Maurice Jarre
Without Maurice Jarre, who died last week at 84, who would David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia be? Peter O’Toole’s deliquescent eyes, shimmering in the desert light, would have been little more than a silent mirage. Jarre’s 1962 film score, which won an Academy Award, is a reminder that in the movies there is no character and no landscape unless there is a musical soundscape too.
Maurice Jarre gave many of us a notion of the scale on which our personal life theme music might be written. People often notice the nostalgic quality of scent, the way a familiar smell can instantly carry you backward in time. The same is true of music.
A few bars of the theme from “The Longest Day” — astonishingly upright and Anglo-American for a French composer — and I am somewhere back in 1962, when I first saw the movie — and even further back in 1945. I understood, of course, that there was no harmony in the real sounds of D-Day. But Jarre’s score made the horrors and the heroism of that day palpably real for me.
To me, the indelible sign of Jarre’s power is the score for “Doctor Zhivago,” which was released in December 1965. Let me put my 1965 in perspective. The Beatles album “Help” came out in August, and “Rubber Soul” came out a couple of weeks before “Zhivago….”