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Accompanying the knight-errant sequence is composer
Basil Poledouris’s sensitive and melancholy "The Search,"
which well evokes the loneliness of Conan’s spiritual
quest. Poledouris’s score is critically important to
Conan the Barbarian and as inseparable from it as Maurice
Jarre’s is for Lawrence of Arabia and Sergei Prokoviev’s
for Alexander Nevsky. From the pounding, elephantine
introduction to the subdued, elegaic conclusion, with
its reminiscences of Holst and The Firebird-like coda,
the music is a sustained series of leitmotivs and thematic
developments that echo and enrich the story’s events.
The composer wrote "two hours of music for Conan," he
said in an interview in 1982. "It was always in John’s
mind that Conan would be solid music--much like an opera...
From the first frame of reel one to the end of the Wheel
of Pain sequence, somewhere in the middle of reel three,
is one long cue without any break. I was terrified when
I first realized that." Poledouris was intimidated too
by the thought of having to equal the music of great
composers--Wagner, Prokoviev, Stravinsky, Orff--excerpts
from whose works Milius had originally intended to use.
But John Boorman’s Excalibur, released while Conan was
shooting in Spain, used the same selections from Carmina
Burana and Wagner’s Ring cycle that Milius had meant to
rely on for the Conan soundtrack. Poledouris was equal
to the challenge, however; Milius, watching the final cut
of the movie in Rome, where Poledouris was recording the
finished score, told the composer, after seeing the raid
on the Cimmerian village with full orchestral accompaniment,
"Prokoviev would be proud."
Prokoviev’s powerful score for Eisenstein’s Alexander
Nevsky (1938) greatly influenced both Milius and Poledouris,
not least in the employment of a chanting chorus. In Conan,
the chorus provides background commentary on Thulsa Doom;
the somber choral sections seem to follow the sorcerer and
hover near him like ghostly voices of his victims. When
Milius decided not to use sections of Orff’s choral cycle
Carmina Burana, Poledouris, inspired by the German composer’s
settings of twenty-four medieval verses, "started looking
into a lot of Gregorian chants, and also into some of the
Catholic masses. The secondary theme of Doom is actually
the Dies Irae." Poledouris wrote the lyrics for the choral
passages in English; they were then translated into Latin.
"Farewell, skies. Farewell, snows," intones the chorus
during the slaughter of the Cimmerians. "Farewell, earth.
We are dying; / we are dying for Doom." "Doom approaches,
/ bringing the Gift of Fury," announces the chorus as the
young Conan watches his mother’s severed head fall to the
ground. "Darkness reigns."
--
"This is a bad land for gods....The old gods are ignored. The new
gods are just as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for
the next big thing."
--Neil Gaiman, "The American Gods"
--
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