| | Peter, I didn't want to ruin the excellent liner notes by noting that. However, you now give me no choice. A fine point made by Magee in the accompanying booklet:
Steiner himself always denied that he had "invented" film music, and gave all the credit to Wagner. In true Wagnerian fashion, Steiner scored many films by composing a few themes and then developing numerous leitmotifs out of those. The Fountainhead is no exception. ... Almost all the music in the film consists of variations on these themes, or in motifs derived from them.
There's lots more in the liner notes.
I should point out, btw, that this month, my "Song of the Day" at Not a Blog features "film scores" (in honor of the upcoming Academy Awards), and the Wagnerian connection is something that many film score composers and film directors understand (I point it out in a forthcoming post on "The Ten Commandments," for example, where director Cecil B. DeMille and composer Elmer Bernstein worked explicitly in that Wagnerian thread...)
I'll have more to say about film scores in my forthcoming SOLO essay on the life and legacy of Miklos Rozsa (which appears in the current Free Radical).
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