Adaptations of The Hobbit - Music

Music

• Leonard Nimoy sang a jaunty ditty about The Hobbit titled "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins". The recording originally appeared on the album The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, released in 1968. A music video accompanied it, featuring sand dunes and dancing girls.

• Paul Corfield Godfrey, who has written a large amount of music based on Tolkien with the permission of the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins Publishers, wrote a full-length opera on The Hobbit during the years 1971-76. The work divides into two parts entitled "Over Hill and Under Hill" and "Fire and Water", but the score of the second part only survives in fragments. Two orchestral suites were extracted from the work; the first of these was performed in London in 1971.

• German power metal band Blind Guardian have recorded many songs which contain either tributes or references to the works of Tolkien. On their 1992 album, Somewhere Far Beyond, the song "The Bard's Song - The Hobbit" tells part of the story of The Hobbit.

• In 2001, Marjo Kuusela produced the ballet Hobitti (The Hobbit in Finnish) with music by Aulis Sallinen for the Finnish National Opera.

• Dean Burry was commissioned by the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus to write an operatic version of the story for piano and choir to be performed in 2004. The performance rights were subsequently locked up by Tolkien Enterprises before being released in 2006. The Sarasota Youth Opera of the Sarasota Opera then requested full orchestration. With that and some revisions by the composer, the second version premiered on 9 and 10 May 2008 in the United States and was conducted by Lance Inouye.