John Williams: Jane Eyre

Conducted by composer

Silva Screeen Film CD 204

David Aspinall

Inspired by the Bronte moors and manors, no doubt, but perhaps even more by that master of the brooding manner and beetle-browed intensity, George C. Scott as Rochester, John Williams composed one of his best early scores for this Delbert Mann-directed version, originally made for TV in 1971. The composer, still a couple of years away from his disaster cycle breakthrough with Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno and Jaws, and unencumbered by the accumulated expectations which were the inevitable negative side of the mega scale success of Star Wars and E.T., here composed a score which is closer kin to Nino Rota's Romeo and Juliet or Francis Lai's Love Story, both sensational successes of the period. I'm no fan of Lai, and prefer my Rota cold, but Williams has managed to incorporate their styles into his conception without overt mimicry. That tendency to over inflation which marks a good portion of his later work, and which in Williams' Hollywood offspring would become full-bloated bombast, is nowhere evident in Jane Eyre.

Although Jane's theme, to these ears, is a mite mechanical for all its elegant line, much of the rest is blessedly more than mood music. As always with Williams, the instrumentation is rich, and gives little or nothing away to Bernard Herrmann's evocative score for the 1944 version, inspired by another memorable Rochester, Orson Welles. In fact, JW's palette has an advantage over BH in his deft use of piano and harpsichord (a commercially-inspired nod to Lai?). But the complexity and adroitness of the scherzando To Thornfield is way beyond the banality of the typical score of that era - not merely the likes of Lai, but even Rota's typical effort in his Hollywood period. Even the String Quartet, which accompanies onscreen festivities at Thornfield, is first rate Williams - and not anachronistic either, although much of the rest, despite the keyboards, typically depends on full-throttle romantic gestures more reminiscent of post-romantic period than the 1830s. That's a convention of old Hollywood, however. Elsewhere, JW nods in the direction of the chamber minimalism of Richard Rodney Bennett, who had recently scored heavily with his spartan background for Far from the Madding Crowd, with a lovely trio for recorder, guitar and viola. Thwarted Wedding displays the composer's comfort with the conventions of modernism. The theme for the minister St. John Rivers and his healing household is even liturgical in its melancholy contour, redolent of Vaughan Williams in his Thomas Tallis mode.

All this is not just fine film music, but lovely living room listening. If the Jane theme seems to affirm the conventions of the day (1970s, not 1830s), its provenance will clang less jarringly today than it did at the time. And if the Thornfield theme anticipates too closely JW's later excursions into the mysterious with The Fury and Dracula, this is historical hindsight, fascinating only to the film music fanatic. Jane Eyre, despite its skimpy playing time, is a notable score and CD.