John Williams by John Williams

Es la primera vez, en más de dos años, que tengo la oportunidad de escribir sobre la música que me gusta. Y estoy fascinada. El texto intenta esbozar la manera en que se compone una banda sonora. Aún así, no hablaré de John Williams porque tengo la idea romántica de que algún día lo entrevistaré y, ahí sí, ahondaré en su trabajo. Sin embargo, estaba leyendo sobre el tema y me encontré con una entrevista que le hizo Tony Thomas en los noventa. Y nada, que vengo a copiar dos de las preguntas y respuestas por el puro gusto de recordar por qué me apasiona tanto su trabajo.

Nota: J.W. dirigió Jane Eyre la primera vez que volé a Boston para verlo. Sobra decir que la experiencia me cambió la vida.

I’ve heard you say that Jane Eyre is one of your own favorite scores –beautifully rhapsodic music but again nothing like the Violin Concerto, with its harmonic complexities and advanced tonalities. Where does your musical heart lie?

I think that Jane Eyre is very close to my musical heart. It comes out of Yorkshire, you know the Brontë book. And it’s created folk music, if you like, and I like it to play it because it is gratifying for the orchestra and melodic in a very colorful and atmospheric way. And if one could say that one’s heart lies with one’s own music and still be within acceptable taste, then I can say that something of my heart lies with some of that music. In the case of the Violin Concerto, it’s dedicated to my late wife Barbara and some aspects of that piece lie within my heart, also even though the technical apparatus that presents it may be, on the surface, somewhat different, the connections to the heart are just as direct.

You’ve been very successful. Presumably you can now do only what you want to do –or am I assuming too much?

Well, I think it maybe assumes a little too much. Within the affairs of all of us, we rarely can do always exactly what we want to do, and perhaps it wouldn’t be a wholesome state of affairs if we could. It isn’t true that I can pick and choose every film that I want to. And I probably wouldn’t want to do that even if I could because the burden of picking a winner could become very great. There are films that I would have liked to have done. I will always say that I have been very lucky, but I think success can be such an illusion, a state of mind, and if you can wear it healthily and in a wholesome way, it’s fine. It can be very damaging to a lot of people. I consider myself being fortunate to be working with the people I do. As long as my energies are intact and I love music then I just figure I am the luckiest person in the world to go on the stage with these great orchestras, and it is a job. I really don’t think about it as being the result of a success. I think I’ve been given a great gift.