Nostalgia, the Silent Cinema, and the Art of Quotation in Herbert Stothart’s Score for The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Abstract

Composed under the direction of Herbert Stothart, the orchestral score to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) is laden with musical quotations ranging from Kodály to Schumann. While the inclusion of outside musical sources in a film score is not unusual, Stothart elevates this practice to a high level of sophistication. In particular, he incorporates melodies previouslyassociated with silent film musical accompaniment, reinforcing Oz’s nostalgic character by hearkening to an earlier era of film exhibition. In this article I analyze the various implications of this musical nostalgia as they intersect with earlier cinematic practices, the film’s narrative, and Herbert Stothart’s musical aesthetics. In addition to bringing a retrospective quality to the Oz score, Stothart’s quotations interact musically and semantically with the film’s songs, furtherunifying orchestral background score and vocal material.

Oneiric music: Dream signals in early cinema.

“…Melody-related dream signals of the sort described above quickly enough came to be regarded as old-fashioned. Indeed, it was doubtless for reasons of reminding audiences of cinema’s “good old days” that Herbert Stothart’s score for MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is “chock full of musical quotations and allusions” (Platte, 2012, p. 47). One of those allusions is to the time-worn “Brahms’s Lullaby,” heard not when Dorothy is beset by the cyclone and knocked unconscious but, rather, deep in the film when Dorothy and her friends are put to sleep by a spell cast by the Wicked Witch of the West.…”