Georges Delerue (1925-1992) composed over 350 film and television scores, working with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Oliver Stone and more. He brought a lush, elegiac sensitivity to art-house auteurs of his native France and an elegant, often minimalist temperance to major Hollywood films in America. Shaped by his teacher, the prolific film composer Darius Milhaud, and his time at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris, Delerue was singularly gifted at enhancing the moods and motives of onscreen characters and heightening the sense of emotional and physical urgency. He was called "the Mozart of cinema" by the French paper Le Figaro, and reaped comparable acclaim: an Academy Award, an Emmy, three Césars and a Commander of Arts and Letters from the French government.
Though he’s undersung outside film-nerd circles, Delerue remains influential. Alexandre Desplat, who has two of the five Best Original Score nominations at this Sunday’s Oscars, owes to Delerue blatantly and makes no pretense otherwise; he directed the Traffic Quintet in a performance of Delerue’s first string quartet and stacked his predecessor’s work alongside originals by himself and Jarvis Cocker on the soundtrack for The Fantastic Mr. Fox, 17 years after Delerue’s death. Many other films, including Frances Ha, have also used his work posthumously.
Here’s a taste of the composer’s best film work below.
"Catherine et Jim" from Jules et Jim (2:31-3:18)
Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962), Truffaut’s prescient cautionary tale against manic pixie dream girls, would never have reached its canonical status without Delerue’s score, which veered effortlessly from can-can bombast to foreboding waltzes. His theme for the more passionate leg of the central love triangle, stormy Catherine and tall drink of hedonism Jim, is the most gorgeous melody Delerue ever dreamt up. The brilliance here is in the title; he is not merely exploring one character, but the unrealized promise of two people, from the lovely fragility of their initial longing to their evenly matched volatility once paired, and the worlds inside both of them.
Hugh Wolff and London Sinfonietta’s version is the apex recording of the "Catherine et Jim" theme; it’s more grandly orchestrated and languorous, with a gorgeous control of dynamics. This is the version used in the exquisite 2003 Italian saga La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth), most notably in its bittersweet reunion scene between two idealistic brothers. This recording is one you must wait to deploy at an unstable moment, when a situation already threatens to be too beautiful and cinematic for your cluttered heart.
"Theme de Camille" from Contempt
Godard was already in a foul mood when he began editing Contempt; he felt suffocated by the studio system and the film reflected that, from his fourth-wall-breaking opening scene to the sleazy American film exec character who was poorly equipped to handle a film adaptation of The Odyssey. So, reportedly, when Delerue submitted his arrangements for the film, Godard swiftly dissected them like Mad Libs.
What remained was still brilliant, especially "Theme de Camille", Delerue’s most famous screen work; Godard recycled its lush arpeggios constantly throughout the film. It’s introduced early, in the film’s eroticized second scene, as Brigitte Bardot lays on her stomach naked, asking her husband if her feet are pretty, then her ankles, then her knees, all the way to her ears. All pert features in question are bathed in a red light that could be tawdry, but Delerue’s sophisticated, restless movements make the scene tender. Much like the miserable unraveling of the main couple’s relationship, Delerue focuses his score with a heightened sense of crescendoing energy; "Theme de Camille" is a gorgeous, morose feat of velocity, and one instantly transportive to the Italian seaside where this whole Trojan War of a marriage transpires.
This madcap bleating from Don’t Shoot the Composer (13:36-15:34)
The English director Ken Russell was so enamored with the elfin Delerue’s très-French charms that, before they collaborated on his film Women in Love, he directed a semi-satirical BBC documentary about the musician in 1965. Called Don’t Shoot the Composer, a play on Truffaut’s Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, which Delerue also scored), it’s a zealous spree of speed-motion sequences and Delerue’s own inspired comedic timing, which had previously gone unrealized amid all his scoring of impeccably dressed philanderers.
Brian Wilson was famous for hearing his fully expanded, teenage symphonies to God inside his head, then committing them agonizingly to the page and leading orchestras through every inflection. Mozart’s (possibly apocryphal) deathbed story was one of panic as he dictated the intricacies of his Requiem. Delerue, as this segment demonstrates, was content to dream up his own opuses and then scream-sing the melodies above quadruple-time piano, accelerating steadily like Jeanne Moreau towards a waiting cliff.
Prelude from Women in Love (2:00-3:02)
One of the more sumptuous musical accompaniments for a homeoerotic wrestling montage. Delerue wrote a prelude and fugue for this pivotal scene in Russell’s controversial 1969 drama about philandering lovers and fluid sexual preferences. However, only the prelude makes the final cut of this increasingly aggressive scene; it’s preceded by a stark stretch of silence broken only by the grunting and slapping of the two naked men.
The desire between them becomes unambiguous as Delerue’s violent woodwinds cut into the fray; the acidic, dissonant tones come from a different realm than the sonorous New Wave triumphs of just a few years prior. It’s a remarkably casual display of versatility—and, just as much, restraint—from a composer who was just starting to court major international attention.
With most of his films, Delerue favored creating a handful of repeated select cues instead of sheafs of individual ones. This was never more apparent than on Women in Love, the Pinkerton of film scores at barely 35 minutes.
"The Gondola" from A Little Romance
Delerue won his Academy Award for scoring this cutesy 1979 romantic comedy, in which an affably meddlesome Laurence Olivier helps a teenage Diane Lane hitchhike from Paris to Venice with her new boyfriend. (It’s not as Woody Allen as it sounds.) Delerue’s work is pure French whimsy, shot throughout with mandolins and spry brass; it’s fairly fleshed out but curt, with most of the 18 tracks stopping short well before three minutes, and effectively arranged but not groundbreaking for the artist.
Still, it is relentlessly pleasant picnictime fare, with light baroque flourishes, jazz interludes and a main theme based largely off a Vivaldi concerto. It’s also a glimpse of how Delerue would take some time to determine his creative relationship with Hollywood, to far more experimental success when he collaborated with Oliver Stone in the 1980s. (Delerue’s best work of the 1970s had a more classical touch: La Nuit Americaine [Day for Night, 1973], which centers around a rousing chorale and bold, uplifting trumpet cues.)
"The Gondola", which supports the young romantics’ ultimate triumph, balances two of Delerue’s familiar elements seamlessly: sprightly yet forceful string passages with a thoughtful, gradually intensified woodwind solo. It’s also far less saccharine than one might imagine for a pinnacle scene between two star-crossed teenagers in Italy. However, this did nothing to appease the legions of Trekkies who threw a Klingon-sized bitch fit when Delerue beat out Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek – The Motion Picture for the Best Original Score Oscar.
"The Assassination" from Salvador (3:21)
Enticed by the dump trucks full of money that was Hollywood in the 1980s, Delerue moved to Los Angeles in 1983; he became an American citizen one year before his death. While in California, he composed music for a host of studio movies, either as themes or full scores: Beaches, Silkwood, Steel Magnolias, Twins. His most interesting collaborator was Oliver Stone, who delivered him into the carnage of Salvador and Platoon (both in 1986). On Salvador, Delerue really shines.
Stone said in the documentary Georges Delerue: Music for the Movies that, for Salvador’s musical accompaniment, he wanted a sense of "agit-prop" akin to his favorite French New Wave works. So he went straight to the source and Delerue gave him a potent, frightening stampede of sharp yet full-bodied brass tones and heavily charged pauses, a despairing melody line eventually arcing over the melee. Stone fittingly compared it to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking theme from Psycho, applauding its "urgency combined with yearning"—a fair summation of Delerue’s epic career.