The film scoring community lost one of its giants when French composer Maurice Jarre passed away on March 29th in Los Angeles at age 84. Born in Lyon, Jarre abandoned an engineering degree from the Sorbonne, to the profound shock of his family, to study music with Arthur Honegger at the Paris Conservatoire. He fell in with the music that was being written by other young, French composers of his generation — Pierre Boulez, Marius Constant and Georges Delerue — and Jarre’s earliest concert works share with them a concern for 12-tone derived methods of composition. In 1950, the Théâtre Nationale Populaire opened in Paris, and producer Jean Vilar named Jarre its musical director. He served in this capacity five years, establishing a name for himself as a composer for the stage. Jarre also worked with choreographer Roland Petit during this time, and developed a populist, melodic style in addition to the more advanced music he already knew. Jarre would later comment that this was the happiest time of his life, and the experience presumably laid a good foundation for his career as film composer.

In 1952, director Georges Franju asked Jarre to score his short, artistic documentary Hôtel des Invalides, and the success of this film garnered interest in Jarre within the French film industry. He continued to work with Franju, likewise scoring the horror classic Le Yeux sans visage (”Eyes without a Face,” 1960), and by the mid-1950’s, Jarre had discovered that he was too busy writing for the cinema to continue composing music for concerts or the theater. Jarre’s international breakthrough came with his score for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which earned him his first Academy Award and placed his name on the “A” list of screen composers with its sweeping, panoramic themes. His next project with Lean, Doctor Zhivago (1965), not only put another Oscar on Jarre’s mantel, but added a Grammy, largely on the strength of the tune Lara’s Theme, which ran through the movie like a mantra. It was later adapted as the pop hit, Somewhere My Love. The enormous success of Doctor Zhivago earned him a ticket to Hollywood, where he would live and work for the rest of his life, occasionally taking on European projects, such as Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel (”The Tin Drum,” 1979).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Jarre maintained a punishing schedule, scoring on average about four to five films a year. Not all of these films are well remembered, and Jarre once commented, “If a film is bad, there is always an executive who gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece.” Nevertheless, it is an impressive resumé — The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) for Paul Newman; The Man Who Would Be King (1976) for John Huston; Jesus of Nazareth (1977) for Franco Zeffirelli and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Witness (1985) and Dead Poets Society (1989) for Peter Weir, not to mention the TV miniseries Shogun (1980) and the popular thriller Fatal Attraction (1987). Jarre was noted for his use of unusual instrumentation, and in 1980 began to add more electronics to his arsenal of instruments, a field in which his son, Jean-Michel Jarre, had already distinguished himself. Originally, it was a measure he used to save time, but Jarre noted that he ultimately ended up expending more effort on his predominantly electronic score for Ghost (1990) than if he had used conventional instruments. His loudest score was for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), which folded “four grand pianos plus a pipe organ, digeridoo, fujana, a battery of exotic percussion and three ondes martenots” into the context of the standard, 51-piece Hollywood symphony orchestra. It was not such elephantine requirements, however, that won him his third and final Oscar for 1984’s A Passage to India (1984), which would be his final collaboration with David Lean. Altogether, Jarre was nominated by the Academy nine times, and the Golden Globes were even kinder, sending him home with 11 nominations and four wins over the course of his career. The mantel in his home must have been awfully crowded.

Not everyone was firmly in Jarre’s corner; some new music aficionados never forgave him for abandoning the avant-garde concert music of his youth — though such techniques did figure significantly in his film output — and in France, he took a lot of criticism for “going Hollywood” and becoming a commercial success. However, Jarre was such a good film composer that some of his scores — such as those for The Train (1965) and Five Card Stud (1968) — are better known than the movies from which they came. In a 1984 quote now widely remembered in the press, Jarre commented, “When I die, there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.” Indeed, we cannot know what that was, but if we imagine hard enough, perhaps it might have sounded a little like “Lara’s Theme.”
 

NOTE: When I was researching the Jarre obituary the “waltz” quote was all over the web, and although I wasn’t crazy about it, I didn’t think it would [[do]] any harm to include it in the article. However, as it goes sometimes — no, often — on the web, that juicy little “fact” turns out to be fiction. As the article indicated below reveals, the “waltz” quote is not from Jarre himself, but contrived for him by a Wikipedian and repeated everywhere. Both AMG and I are genuinely regretful for any misunderstanding this may have caused, not only to Mr. Jarre’s family, but for his millions of fans as well.

Link: Wikipedia Hoax Quote Used Worldwide in Newspaper Obituaries