The music of The Tree of Life

Music flows through nearly every frame of Terrence Malick's darkly devotional new film The Tree of Life. The director is an avid classical listener — I was fortunate to meet him at the American Academy in Berlin in 2002 — and the soundtrack of his latest film has generous helpings of François Couperin, Bach, Berlioz, Smetena, Mahler, and Holst, as well as more modern works of Górecki and Tavener and original cues by Alexandre Desplat. (Opera Chic has the complete list. Alas, no Wagner this time.) The Agnus Dei of the Berlioz Requiem accompanies the otherworldly climax, and chilling use is made of a passage from the introductory section of Mahler's First Symphony. The most remarkable musical moment involves, however, the finale of the Brahms Fourth Symphony. The distant, troubled father played by Brad Pitt is a frustrated musician, a former church organist, and he has a habit of blaring classical records during family dinners. In one scene he gets up from the table to conduct along with the Brahms, waving the jacket of Toscanini's NBC Symphony LP for emphasis. The use of classical music as a signifier of emotional coldness is an all-too-familiar cinematic trope, but this episode goes rather deeper than that; we sense that the father's unhappiness comes from his not having stayed true to his early musical instincts. In the scene immediately preceding this one, Smetena's Moldau speaks for the joy of life fully and richly lived, as the three young brothers cavort in the natural landscape around their Texan home. In other words, Malick's classical selections span the entire spectrum of human emotion, from the darkest regions to the most luminous.

Incidentally, Brahms's great motet "Warum?" is a setting of the anguished question from the Book of Job: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul?" The beginning of God's response serves as the epigraph to The Tree of Life: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" I have long had the feeling — entirely unsubstantiated by biographical evidence — that the finale of the Brahms Fourth is a representation of the same passage.