Lawrence of Arabia - Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico

By Maurice Jarre

Lawrence of Arabia 's score has the haunting, lilting rhythm of a triumphant elegy. It's as powerful as Bolero without one tenth of the maniacal effort. In its full-length, uncut version, the film opens with an extended overture as compelling as any interlude from a classical symphony. The music suggests to the audience that what one is about to see must also be translated into an auditory argument, and that the visual narrative is only a metaphor for the self-betrayal of a hero who chose his fate, and regretted that choice for the remaining two decades of his life.

Jarre's score is what I carried in my head as I went to the local library and asked for a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and it was Jarre's assemblage of percussion, strings, wind instruments and odd, ethereal chimes that formed a chorus in my head to preface the opening sentence of Chapter 1: "Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances..." Lawrence's choice of the first noun in his formal narrative is not an accident, and the music of the film argues, in a far more convincing manner than the visuals, that his valiant subservience to the freedom of another cost him more than simply the power to control his own destiny; he violated his own ideals, and consequently imposed a penance on himself far exceeding his culpability.

I am not trained in music, and perhaps if I had found myself at a dinner party with Virgil Thomson a quarter-century ago, I would have found myself admitting that I could bring nothing more to an appreciation of Jarre's music than the same untutored response that I bring to the work of Debussy, Ravel, Brahms, and Mendelssohn. Whether Jarre's composition can hold its own with other masterpieces of the classical music canon is not for me to say. I am willing to venture, however, that the music contains the unresolved mystery of Lawrence's multitudinous ambiguities: a soldier who loathed war, a writer whose imagination veered between the literal and the abstract with too little attention to what comes between, and a man whose friendship and loyal companionship appears to have been capable of crossing enormous boundaries of class and education, yet who was profoundly lonely.

Bill Mohr

Speechless Spring 2007
Copyright © 2007


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[davimerc]

Thank you...

[kingcaesar5]

this is my inspirational music. I recommend you use this anytime you can't think clearly.