![]() For The Return of the King, Shore relied on a full orchestra plus voices, and the soundtrack is filled with 19th century elements, including Wagner’s leitmotif technique. He even included part of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in one of his previous scores. I was hardly surprised to learn that composer Howard Shore, responsible for the soundtrack music, turned for inspiration to the works of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Beethoven. At the top of the list I found The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King-with 836 fatalities during the course of the movie. I recently discovered an online ranking of the commercial films with the most on-screen fatalities. Mike Morasky’s score for Counter-Strike Global Offensive (2012) embraces the same aesthetic with the fervor of a young Werther, marrying a 19th century vocabulary to some contemporary drum and bass effects.Īnd action movies are marching to the same beat. On recent video game scores such as Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can hear the high Romanticist effects coming to the forefront during the most dramatic moments. Even composers working solely with software strive to capture the sound of the traditional symphony orchestra. And this tendency has only gained traction with the passing years. Michael Giacchino’s score for Medal of Honor: Frontline, released the following year, commandeered a chorus and full orchestra, extracting musical fireworks that would make grim Mahler smile. By the time you get to Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001), we are in full German Romanticism mode-perhaps a little ironic, given the premise of the game is to hunt down and kill Nazis. But as the capabilities of game consoles improved, soundtrack composers were able to tap into their inner Wagner. If you listen to early generation first-person shooter games, such as Wolfenstein 3D (1992), the music sounds more suitable for a demented merry-go-round than a video battle. ![]() Give those German composers credit! They didn’t have any video screens back then, but they somehow concocted the perfect formula for on-screen carnage. The grandiloquent sounds of the 19th century are still alive in the new millennium … but only when someone is getting bludgeoned, bloodied, blown-up, or decimated with automatic weapons. ![]() Over-the-top Romanticism, in all its most extravagant manifestations, is now the preferred musical accompaniment to virtual killing. The spirit of Beethoven has come back to life in first-person shooter games. But I never, in a million years, would have guessed where musical Romanticism would experience this rebirth. And, believe it or not, the revival has finally happened. You can’t keep a good man down, as the proverb goes. Here was my hunch: I expected that the spirit of Beethoven would return some day.
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