Wuthering Heights

We have already studied one of Alfred Newman’s compositions for movie soundtracks, when we listened to Newman’s opening dramatic sequence for Twelve O’Clock High.  In that situation, we were taken back from a peaceful day in the English countryside in 1949 to the terrifying reality of daylight precision bombing carried out from the same location in 1942.

Crash of B-17

The music served this purpose, even as the camera remained fixed on the runway and empty fields seen in 1949.  Nothing had changed; everything had changed.  From the standpoint of Dean Jagger, his body was still intact in 1949, but his mind was taking him back to 1942; and we were now inside his recollections of events that had occurred seven years earlier.  The music went from pastoral to dramatic and served to foreshadow the transition without the use of any dialogue.

Today, we are going to examine a very different type of movie from 1939, one based on love and jealousy; loyalty and treachery.  Wuthering Heights was based on the novel of the same name by Emily Bronte.  While the story has its twists and turns, it is all about one woman’s chance remark, made in haste and regretted forever.  The woman’s name was Cathy Earnshaw, and she had fallen in love with a boy her father had found abandoned on the streets of the nearby town.  His name was Heathcliff.

Heathcliff and Cathy

Merle Oberon played the grown up Cathy, matched by the smoldering Laurence Olivier, as her lover Heathcliff.  The two leading characters were deeply in love but were also capable of inflicting tremendous pain and suffering on each other.  Thus, they were not pure in heart and deed.  Just as the rejected Heathcliff returns to torment the living Cathy, Cathy’s ghost returns to torment Heathcliff.  Only his death reunites the two lovers, who can now start all over again.

The music we are about to listen to is called Cathy’s Theme, and it must not provide us with an abundance of hope and serenity.  It must provide a combination of beauty and pain that matches the personalities of the two lovers.  We have chosen to use music that was performed well after the soundtrack was recorded.  Here is the incredible Itzhak Perlman playing Cathy’s Theme.