The Blue Max - Music

Music

The producers chose Jerry Goldsmith to compose the score after offering the job to Ron Goodwin who was working on another score. With Goldsmith, they requested a Germanic composition. Goldsmith was even introduced to the project with scenes incorporating a "temp track" from Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. Goldsmith said of this experience "I admit it worked fairly well but my first reaction was to get up and walk away from the job. Once you've heard music like that with the picture, it makes your own scoring more difficult to arrive at."

Goldsmith used a large orchestra, some cues requiring over 100 musicians, with large brass and percussion sections as well as a wind machine. On 4 April 1966, he conducted the soundtrack with the National Philharmonic Orchestra led by Sidney Sax at Shepperton Studios in London. These recordings were released on LP by Mainstream Records in 1966, and re-released on LP by Citadel Records in 1976. The soundtrack was released on CD by Varèse Sarabande 1985 and by Sony in 1995 (with seven cues of source music from the movie arranged by Arthur Morton). The score was once again released, this time complete and in correct film order with accurate track listings, by specialty-label Intrada in 2010.

André Previn chose an extended passacaglia from the score to perform on his television program Previn and the Pittsburgh in 1978 on the episode "Music that Made the Movies".

Five tracks of music from the film ("Overture", "First Flight", "The Bridge", "The Attack" and "Finale") were recorded on 11 March 1987, at Walthamstow Assembly Hall, London, and are incorporated as Tracks 1-5 into the CD, Goldsmith Conducts Goldsmith, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra and subsequently released by Silva Screen Records in 2002 (FILMCD336), though it had been originally released in 1989 by the Decca Record Co. Ltd./Filmtrax plc.