10 Memorable Uses of Opera in Films
From Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – “Sull’aria”
The character of Red, played by Morgan Freeman, utters this immortal line:
“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”
From Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor – “Il dolce suono”
Luc Besson’s phenomenally successful film, that starred Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman, is set on earth in the year 2214, where in one memorable scene, opera has defied all predictions and survived long into humanity’s future: we see and hear the diva Plavalaguna, a multi-tentacled soprano with blue skin, perform the mad scene from Donizetti’s most famous opera.
From Puccini’s La Rondine – “Canzone di Doretta”
Merchant and Ivory’s gorgeous film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel about Brits in Florence in 1907. The film uses a lot of Puccini’s music, including one of the most ravishing and breathless kisses ever filmed, landing exactly on the word “felicitá” near the end of the famous aria from La Rondine. Julian Sands as George kisses Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy in a field of poppies overlooking Florence, and the music seems to well up from the Florentine setting like a spring.
From Wagner’s Die Walküre – “Ride of the Valkyries”
Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus, his 1979 film Apocalypse Now, has Wagner’s famous “Ride of the Valkyries” which opens the third act of Die Walküre, playing on loudspeakers as helicopters deliver an air assault on a Viet Cong-held village. Coppola’s imaginative use of Wagner’s music forever altered the public’s perception of it. Or did it? In Wagner’s opera, the music is meant to evoke the collection of slaughtered warriors on flying horses, taken from battlefields by the heroic Valkyries.
From Giordano’s Andrea Chénier – “La mamma morta”
Tom Hanks won the first of his back-to-back Oscars for this harrowing AIDS story—the second was for Forrest Gump. The character he plays in Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett, in an epic scene, listens to Maria Callas sing his favorite aria, “La mamma morta” from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, linking the character of Maddalena in the opera to his own, as both are musing on the power of love in the face of death, grief, and the struggle for dignity against oppressive fear-driven views. Unforgettable.
Themes from Verdi’s La forza del destino
Marcel Pagnol’s extraordinary two sequential novels, set in Provence, tell a multi-generational story about water rights, and this pair of films directed by Claude Berri starred Yves Montand along with Gérard Depardieu and his wife at the time, Élisabeth. Opera is woven through the story, but the music is Verdi, from his opera La forza del destino, reminding us how deeply Pagnol’s story is itself about destiny. A magnificent set of epic films.
Music from Puccini’s La bohème
Norman Jewison’s knockout ensemble comedy, written by John Patrick Shanley, who would later write the play and film, Doubt, created a love letter to opera. Cher, as Loretta Castorini, gets taken to a Metropolitan Opera performance of Puccini’s La bohème by Ronny Cammereri, played by Nicolas Cage. The camera lingers on Cher during the opera’s performance, and she is memorably moved by it in the moment. On their way out, she says, “I didn’t think she was gonna die. I knew she was sick!”
From Wagner’s Götterdämmerung – “Funeral March”
This 1981 Arthurian romance, directed by John Boorman, brought a whole generation to the music of Richard Wagner, because of the film’s unforgettable use of the magnificent Funeral March that follows the death of Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. Director Boorman had made memorable use of music before, in his 1972 film Deliverance, in which the light-hearted “Dueling Banjos” gets repurposed for an incredibly brutal scene that haunts anyone who has ever seen the movie.
From Rossini’s La gazza ladra – Overture
This forgotten little 1989 British comedy starred Jeff Goldblum, Rowan Atkinson, and was the big-screen debut of Emma Thompson. The film is hilarious, and it has one of the most hilarious sex scenes imaginable, set to the overture from Rossini’s delightful overture to La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), one of those operas you are unlikely to see except possibly in a conservatory. This scene represents one of the great uses of Rossini’s music that would likely have scandalized the famously prudish composer.
Music from Britten’s Billy Budd
Claire Denis’s extraordinary 1999 French film is a retelling of Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd set in the desert of Djibouti, with the French Foreign Legion doing their basic training. The film evocatively uses major sections of Benjamin Britten’s score from his opera, Billy Budd, and is highly recommended. This is one of the greatest uses of operatic music in a film.
Music from Verdi’s La traviata
It has to be mentioned, because of the obvious role opera plays in the plot of this 1990 film that made Julia Roberts into a mega-star. The Cinderella-trope is fairly worn, but the cast is so terrific that the film is enjoyable. Roberts plays Vivian Ward, a Los Angeles prostitute hired for a week by Richard Gere’s character, Edward Lewis, and he flies her to San Francisco to see an opera about another famous courtesan, Verdi’s La traviata. Working full time at the San Francisco Opera when the film premiered, we were all mostly horrified at how mediocre the performance was of La traviata in the film, but despite its obvious nod to Moonstruck, one sees the reasons Roberts became such an iconic actress.