Johnny Belinda (Original Motion Picture Score)

1949年奥斯卡最佳配乐（剧情/喜剧类） (提名) by Bruce Eder Your jaw may well drop open in awe the first time you listen to this CD of Max Steiner's complete original soundtrack music for the 1947 feature Johnny Belinda -- if you've been familiar with the movie for decades, the music seemed like a known quantity, until the first experience of hearing it free-standing; suddenly, all of the little nuances in the writing and orchestration and the conducting became clear, and it was as though one were suddenly in the presence of a heretofore unknown masterpiece. It's not as though Steiner didn't do here what he was known (and, indeed, notorious) for elsewhere, interpolating one national anthem and an old Scottish tune (hey, Flotow did the same thing in the opera Martha, and no one complains about that), but what he does with the orchestra and with the timbre and the range of sounds is infinitely more sophisticated than that -- in fact, the score for Johnny Belinda may be one of three occasions (the others being The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Fountainhead ) where Steiner got inside of a subject with his music, exploring psychological depths akin to what his more exalted Warner Bros. stablemate Erich Wolfgang Korngold did with Kings Row , arguably his greatest score. The result here may be Steiner's most unselfconsciously beautiful score, and nowhere more so than on track 12, "No Lesson Today," which may be the prettiest single piece of music that Steiner ever wrote; and it's followed closely by the more pensive but almost as compelling "The Examination." We're fortune today that the source materials for this CD are in what appear to be excellent condition -- there's not a moment that needs apology or explanation, and although the age of the music recordings means that the volume can't be pushed too hard, all of the detail that should be here is present, and the sound is bright and clean within the limitations of a 1947 recording that was never meant to be heard fully exposed. The annotation is informative and so wide-ranging that it is virtually the core of an entire book on the subject of the movie.