They do not know the words to the song, but they seem to know the tune, and soon they are singing along with her. Tears fall down the faces of some of the men who are watching, matching the tears of the woman.
Outside the café, Dax listens to them, his face softening for the first time in the film. It is as if music, particularly melody, is the humanity that the men have forgotten out on the battlefield. As they share the music, singing the melody in unison, they momentarily cease to be soldiers, and the line between French and German is blurred. Kubrick and Fried have made these final moments of the narrative especially powerful because they have withheld melody for the majority of the film. Besides La Marseillaise at the opening credits and the diegetic waltz of General Broulard’s party, the only musical elements we have heard are drum rolls and the percussive cues of the night patrol scene. We the viewers—and these characters—have been starved for melody and starved for humanity. Kubrick gives us both in this final moment, and it is all the more sweet because we have been deprived of them. An orchestrated version of “The Faithful Hussar” accompanies the credits. In his book about the music of Kubrick’s films, Gerrit Bodde says this about the music in Paths of Glory :
We can assume that Kubrick wanted to create this interpretation of the film: France’s power and glory (as shown in the main title theme) has a high price, which is paid by the soldiers. This is shown through the cinematic action, in the disconsolate mood of the soldiers’ celebration, and through the end titles). 42
The choice of a mostly percussion score was made by both Kubrick and Fried, who said: “Now Stanley had a kind of harsh, bleak vision of life, and taking the tonality out of the music, having an all-percussion score would be just a natural.” After viewing the film in recent years, Fried almost seemed to regret the decision from a humanitarian point of view: “By taking away the tonality of the music, it was as if I had abandoned them, and I took away their humanity. I stranded them out there with no underscoring except bleak percussion. And I felt terrible.” 43
After this, Kubrick didn’t jump directly into using preexistent music; he still had Spartacus and Lolita ahead of him, but perhaps he was beginning to see the possibilities in using other sources for his scores. Kubrick and Fried would never work together again, but remained friends. It’s unlikely that Fried would have worked with Kubrick again, even if he had been asked. In recent years, Fried described the difficulty of his collaboration with the director:
He liked the first score, it was very effective and it did the job. Second score he began to get more ideas about music and then he became more demanding about certain things, and by the third score, we were already arguing. The fourth and fifth score, there were knockdown battles. But by that time, he had developed a taste and a style and he was a hard guy to argue with. . . . At the beginning, it was easy, I went my own way, but by . . . Paths of Glory , I had to justify every note. 44
Furthermore, Kubrick and Fried were philosophically opposed on the issue of preexistent music in film. Fried believed that classical music took the viewer out of the film experience, especially if the music was well known. In addition to that, he has said: “[Preexistent music] doesn’t support the picture because it wasn’t written for the picture.” 45 Kubrick, on the other hand, believed that preexistent music was a viable source for scores, especially because he saw the quality of that music overshadowing that of newly written scores:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart, or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? . . . With a little more care and thought these
Outside the café, Dax listens to them, his face softening for the first time in the film. It is as if music, particularly melody, is the humanity that the men have forgotten out on the battlefield. As they share the music, singing the melody in unison, they momentarily cease to be soldiers, and the line between French and German is blurred. Kubrick and Fried have made these final moments of the narrative especially powerful because they have withheld melody for the majority of the film. Besides La Marseillaise at the opening credits and the diegetic waltz of General Broulard’s party, the only musical elements we have heard are drum rolls and the percussive cues of the night patrol scene. We the viewers—and these characters—have been starved for melody and starved for humanity. Kubrick gives us both in this final moment, and it is all the more sweet because we have been deprived of them. An orchestrated version of “The Faithful Hussar” accompanies the credits. In his book about the music of Kubrick’s films, Gerrit Bodde says this about the music in Paths of Glory :
We can assume that Kubrick wanted to create this interpretation of the film: France’s power and glory (as shown in the main title theme) has a high price, which is paid by the soldiers. This is shown through the cinematic action, in the disconsolate mood of the soldiers’ celebration, and through the end titles). 42
The choice of a mostly percussion score was made by both Kubrick and Fried, who said: “Now Stanley had a kind of harsh, bleak vision of life, and taking the tonality out of the music, having an all-percussion score would be just a natural.” After viewing the film in recent years, Fried almost seemed to regret the decision from a humanitarian point of view: “By taking away the tonality of the music, it was as if I had abandoned them, and I took away their humanity. I stranded them out there with no underscoring except bleak percussion. And I felt terrible.” 43
After this, Kubrick didn’t jump directly into using preexistent music; he still had Spartacus and Lolita ahead of him, but perhaps he was beginning to see the possibilities in using other sources for his scores. Kubrick and Fried would never work together again, but remained friends. It’s unlikely that Fried would have worked with Kubrick again, even if he had been asked. In recent years, Fried described the difficulty of his collaboration with the director:
He liked the first score, it was very effective and it did the job. Second score he began to get more ideas about music and then he became more demanding about certain things, and by the third score, we were already arguing. The fourth and fifth score, there were knockdown battles. But by that time, he had developed a taste and a style and he was a hard guy to argue with. . . . At the beginning, it was easy, I went my own way, but by . . . Paths of Glory , I had to justify every note. 44
Furthermore, Kubrick and Fried were philosophically opposed on the issue of preexistent music in film. Fried believed that classical music took the viewer out of the film experience, especially if the music was well known. In addition to that, he has said: “[Preexistent music] doesn’t support the picture because it wasn’t written for the picture.” 45 Kubrick, on the other hand, believed that preexistent music was a viable source for scores, especially because he saw the quality of that music overshadowing that of newly written scores:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart, or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? . . . With a little more care and thought these
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