Bond and Tchaikovsky: trouble beneath the bubbles
Tchaikovsky’s romantic but troubled music bubbles up across the Bond series. Each time it has something to say or an important role to play, whether it’s satirising heteronormativity, softening up rival spies or providing a prelude to a climax. Fire up the jacuzzi because we’re going in!
There is a lot of classical music across the Bond film series. Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Puccini, Strauss and Vivaldi are just a few of the big names whose works are given ample time on the soundtracks. What’s more, the music is given the opportunity to actually be heard, unobscured by sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes, it’s used to thrilling, contrapuntal effect, the onscreen action at odds with the beauty of the composition. I surely can’t be the only one who, as a child, dreamt of becoming a Bond villain because it meant I got to do a Stromberg, eliminating my duplicitous secretary by feeding them to a shark while I played Bach’s Air on the G String at full blast? Or pressing a button to make my underwater lair rise from the watery depths accompanied by Mozart?
Bond films revel in classical music, often - but not exclusively - associating it with urbane villains. Many of these pieces are doubtless chosen because they merely sound sophisticated and ‘fit’ the scene aurally. For instance, A View To A Kill’s use of ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ movements from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is hardly apt considering the scene at Zorin’s stud farm takes place in bright summer sunshine. But it sounds good. Seldom do the classical selections add additional layers to the story. A notable exception is the Tosca opera sequence in Quantum of Solace, where the Puccini music is not merely used to underscore Bond’s actions but invites the audience (or at least anyone who knows the story of Tosca) to make parallels between both stories’ rampages of revenge.
Quantum regularly gets labelled ‘pretentious’, and it’s touches like this (more than a touch - it’s an entire opera sequence!) which are partly responsible. The world of classical music can be exclusionary, despite the fact that the music itself can be as fun, bombastic, silly and downright profane as any Bond film.
It certainly can when its composer is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky is Russia’s most popular export (perhaps with the exception of vodka) and some film music experts credit him with being ‘the original film score composer’, despite Tchaikovsky dying a couple of decades before the medium was invented. Certainly, any film composer working within the Romantic idiom is indebted: John Williams is an especially notable proponent who has gone on to influence generations of composers. Bond composer John Barry didn’t credit Tchaikovsky as an influence directly, but he was an avowed fan of Shostakovich, aka the ‘Tchaikovsky of the 20th Century’. Both Russian composers shared with Barry a gloriously melodramatic sensibility. More recently, Bond composer David Arnold cited Tchaikovsky as one of his four biggest influences.
Unlike Quantum of Solace, Tchaikovsky’s music is utterly unpretentious. It’s sophisticated and ground-breaking but also a heap of fun, capable of being serious and silly simultaneously. Susan Sontag saw seriousness as a prerequisite for Camp: the two must work hand in hand. In her list of things she considered to be Camp, she included Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
A piece from Tchaikovsky’s most famous ballet score is used - in iconic fashion - in A View To A Kill. KGB agent Pola Ivanova waits until the crescendo of Lake in the Moonlight to make her escape from Bond, the Japanese, the blasts of brass muffling the noise of her opening the door to the Japanese spa. It’s the perfect synchronisation of sound and image - sexy and silly simultaneously. No wonder this scene has attracted such a following. In addition to the celebrated Twitter account and book by Robbie Sims there’s a cocktail named for the line “The bubbles tickle my… Tchaikovsky.” Fiona Fullerton sells the hell out of the double entendre, the pause being just long enough to make it abundantly clear where she was going with that line. Tchaikovsky would surely have seen the funny side of his name being used as a stand-in for women’s genitalia.
Earlier in this scene, Bond has already used an extract from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Romeo and Juliet to soften-up Ivanova, changing the music to something familiar so the Russian lowers her defences, thereby giving Bond the opportunity to snatch her recording of Zorin discussing his operations. There’s a lot riding on her passion for Tchaikovsky! The piece that Bond selects is the Fantasy Overture from Tchaikovsky’s score for the ballet Romeo and Juliet, a piece so overused that it’s difficult to take seriously in any context. It’s not even its first appearance in a Bond film. The same piece soundtracks the meet-cute of Jaws and Dolly in Moonraker - to intended comic effect.
There’s something perversely fitting about this piece being used to satirise the cliches of on screen heterosexual couplings.
Tchaikovsky was, of course, gay. Even President Putin acknowledges it, although he may want to tell his cultural minister, who vehemently disagrees. He wrestled with his homosexuality throughout his life. He married a woman in a bid to ‘cure’ himself and deflect rumours, but the marriage was very short-lived. It didn’t help that he had fallen in love with his nephew at the same time.
Some parallels with Bond are irresistible - up to a point. Okay, so you have to leave at the door the whole fancying your nephew thing (I don’t recall anything untoward being hinted at between Uncle James and James Bond Jnr.). But like Tchaikovsky, Bond shares a less-than-heteronormative sexuality. His relationships - including his marriage - are universally short-lived. Bond would much rather hop into jacuzzis with whoever comes across his path (or emerges from the ocean). There’s no evidence that Tchaikovsky was similarly promiscuous, but, in 19th Century Russia, being attracted to men was bad enough.
It’s the consensus of contemporary critics, including John Suchet (author of the excellent Tchaikovsky: The Man Revealed), that Tchaikovsky channelled his feelings about his relationship woes and conflicted sexuality into his works. You can hear this in his music, especially in the doomed romance of Swan Lake. The deservedly famous production by ballet impresario Matthew Bourne makes this longing explicitly gay.
Tchaikovsky’s loves were mostly unrequited whereas most of Bond’s cinematic romances are quickly consummated - by the end of two hours or so at least. Even so, the principle tension of a Bond film is, I would argue, not whether Bond will save the world but whether Bond will get the girl. Drama hinges on unrequitedness. This is what I hear in most of Tchaikosvky’s music - even in the finales.
Such a finale appears, aptly, in the denouement of The Living Daylights, where Kara Milovy (conducted by an onscreen John Barry), performs the cello solo at the heart of the finale to Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. Although the music sounds highly civilised to modern ears, at least one influential critic at its first performance in 1877 found it to be ‘vulgar’. Perhaps this was what Tchaikovsky was going for. He saw the earlier rococo period as embodying “a carefree feeling of well-being”. One man’s ‘care free’ is another man’s vulgarity. And was Tchaikovsky really that care free? He wrote his Variations just before his failed marriage and, when invited to adapt the work later in life, he wanted to have nothing to do with it. Perhaps the memories of this period were too uncomfortable to return to.
In The Living Daylights, the music is used to signal to the audience that the film is coming to its inevitable finale. The tension, like the music, is about to be resolved. A gigantic climax (!) is on its way… but not quite yet. There’s still a little bit of longing in the air as Kara looks around for James: where is he?
She - and we - only have seconds to wait. For Tchaikovsky, the struggle was somewhat more real.
In the course of researching this piece I stumbled across this mash-up of Bond and Tchaikovsky from group Decostruttori Postmodernisti. It’s a lot of fun.
