In his letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov misses his wife. He longs for that “thin shadow of [her] voice”. But what does this voiceless shadow sound like? What does he hear in his memory of the real her? This is what composer and pianist Michael Nyman endeavored to answer.
Tasked with painting a score to director Jane Campion’s lustful, romantic and wild The Piano (1993), Nyman needed to plant music where words could not reach.
The mouth, that of nonspeaking protagonist Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), who is as elusive as she is piano-obsessed. And as a talented maiden just promised to a stately man Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), Ada is sent to his land.
The place? New Zealand. Where the cacophony of waves sweeps Ada and her young precocious daughter Flora ashore. Anna Paquin would go on to snag the Academy award for this role - the youngest actress to do so behind Tatum O’Neill.
Their piano in tow, Michael Nyman’s score opens the scene. The song? A Wild and Distant Shore.
So it is within that Wild and Distant Shore that I bring you. For this is the song, track number 3, that I linger with. Pause here and listen to Track #3 now for the rest of reading.
Beautiful, right?
The song is a percussive dream-like mixture of music. It rocks us, like an angry ocean would. We are spit out onto the shore. Like Ada and Flora, stranded for a night underneath candlelit crinolines.
This song anchors the film. It forces a buoy within the ocean of a plot. And we are forcibly brought back to its strange safety. For it is enchanting, haunting and deeply inspiring.
And we’re not alone.
So powerful is this score that it floated to the ears of Galliano and McQueen too.
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