Listening to Stanley Kubrick (43 page)

“If I Had You”

Appearance:

0:54:59–0:56:17 We hear just the end of this song as Bill enters the Sonata Café at the end of Nick’s set.

“Blame It on My Youth”

Appearance:

0:56:57–1:01:22 Nick and Bill talk in the Sonata Café

This slow instrumental accompanies a conversation between Nick and Bill. They catch up on their marriages and family, and Nick confesses that he has another gig that same evening, vaguely explaining that he plays these kinds of gigs blindfolded. Bill is intrigued. While they are talking, Nick gets a phone call telling him the password for the party. Nick writes it on a napkin, aided by Bill, who reads the name, Fidelio, that Nick has written. “What is this?” Bill asks. “It’s the name of a Beethoven opera, isn’t it?” Nick says, finally admitting it’s the password. Bill insists that Nick take him to the party, but Nick is hesitant. He explains that first of all Bill would need a costume and a mask. The scene then cuts to a taxi pulling up in front of Rainbow Fashions, Millich’s shop.

Music Ricercata: Ligeti

1:24:18–1:27:33 Bill is discovered at the masked ball and Red Cloak asks for the house password

1:29:07–1:29:34 The woman in the headdress is led away, and Bill asks what will happen to her

1:48:59–1:51:56 Bill returns to the mansion the next day only to receive a typed letter

2:01:23–2:04:38 Bill notices someone following him

2:05:42–2:06:37 Bill reads about the girl who had the overdose

2:24:04–2:27:35 Bill returns home and finds the mask from the masked ball on his pillow next to Alice

Musica Ricercata
was composed by Ligeti in the early 1950s. At that time, Ligeti was a professor at the Budapest Academy, where he taught harmony and analysis. Hungary was one of the Eastern Bloc countries, and as a composer, Ligeti’s developing style was at odds with the political climate of Stalinism. In order to maintain his reputation, Ligeti was compelled to create choral arrangements of folk songs.

The ricercar, from which Ligeti named the
Ricercata
, is a type of instrumental work dating from the sixteenth century. In the late Renaissance, the term “ricercar” was used almost interchangeably with other types of improvisatory instrumental pieces like the toccata or the prelude, but later ricercars had one trait that would become the defining characteristic of the form: imitative counterpoint. In the Baroque period, the ricercar would eventually become the fugue, a piece with strict imitative counterpoint based on a musical theme called a subject. In fact, the last movement of Ligeti’s
Musica Ricercata
features fugal treatment of the twelve-tone row. Ligeti called this movement “(Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi) Andante misurato e tranquillo.” Here Ligeti makes reference to Frescobaldi, an important and influential keyboard composer who died in 1643. The movement is not a strict fugue because it doesn’t follow all the conventions of voice leading, but there is plenty of imitative counterpoint. The term “ricercar” also refers to a seeking out, as some ricercars explored key areas or motifs.

Musica Ricercata
was born into a climate of oppression and fear. Because of the despotism of Hungary at the time,
Musica Ricercata
was an example of “the unexpected, unwanted music that mostly went into [Ligeti’s] desk drawer.”
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The work is made up of eleven pieces for solo piano (although versions of this piece have been arranged for wind quintet and for a Russian accordion called a
bayan
). For each of the pieces, Ligeti limits the number of pitches that he can use, and as the set goes on, each new piece has one more possible pitch. The very first piece in the set uses just two tones (and their octave transpositions). The second piece—the only one heard in
Eyes Wide Shut
—has three pitches. The third has four, the fourth has five pitches, and so on. At the end, the eleventh piece in the set, Ligeti uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. In the first piece of the set, “Sostenuto—Misurato—Prestissimo,” the pitch A is used almost exclusively for the entire piece. Ligeti creates interest by concentrating on rhythmic aspects and by building a large dynamic crescendo. At the end, we finally hear the other note, D. In the second piece, the one heard in the film, the main musical gesture is just a half step from E-sharp to F-sharp. While the first piece in the set seemed almost playful in its rhythmic interest (polyrhythms, gradual acceleration of tempo), the second piece seems more serious and grave. It is marked “Mesto, rigido e ceremoniale,” emphasizing both the rigidity of the music and the ceremonial mood. There are shifting meters and a concentration on using the different ranges of the piano. The first half of the piece consists of the pianist rocking between the E-sharp and the F-sharp. About halfway through the movement, after a pause, Ligeti introduces the third pitch, G. These three pitches may represent Bill’s three problems: “temptation, sin, and retribution.”
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Once the G appears, the pianist is directed to accent the new pitch and repeat it faster and faster until the pianist repeats the pitch as quickly as he or she can (“Tone repetition as dense as possible”). The E-sharp and F-sharp return, faster, louder, in the low register. Ligeti marks this section “Intenso, agitato.” The repeated Gs eventually die away and the movement is over. In
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
, Ligeti himself comments on the piece and its personal meaning: “I was in Stalinist terroristic Hungary where this kind of music was not allowed, and I just wrote it for myself. . . . For me, when I composed it, in the year [19]50 . . . it was a knife in Stalin’s heart.” The repeated G—the knife in Stalin’s heart—often appears at the point of highest tension. Perhaps it is the hammering of Bill’s heart, or perhaps it arrives when Bill is at his most vulnerable.
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In the first appearance of this movement, Bill is led to the main room of the mansion where the masked ball takes place under the pretense that his taxi driver has asked for him. Arriving there, he sees the red-clad figure sitting in a throne-like chair, flanked by two figures in dark purple robes. The man in the middle asks Bill to come forward, and as he does the surrounding crowd fills in behind him, trapping him. The man in red asks for the password, to which Bill replies, “Fidelio.” But when the man asks for the house password, Bill says that he’s forgotten it. The murmuring crowd immediately signals that he has made a mistake, and Bill is asked to take off his mask and then his clothes. Up to this point, we have heard only E-sharp and F-sharp, but the entrance of the pitch G begins hammering, as if it’s the panicking heart of Bill. The music continues as Bill attempts to talk his way out of this. The mysterious woman appears alone on the second level, and she shouts, “Stop!” The music obeys. She offers herself in Bill’s place, and he is allowed to leave unharmed, so long as he promises to keep the evening’s events silent. An excerpt of the piece is heard again as the mysterious woman is taken away.

The second time, it is the next day and Bill returns to the mansion to find out what happened to the woman. He carefully approaches the locked gate and sees that a camera is watching him. A car drives down from the house, and a man gets out. He gives Bill an envelope, and when Bill takes it, the pitch G emerges and hammers away, as Bill sees that it is his name typed on the outside of the envelope. The letter tells him to “give up your inquiries” and “consider these words a second warning.” The music is replaced by street noise and ostensibly an exterior shot of the Harford home.

After Bill is inspired to meet up with Domino again, only to find out that she’s HIV positive, he walks through the streets of Greenwich Village alone. Bill looks back to see a man on the otherwise deserted street. The Ligeti cue begins as he walks, even before he realizes the other man is there. He attempts to hail a cab to escape, but cannot find one. In front of a newsstand, he turns to look at the man following him. It is at this stalemate that the G hammers away. Bill buys a
New York Post
that has the headline “Lucky to Be Alive.” Eventually, the man walks away, and Bill takes refuge in a café called Sharky’s. Only a minute or so later, the piece returns as Bill opens the paper to read a story called “Ex–beauty queen in hotel drug overdose.” The story, easily read in freeze-frame, concerns former Miss New York Amanda Curran (possibly the Mandy from Ziegler’s party). There are some glitches in the text, like repeated lines, but it’s a fully written story. Amanda’s sister Jane is quoted as saying, “The overdose must have been an accident. Mandy and I were as close as sisters can get. If there had been anything wrong, she would have told me.” The piece continues as Bill goes to New York Hospital to see her, where she is reportedly in critical condition. In this instance, the piece never gets to the hammering G. Bill feels in control. The music stops when he talks to the receptionist. He finds out that Amanda Curran died at 3:45 that afternoon. Bill is led down to the morgue to see the body.

Finally, the Ligeti cue plays as Bill arrives home, at the end of his odyssey. Alice has placed Bill’s mask on the pillow next to her, but when he gets home he doesn’t go to bed right away. He turns off the lights on the Christmas tree in the living room, getting himself a beer from the refrigerator. When he enters the bedroom, he sees the mask, and the pounding G begins, his hand is over his heart. He sits down on the bed and begins crying, and when Alice wakes up, he says, “I’ll tell you everything.” The music is replaced once again by street sounds.

For Jan Harlan and perhaps Stanley Kubrick, the piece represented jealousy, “the poison in almost all relationships.” For Michel Chion, the Ligeti piece represents “the Law.”
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For Ligeti, it was, “a knife in Stalin’s heart.” It is also the kind of piece that Kubrick seemed particularly fond of, a work that could possibly be film music, but that over time reveals itself to be something else.
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Ligeti’s work fulfilled this criterion in both
2001
and
The Shining
. Penderecki’s music in
The Shining
could easily fit this category as well.

Mozart: “Rex Tremendae” from the Requiem

Appearance:

2:04:38–2:05:42

The presence of Mozart’s Requiem on the score, even for a minute, is to make manifest the presence of death in music (see chapter 6). Historically, the Requiem Mass is the Roman Catholic liturgy that is performed upon someone’s death. There are Gregorian chants that make up the liturgy, the most famous being the
Dies Irae
(heard famously in
The Shining
), but in Mozart’s time, it was customary to set the texts of the mass to new music. In 1791, Mozart received a mysterious commission for a Requiem Mass. The man who was paying for the commission preferred to remain anonymous, sending an emissary to Mozart in his place.
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They negotiated a price and the mysterious man paid half up front, intending to pay the other half upon the Requiem’s completion. Unfortunately, Mozart died before finishing the piece, and in order to collect the rest of the money, Mozart’s widow—who had been left in a difficult financial situation—employed the help of her husband’s assistant, Franz Xaver Süssmayer, to complete the work.

The part of the Requiem that appears in
Eyes Wide Shut
is the opening of the choral movement called “Rex tremendae.” The text of this movement is actually a part of the Sequence of the mass, the text that begins “Dies Irae, dies illa.” Mozart broke down the very long
Dies Irae
text into different movements including the “Tuba mirum,” which precedes the “Rex tremendae,” and the “Recordare” and “Confutatis,” which follow. The text of the “Rex tremendae” is short, just one stanza of the Sequence. It can be translated as:

King of tremendous majesty,

Who freely saves the worthy,

Save me, source of mercy

There is no specific justification for Kubrick’s use of this particular segment of the Requiem, as many others would have fit well enough in the scene.

The piece is heard—ostensibly sourced on-screen—at Sharky’s café. Bill opens up the
New York Post
and reads the article about Amanda Curran. The excerpt from the Requiem likely continues in Sharky’s but it is replaced, in Bill’s mind and heart at least, by the Ligeti piece. It has been suggested that the placement of this piece is another one of Kubrick’s commentaries: Bill reads about a dead girl and we hear the Requiem, but it should be noted that Bill is reading about a girl who is still alive, as far as he knows. If this is Kubrick’s commentary, the soundtrack is omniscient, knowing of her death before Bill finds out.

The Requiem’s explicit reference to death brings up one of the most important tropes of the film, and that is the relationship between sex and death, eros and thanatos. At the beginning of the film, Marion, the judge’s daughter, professes her love for Bill while the two are in the room with her father’s corpse. Domino, the prostitute with whom Bill would have had sex—were it not for the interrupting phone call of his wife—finds out she has an incurable sexually transmitted disease. Bill asks to see the body of Amanda Curran and is led down to the morgue after learning of her death. He leans over her, possibly compelled to touch her, but he does not. He wants to know if this is the same woman who “saved” him, but ultimately he can’t tell.

Liszt:
Nuages Gris

Appearance:

2:08:22–2:09:59 Bill sees the body of Amanda Curran in the morgue

When Franz Liszt composed
Nuages Gris
(Gray Clouds), the nearly seventy-year-old composer had been well known for writing extremely virtuosic piano works.
Nuages Gris
, however, represented a departure from this aspect of Liszt’s style. It is a short piece, exceedingly simple, but it is infused with interesting and haunting harmonies. It prefigures the work of impressionists like Debussy,
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and it was composed at a difficult time in Liszt’s life. At the beginning of July 1881, Liszt fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in bed for two months. The fall started the seventy-year-old composer on a path of ill health that included a cataract in one of his eyes, insomnia, and edema (known then as dropsy).
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Nuages Gris
was composed on 24 August 1881, near the end of Liszt’s convalescence. The words “restless” and “unresolved” have been used to describe the harmonies and mood of the piece.
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Tremolos in the left hand add to a feeling of uneasiness; the dynamic level stays quiet. There is repetition and regular phrase structure, but the harmony is approaching a level of nonfunctionality, meaning that the internal harmonic logic of much Western music—in which one chord logically leads to another—is disappearing. This would happen more and more in music at the turn of the century, leading eventually to atonality and different modes of structuring musical pieces.