Overcome with emotion upon seeing a cut of Schindler’s List, which Steven Spielberg had asked him to score, John Williams said, “I think you need a better composer than I am for this film.” “I know,” Spielberg replied, “but they’re all dead.”1 Williams may be the most decorated composer in history—only Walt Disney has more Oscar nominations—but the proof that he’s one of the greatest, not only of our time but any, is directly audible in his instantly recognizable musical voice. The magic, majesty, and lyricism of that voice are beautifully captured in this new live recording of Williams conducting the Berlin Philharmonic: John Williams: The Berlin Concert. No single recording could exhaustively capture even just the highlights of Williams’s career, spanning six decades, but Deutsche Grammophon’s latest culls a varied set of gems, from the uplifting Olympic theme, to the sinister sounds of Close Encounters, to anthems from the beloved Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars franchises.

One shudders to think this voice of American cinema nearly opted for a career not in composition, but in performance, especially given that he was practically groomed to create the sorts of epics that he has. “I became fascinated and had a love affair with orchestra itself, as an instrument to deliver music, when I was very, very young,” he recalled. His father was a professional musician who worked for the CBS orchestra in New York City. “His friends were all musicians in the orchestra, so I thought that when you grew up, you became a musician. That’s the only kind of adult that I knew.” Williams would attend his father’s radio rehearsals and soon became enamored of the orchestra as a tool for conveying powerful emotions, especially as accompaniment to film. “I loved the action movies,” he said, “and I loved the swashbuckling and sword fighting, because I always thought, Oh, that’s the most exciting music.”2

In 1951, he joined the Air Force and its band, playing piano and brass and also doing some conducting and arranging. After his discharge in 1956, he attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music, studying under famed Ukrainian pedagogue Rosina Lhévinne in preparation for a career as a concert pianist. But after seeing performances by John Browning and Van Cliburn, he decided against it, lucky for us. He moved to Los Angeles and began working as a studio musician, soon landing work with legends whose film scores he grew up listening to, including Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. “I knew these men from early childhood and was so fortunate to be introduced to them and to be able to play for them for a number of years on their scores.”3

He was soon helping to orchestrate these scores and, before long, was composing his own. When Fiddler on the Roof was taken from the stage to the screen, Williams was hired to score the new sections created for the film version. This garnered him his first Oscar and the attention of a budding director, Steven Spielberg. Williams’s score for Sugarland Express kicked off their nearly fifty-year relationship, and he gained fame with their next collaboration, Jaws, the two-note motive of which has become the universal symbol for all things deadly.

Spielberg recommended Williams to another young director, George Lucas, in need of a composer for his in-progress space epic, Star Wars. Featuring the iconic “Main Title” theme, the “Princess Leia” theme, and “Cantina Band,” Williams’s score would go on to become the best-selling soundtrack of all time, laying the groundwork for eight more films developing the core story line, all scored by Williams. Indeed, Star Wars minus John Williams would not be Star Wars. As Lucas put it, “Star Wars was meant to be a simple hero’s journey, a fantasy for young people. And then John wrote the music, and he raised it to a level of art, popular art that would stand the test of time.”4

These films became the vehicle for Williams’s epic romanticism, harkening back to the works not only of 20th-century film composers Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, but to their influences, too: especially Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Gustav Holst, and Richard Wagner. Wagner, in particular, reconceived opera and thereby fundamentally changed music, popularizing the use of leitmotif (or theme songs) that has become indispensable to film music. “I think the leitmotivic practice, which is to say the technique of some kind of melodic identification with a character or a place, is basically how film music works,” said Williams.5 He once quipped, “Wagner would have had his own studio out there in Burbank, with a huge water tank with a ‘W’ on it.”6 Williams has helped bring to fuller fruition Wagner’s conception of the “total work of art,” an indivisible integration of music, ideas, and action that the German called “music drama.”

This is perhaps most evident in the closing sequence of E.T. The composer’s job, of course, is to serve the film, and that typically means modifying what he’s written as needed to whatever director’s cut he’s been handed. But when Spielberg saw Williams struggling to fit his dramatic close into the cut, he told Williams to record the music as written, that he would recut the film to fit it. “When I look at the scene now, there’s something sort of operatic about the way the orchestra was playing it,” said Williams. “They were left free to go, . . . and I think it gave some lift to the final scene.”7

That music would win Williams his fourth Oscar, and the Berlin Philharmonic’s rendition of its “Flying Theme” is particularly lovely. Williams, who conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993, made his German debut at this October 2021 concert with the Berlin Philharmonic—in his words, “perhaps the world’s greatest orchestra.”8 The recording was released four days before—and topped German charts the week of—Williams’s ninetieth birthday, also marking the Berlin Philharmonic’s first appearance at number one on Germany’s Album Chart.9 It’s a fabulous follow-up to his earlier concert series with the Vienna Philharmonic. The recording of that stint, John Williams in Vienna, was the best-selling classical album of 2020.

These European additions to the Williams catalog are warmer, if a bit less vivid than their American counterparts, giving listeners a more lifelike experience of the gentle sonic blending that happens within the concert hall. Compare, for instance, the recording of “Elegy for Cello and Orchestra” by the Recording Arts Orchestra of Los Angeles and Yo-Yo Ma with that of The Berlin Concert. The LA recording has airier treble and thicker bass, sounding more cinematic and less classical. But the pleasing patina lent by some of Europe’s most renowned halls is particularly welcome on slower, less articulated numbers, such as “Marion’s Theme,” and on soaring melodies, as in E.T.’s “Flying Theme.”

The success of these albums evidences what French conductor Stéphane Denève once said in an interview with Williams: “You saved the symphony orchestra, [kept it] present in the popular culture.”10 Williams has impacted more facets of that culture than most any other single artist. His music graces not only the most memorable movies in history, but also theme park rides, sporting events, newscasts, and more. “That damn music follows me everywhere,” joked Harrison Ford. “It was playing in the operating room when I went in for my colonoscopy.” But, he added, “I’m not complaining. To play a character graced by John’s music is, of course, a real gift.”11 That’s in part because Williams’s music is virtually unforgettable. A few bars, sometimes just a few notes, can conjure characters, dialogue, and whole worlds that the listener may not have thought about in years.

Williams’s masterful ability to find just the right notes—to evoke just the right mood—is the result of his interminable drive to improve, even now, at the age of ninety. He says without affectation, “Whatever we do, it can always be better.”12 J. J. Abrams said that it’s as if Williams has never read his own résumé.13 He’s never rested on what he’s accomplished. When Williams was named the first composer honoree of the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award in 2016, his response to his colleagues’ heartfelt praise was, “Tomorrow morning, when I’m back at work, I will try to deserve all of this.” Of course, he already has. As news anchor Tavis Smiley told Williams, “You are the soundtrack of our lives.”14 Or, as Spielberg put it:

Without John Williams, bikes don’t fly and neither do brooms in Quidditch matches nor do men in red capes. There is no Force. Dinosaurs do not walk the earth. We do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe. John, you breathe belief into every film we have made. You take our movies, many of them about our most impossible dreams, and through your musical genius, you make them real, and everlasting for billions and billions of people.15

People will never stop thirsting for heroism, and for a sense, as Ayn Rand put it, “of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead.”16 Those who seek it can find it in The Berlin Concert, yet another fantastic record of an American treasure whose uplifted view of man’s potential is strewn across galaxies, our own and those he’s helped to create.

John Williams is an American treasure whose uplifted view of man’s potential is strewn across galaxies, our own and those he’s helped to create.
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Endnotes

1. “John Williams accepts the 44th AFI Life Achievement Award,” American Film Institute, YouTube, August 8, 2016, https://youtu.be/JTmcmxl2OpQ.

2. “John Williams and Gustavo Dudamel,” CMajorEntertainment, YouTube, April 30, 2015, https://youtu.be/GNbMpDo4kmw.

3. “John Williams and Gustavo Dudamel.”

4. “George Lucas Toasts John Williams,” American Film Institute, YouTube, August 5, 2016, https://youtu.be/wMWzkYgfiUA.

5. “BBC Radio Documentary: John Williams,” weymouthladuk, YouTube, December 23, 2019, https://youtu.be/PwanBDlS9ag.

6. “John Williams Accepts the 44th AFI Life Achievement Award.”

7. “John Williams and Gustavo Dudamel.”

8. “John Williams & Berliner Philharmoniker—The Berlin Concert,” Deutsche Grammophon (accessed May 5, 2021), https://www.dg-premium.com/dg_stage_video/john-williams-the-berlin-concert/.

9. Sharon Kelly, “John Williams Tops German Charts at 90 with ‘the Berlin Concert,’” UDiscoverMusic, February 12, 2022, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-news/john-williams-tops-german-charts-with-berlin-concert/.

10. “John Williams · Stéphane Denève/the Interview,” Stéphan Aubé, YouTube, January 21, 2022, https://youtu.be/L_vpRcQUP7I.

11. “Harrison Ford on the ‘Indiana Jones’ Theme Song, Praises John Williams,” American Film Institute, YouTube, May 3, 2020, https://youtu.be/nVt-QAWjPcY.

12. “Full John Williams Interview for Star Wars VII Music,” GundamFan89, YouTube, May 16, 2016, https://youtu.be/fIfWfengo3E.

13. “J. J. Abrams celebrates John Williams,” American Film Institute, YouTube, August 5, 2016, https://youtu.be/su3oJoKQxQs.

14. “Full John Williams Interview for Star Wars VII Music.”

15. “Steven Spielberg Praises John Williams,” American Film Institute, YouTube, August 8, 2016, https://youtu.be/tJY5l6I253c.

16. Ayn Rand, “Introduction,” The Fountainhead, centennial edition (New York: Penguin, 2005), xiii.

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