Submitted by
Malcolm Pratt
Allan Gray
Notes from a CD sleeve
Allan Gray (1902 - 1973) was born Joseph Zmigrod in Poland, and
studied under Arnold Schoenberg. He served as music director for Max
Reinhardt in Berlin, where his compositions included a children's opera
called "Wavelength ABC." He took his new name after arriving in England
in
the early 1930s, and began his motion picture career with the thriller
"F.P.I."
[not to be confused with the FBI, the Film British Institute - Malcolm]
[F.P.1. - that's a digit 1, not a letter I - starring Connie Veidt]
in 1933. In 1943, he started writing music for The Archers, the
production company founded by the writer/producer/director team of Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger. "Stairway to Heaven" (titled "A Matter of
Life and Death" in England) was the last and grandest wartime film made
by
the duo, a romantic fantasy about a pilot (David Niven) who finds himself
caught between two worlds - a Technicolor Earth, populated by passionate,
robust men and women, and a cold, monochromatic Next World, dedicated to
order - after he survives a jump from a burning plane without a parachute.
[Why oh why didn't they think to attach a parachute to that plane! - Malcolm]
The film wove a delicate, dazzling spell, its moods alternately exultant,
witty and tragic, with a boldness of spirit that lay somewhere midway
between an Offenbach opera and Beethoven's Choral Symphony.
Gray's score for "Stairway to Heaven," the major themes of which are
contained in this 1946 Prelude conducted by Charles Williams, opens with
its
expansive title music, swelling ominously (as does the universe on screen)
before giving way to the theme associated with the pilot's fear of the
irresistible heavenly forces at work, and the immense celestial stairway
that he imagines is waiting to lead him to his death (curiously, some 15
years later, composer Leonard Rosenman adopted a similar piano theme for
the
"Twilight Zone" story "And When the Sky Was Opened",
[any old-timers recall this episode? Although an old-timer myself, and
a fairly large fan of the "Twilight Zone", I don't recall it - Malcolm]
about three astronauts who find
themselves caught in a similar predicament.) The stairway motif is replaced
by the love theme (which was published, with lyrics, as "So Heavenly")
[anyone ever heard or seen this? - Malcolm]
- which is first heard in the film
coming from a harmonica played by a dead airman, newly arrived in the Next
World in the pilot's fantasy - manifested in a triumphant mode for the
dénouement.
