Gladiator Live’s music comes with a backstory
Film score with debt to Holst triggered copyright infringement lawsuit
Gladiator Live: This is the title given the screenings next weekend of the Ridley Scott sandal epic of 2000 in Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts. There will be no actual matches or maulings on stage, but there will be an orchestra of 82 with chorus and female soloist performing the lavish Academy Award-nominated music under the baton of Justine Freer while the movie unfolds in HD.
The event is listed under the “classical” rubric of the Montréal en lumière festival. After sampling excerpts of Hans Zimmer’s score, which employs electronic pulses and portentous vocalize, I wonder about this classification.
There will be ample evidence of classical influence, however, and possibly more than influence. Listen to the encroaching lower brass and jabbing trumpets in the sequence titled The Battle, and you will be put in mind of Mars, the Bringer of War from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Failing to hear a similarity at 1:40 of Barbarian Horde is even more difficult. At 2:55 of this sequence, when the Mars rhythm breaks out in its naked splendour, the task becomes impossible.
Surely this was one of the scores Sir Simon Rattle had in mind when the conductor wrote in a booklet note to his own 2006 Berlin Philharmonic recording of The Planets: “It’s not Holst’s fault that every film composer took it as their tool box, and stole shamelessly.
“Now it’s out of copyright they don’t even bother to change the notes.”
Back to Zimmer. This German composer of more than 150 film scores (who has granted a co-composer credit for Gladiator to the Australian singer Lisa Gerrard) has not denied the influence of Holst on his handiwork. In his notes to the Gladiator soundtrack, he admits to using “the same language, the same vocabulary, if not the same syntax” as his British forebear.
Such candour might be admirable, but it cannot alter the fact that Zimmer wrote the Gladiator score before The Planets fell out of copyright in the U.K., where the legal formula stipulates the life of the composer (Holst died 1934 at 59) plus 70 years.
Thus it was possible for the Holst Foundation and an offshoot of the original publisher of The Planets to sue Zimmer for copyright infringement in 2006.
The case was initiated in the High Court of London and resolved privately according to terms not made public.
All the executive administrator of the Holst Foundation could offer in response to an email inquiry was to quote these words from the understanding: “The Claimants … have now amicably agreed that all claims of copyright infringement relating to the musical score for Gladiator have been withdrawn. The matter is now closed. The parties have no further comment.”
The logical inference is that Zimmer agreed to a settlement to avoid the embarrassment, trouble and expense of a public legal case. But without further information, an inference is all it can be.
The name of the executive administrator of the Holst Foundation is Colin Matthews, whom perceptive readers will recognize as the British composer who wrote Pluto, the Renewer in 2000. This evocative continuation of Holst’s suite manages to take a cue from the earlier composer without any shoplifting, although Matthews does retain the famous women’s chorus that ushers listeners past Neptune into what was viewed in 1918 (when The Planets had its première in London) as space beyond the solar system.
Pluto, of course, was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh and reclassified as dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. But that is another column.
A further footnote: Pluto, the Renewer was commissioned by the Hallé Orchestra, the venerable Manchester ensemble, which was led at the time by one Kent Nagano. In a 2006 communication to this writer, Matthews described the commission unambiguously as Nagano’s
idea. Indeed, the conductor also wanted an Earth movement, which Matthews felt he was unable to supply.
Back again to Zimmer and Gladiator. Holst is not the only influence on the score.
A few listeners have taken note of the double Wagnerian whammy in The Might of Rome.
There is an unmistakable evocation of the fluid opening of Das Rheingold after the threeminute mark, to which Zimmer soon adds, for good measure, the double-punch of Siegfried’s funeral march from Götterdämmerung.
I also hear Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration in the rising string figure about 8 ½ minutes into The Battle, when the bloodshed presumably subsides into calm. Here perhaps it is worth asking whether the resemblance is to Strauss or to John Williams, who himself adapted the Strauss tune quite flagrantly as the central
love theme in his score for Superman.
Zimmer and Gladiator were nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Score category in 2000. (Tan Dun’s music for Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger was victorious.) This year Zimmer is in the running again, for the score to Interstellar. Its static and monumental organ chords refer (in my view, obviously) to the celebrated introduction of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, which Stanley Kubrick used to unforgettable effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is perhaps not so much a case of derivation as tribute, since Strauss’s music is well known even to non-classical fans.
But it is clear that Zimmer (and, for that matter, his rival Williams) has derived more than a little inspiration from great orchestral repertoire. Students learn from masters.
MUSIC ONLINE
Kent Nagano and the OSM will make their fifth appearance as a live-stream offering on medici.tv, a classical website, on Wednesday.
The program in the Maison symphonique begins with the world première of Samy Moussa’s Nocturne and continues with Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”) and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Emanuel Ax in the starring role.
The concert will be available as a free archive item for three months. Go to www.medici.tv. If you want to experience the program (first given on Tuesday) in truly “live” circumstances, go to www.osm.ca.