Freud [soundtrack]

Jerry Goldsmith - Freud [soundtrack]

Early in his prolific and renowned career, film music composer Jerry Goldsmith scored a soundtrack to the 1962 film, "Freud". It is a biographical film of Sigmund Freud directed by John Huston.

From the liner notes:

From the very first moment of the film's main title, one is absorbed not only by the strange and effective art work, but even more importantly by the brilliant music. It is music of high energy and tension, at times disturbing. Other portions of the score contain passages of an eerie nostalgia and delicate lyricism. The style of composition is substantially atonal, similar to that of the experimental atonality of Freud's later contemporaries in Vienna: Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg (circa 1910-25). This type of stark agitated music was necessary; for had the central focus of the music been linked precisely chronologically to Vienna in the 1880's i.e., Mahler, Brahms, Johann Strauss Jr. and Richard Strauss, etc. (There are brief allusions to Johann Strauss Jr. in certain parts of the film, but in a style appropriate to the score's fundamental intentions), the effect would have been different and off-target.

The score sustains a cerebral character throughout. It seems to scan the psyche and direct the emotions in a severe and bizarre fashion perfectly descriptive of this important period in Freud's life. Goldsmith's musical expression seems to have a dual nature. At times it has the detached objective quality of Freud the scientist. At other times it takes on the aberrational identity of the various characters of the drama, including Freud himself, whose important psychological discoveries included revelations about the effects of a traumatic episode in his childhood on his own psyche. These two contrasting subjective and objective elements are skillfully manipulated by Goldsmith, who superimposes, when the film calls for it, his unique communication of a curious quasi-Viennese nostalgia.


Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Main Title {3:17}

2. Charcot's Show {5:08}

3. Thirsty Girl {1:18}

4. Case Histories {2:12}

5. Desperate Case {3:30}

6. The Funeral {0:45}

Side 2

1. Cecilie and the Dreamer {3:02}

2. Cecilie's Dream {1:07}

3. The First Step {2:10}

4. Red Tower Street {1:26}

5. Trauma {3:20}

6. Freud's Awakening {1:51}

7. End Title {2:30}

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