by trumpets without
the sort of pistons we use
in Britain and America.
I need not have worried,
though: the trumpets were
fabulous. Their pitching
and power blew me away.”
Hearing music from so
many films and decades
collected together on
one recording makes one
appreciate the protean nature
of Williams’s genius. There
is no single “Williams style”.
Yes, the swaggering imperial
marches of Star Wars and
Raiders of the Lost Ark might
be regarded as a hallmark, but
so might the spooky, bitonal
shifts of the Harry Potter
score, or the relentless
Prokofiev-like ostinatosof Jaws, or the uneasy Vaughan
Williams-like pastoralism of War
Horse, or the Yiddish melancholy
of Schindler’s List. Does Williams
recognise this aspect of his craft, the
ability to use the past 200 years of
orchestral composition in the way that
a painter might use a palette, selecting
the colours and textures appropriate to
the mood of each movie?
“Yes, that’s the essence of being
a film composer,” he says. “We are
asked to conjure all sorts of moods.
I remember in my early days being
asked to write burlesque and
vaudeville-type music for comedies
simultaneously with supplying big
romantic scores for dramas. If you are
going to write music for cinema, or at
least for more than one or two films,
you have to accept all varieties of
challenge. It goes with the territory.”
And although few people think of
Williams as an avant-garde composer,
there are many moments in his
films when he displays a remarkable
grasp of what were, at the time, very
avant-garde techniques. The nebulous
string clusters that open Close
Encounters, for instance, could have
come straight out of a score by Ligeti
or Penderecki. “Yes, it’s true,” Williams
says. “In film there’s often the need for
a composer to change gear even in the
space of a few minutes. So in Close
Encounters, yes, you get those
Penderecki-like clusters, but they are
then combined with a romantic tune,
all in the course of
a six-minute sequence.”
Does his inspiration ever dry up?
Down the phone there is a sardonic
chuckle. “There can be no such thing
as writer’s block in film composition,”
he says. “You are closer to being