For a man who confesses he isn’t truly a cinephile, the French-Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared has contributed enormously to film – and prospered from it.
In recognition of the rich fund of music he has created for the big screen, bringing him an Oscar, effusive acclaim and occasional controversy, Yared is among the judges at the 70th Cannes Film Festival, which closes on Sunday.
Yared, who as a small boy in Beirut threatened to throw himself under a tram if his father didn’t buy him an accordion seen in a music shop window, describes himself as a composer of music for film, not a film-music composer.
If the distinction seems nuanced, it’s important to him. “I believe a composer must serve the spirit of a film rather than serving the film literally,” he told the France Info radio station this year. “I do not look too much at the film in order to compose.”
This air of artistic detachment seems all the more remarkable when set against not only his membership of the Cannes jury but the evidence of a career devising compelling scores for cinema.
His music for the late Anthony Minghella's triumphant 1996 movie The English Patient, the first of several collaborations, won one of its nine Academy Awards, for best original dramatic score.
He also took Bafta, Golden Globe and Grammy prizes for The English Patient, received Oscar nominations for two other film scores, The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003), and a French César in 1993 for L'Amant (The Lover).
Among a handful of failures, one was as spectacular as the successes – and, according to some critics, not a failure at all. Yared spent more than a year composing music for the Hollywood epic Troy, after being headhunted by the director Wolfgang Petersen. Despite lavish preparations involving a 100-piece orchestra, a Bulgarian choir, a Macedonian singer and a brass section, the end product was not to the liking of studio chiefs at Warner Brothers.
The audience at a test screening was unimpressed. One complaint had the music as "too brassy and bold". With less than four weeks before the film's opening, Yared was unceremoniously ditched in favour of James Horner, responsible for the bestselling film score in history, Titanic.
Horner, later killed in a light-aircraft crash, was scathing of Yared’s “absolutely dreadful” efforts. Yared had complained that he wasn’t given the chance to ”fix” his score; Horner claimed the changes he proposed would have made it even worse.
But Horner’s disparaging view was not universally shared. One respected American critic, Christian Clemmensen, owner of the website Filmtracks, said “time and perspective” favoured Yared’s work. While Horner produced a score – admittedly in a hurry – that was “functional but mundane”, he said, Yared’s work was vastly superior, the “momentous crown jewel of his career”.
Gabriel Yared, now 67, was born in Beirut on October 7, 1949. It wasn’t a blissful childhood; he suffered poor eyesight, often felt lonely, faced parental resistance to his musical inclinations and was easily bored by academic study. From 4, he attended a Jesuit boarding school, his family hoping to propel him into medicine, engineering or law. But once in possession of the accordion he had begged his father to buy, he became engrossed in music, soon switching to theory and piano though without showing obvious virtuoso ability.
At 14, he took over as organist at the Saint-Joseph University after the death of his piano teacher, Bertrand Robilliard, who had previously fulfilled the role. With access to the university library, he researched the works of classical composers, especially Bach. He met family expectations by obtaining a law degree – his father remaining steadfastly opposed to his musical aspirations – but in 1969, travelled to France to attend the famed École Normale de Musique in Paris. There, he flourished under the tutelage of the influential composers Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana. Dutilleux warned him to improve his command of musical theory, without which he felt Yared would be restricted in his own compositional development. Yared felt "like a tourist", he told The National last year. "I hadn't studied music, so I was allowed to attend but not participate."
Then came an opportunity that changed his life. Back in Beirut in 1971, he was asked to work with a Lebanese contestant in a Rio de Janeiro song contest and co-wrote Song Without Love, which took third place.
He chose to stay in Brazil. A biography by Heather Laing describes comprehensively how a one-off project grew into a lifestyle and career, composing by day and playing piano by night in Ipanema’s Number One Club.
By 1972, he was in Paris again. He won praise for an album he made as composer, orchestrator and singer with the Costa Brothers. He went on to collaborate with the cream of the era’s French popular music, from Charles Aznavour and Johnny Hallyday to Françoise Hardy and Mireille Mathieu. He was also in demand for advertising jingles, and theme tunes for television and radio. But he still wanted to write music for the cinema. Laing’s exploration of his career talks of a childhood passion, a “love affair with score reading”. Yet his relationship with film was complex; he always enjoyed adventure movies, but – then as now – found depictions of violence troubling.
A path into score-writing finally presented itself when Hardy's husband, Jacques Dutronc, a seasoned singer, songwriter and actor, recommended him to the director Jean-Luc Godard for Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (Every Man for Himself) in 1980. "I told him I knew nothing about writing music for a movie," Yared said years later. "He said: 'Don't worry, just use your imagination.'"
Throughout his career, Yared has struggled against frustrations he feels the industry imposes on him. More than once, he has been tempted to abandon the composition of film scores altogether, even viewing his success with The English Patient with ambivalence, especially when two subsequent scores were rejected.
Even so, Yared is proud of his craft. He once said film composers should be treated as salaried staff, on the payroll from the moment they are hired rather than simply paid a commission.
His need for recognition seems powerful. When his score for Troy was turned down, he posted an excerpt on his own website until Warner Bros forced its removal. Bootleg versions survived, ensuring the gesture was not wasted.
Yared is a man and a musician full of contradictions. He once said he had no desire to be a “slave-composer who adjusts his melodies to the image”.
But amid all he’s well known for, there’s one example of his copious output that relatively few in France associate with him though many hear it daily. For all his protestations, it serves as the perfect introduction to dramatic imagery: television news.
The breathlessly urgent theme that opens the TF1 prime-time news bulletin is his. And as the newspaper Le Monde noted recently, it has been heard every day since 1984.
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