St. Matthew Passion in Scorsese's Casino
ex-neo-con
recall the open sequence in which Robert De Niro gets in his car, is
blown to bits, and is shown floating through a fiery space as the
soundtrack launches into the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion.
Question: what recording does Scorsese use?
ex-neo-con
ansermetniac
wrote:
George Solti
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Peter Greenstein
"ex-neo-con" <ex-ne...@bonbon.net> wrote in message
news:1117656708.1...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
And is there any significance to the choice of this music? Perhaps a chance
at Resurrection?
--
peter greenstein
http://wakefieldjazz.com/
guyma...@aol.com
choices, although in many cases they might be purely personal. His
longtime editor says he has an incredible memory for when and where he
first heard a piece of music and will pull a song out of nowhere to
frame a shot. Here's what he says about the music in Casino:
Scorsese: In those cases there were a lot of old rock 'n' roll songs
that I liked from the fifties and the sixties, right before Dylan and
the British invasion. But then of course the Rolling Stones were there
too, they come up into the seventies. Casino really pushed it and I was
listening to St. Matthew's Passion by Bach for four days, five days
just designing the shots and playing this thing back over and over
again and using it for the opening credits and for the end. But it's a
dangerous thing to do that. It's a dangerous thing to put classical
music over a gangster movie, because that's what it is, a "gangster
film", Casino. Although it was more of an image of America rather than
just Vegas, you see, it was bigger than that in a way.
It was a profane paradise that they lost, cast out of paradise like
Milton, like Milton's Paradise Lost. Only this paradise was evil, this
paradise was greed and they all up there on the screen saying "gee,
it's too bad we got thrown out, it was a great place". So play St.
Matthew's Passion. But it's dangerous, it could be very pretentious.
Some people felt it was, I thought it was very funny. Some guy turns
his car on, it blows up, he goes flying in the air and St. Matthew's
Passion comes in (laughter). That's the kind of movie it's going to be,
it's going to be three hours long so you might as well, you know, leave
now (Laughter)
So we took a chance that way. Music is very important. That's why most
of my scores are scores that I make up. Taxi Driver was Bernard Hermann
and I felt that because Travis Bickle, Paul Schrader's extraordinary
character that he devised, I felt that Travis didn't let music into his
mind any more, he just didn't, he was not receptive to it okay, he just
didn't want to hear it, so don't push him, you know what I mean, do not
push the man! (Laughter) It's his car, he'll go anywhere anytime, but
don't play any music. (Laughter) All right. So I felt that the only way
that we could have a sense of what he may have been feeling was Bernard
Hermann, he was the only one who could do it, the only one. I though
his music was so powerful over the years.
I discovered it afterwards. I would say "gee that film had great music"
when I was at film school or I'd see I film repertory see it on video
or something, I'd say "oh of course Bernard Hermann". And I discovered
it backwards that way. I didn't realise it when I saw Psycho for the
first time or North by Northwest or Vertigo, I just looked at it later.