Interview: Napoléon Score Composer Carl Davis

Did the amount of time you had to complete the score influence how you went about it?

Knowing that I had three and a half months to prepare these five hours and that it really would not have been possible, and in some ways not even appropriate to write a complete original score, but certainly I would need several years to do it, and I had, you know, three and a half months, in kind of film tradition, you know where the composer and the music is the last in line. They had their screening date at the Paris opera and I had my screening date at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square in London, so I knew that I would have to basically put together a score, which the majority would be found music. But it would still be possible to exercise artistic control over the content of it, so that I could offer a parallel experience to the film, just as the film is “Napoleon and His Time,” this would also be the music of Napoleon’s period, would be the center of the score.

And you think, well who was alive during the late-18^th century. Not bad, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – they were the stars. As well as the very long list of second and third-rate composers, who were functioning in court as popular entertainers at the opera, opéra comique. There really was around Paris and Vienna this really tremendous music alive that was going on, with Beethoven and Hayden and Mozart as the “three gods”, as they say.  Then there was another area that had to be provided for: scenes from the French Revolution, which really had to be based, to a certain degree, on the songs of the Revolution. People sang a lot, you know. So “La Marseillaise” itself is a major scene, when it is sort of taught to the people at the national assembly; a stunning, stunning scene. There were all these [songs] that had to be incorporated in some way to give it flavor.

Vladimir Roudenko as the young Napoléon

Then there is this enormous sequence in Corsica; that had to be different. Napoleon’s Corsican roots were a very, very major part in the makeup of his personality and politics. I was able to research that quite easily, in collections of Corsican folk songs, or as part of a collection of French folk songs, which would have an area. They are very Italianate; they really sound like Italian pop music in some way.

So I used three of those for the scenes. Then the sort of final area was when the tenor of the film shifts direction and becomes a sort of very subjective 1925 political view of French history and the follow-up to Napoleon’s reputation, and the affect he had on France and the political situation was very chaotic in France in the mid-1920s. So a kind of romanticism was required of Napoleon’s kind of image of himself as an eagle, identifying with an eagle, which is an image used both by democratic countries and totalitarian regimes. It became a universal symbol, so I knew I had to write something that would correspond, which had nothing to do with the late-18^th century, but more with contemporary film music, which was very, very romantic. And then the whole area of Josephine was more film than history. Film history.