Gabriel Yared

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Gabriel Yared, 2017

Gabriel Yared (born October 7, 1949 in Beirut ) is a Lebanese composer . He gained fame primarily through his work on over 90 compositions for film and television. The musical autodidact began to compose pieces himself at an early age and, at the age of 14, took over from his late mentor as organist at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut. After a stay in Brazil, Yared settled in France in the 1970s, where he made a name for himself as an orchestra conductor and began working as a film composer. In 1997 he became the background music for Anthony Minghella's feature film The English Patientwith the Oscar awarded.

biography

childhood and education

Yared was born in Lebanon in 1949 and lived there until he was eighteen. When he was four years old, he attended a Jesuit school in Beirut . Yared was first introduced to music at the age of seven through his father , who recognized his son's musical talent and placed him in the care of an accordion teacher. Two years later, his music teacher fired him for teaching Yared everything he knew. Yared began studying music theory at the age of eleven and took piano lessons for half an hour a week . Yared quickly realized that he had more of a talent for composing and "reading" music and with his knowledge of a variety of musical instruments he began to compose music himself.

Yared's piano teacher died three years later, and only 14 years old, he took the place of his late mentor as organist at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut. In the large musical library of the Jesuit school, which he attended, he was able to read the works of composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach , Robert Schumann , Franz Liszt , Dietrich Buxtehude , Johann Pachelbel , Maurice Duruflé , Olivier Messiaen , Jean Langlais and Charles-Marie Widor and César Franck to study. The working alone enabled him to continue to compose music, including the age of 14 a first piano - Waltz .

Since Yared parents welcomed any musical career for her son, he began after his graduation, where he, among other philosophy -classes in French and Arabic was a study of the jurisprudence at the University of Saint Joseph. Nevertheless, he continued his musical studies on the side.

It was difficult to get music sheets in Lebanon, but Yared's father occasionally bought some for his son on his trips abroad. Yared had never heard of Sergei Prokofjew or Béla Bartók and hardly knew Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel , but in 1966 he was able to compose a polyphonic refrain for a poem by Paul Valéry , as well as a piano trio (for piano , violin and Cello ) in 1968. During that time, Yared's musical mentors were mostly the Beatles , Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye . He continued to practice on the church organ of the University of Saint Joseph and gave two concerts .

At the age of 20, Gabriel Yared decided to give up law studies and pursue a musical career (although he had never received an academic music education). In 1969 he traveled to Paris , where, as a non- enrolled student at the Ecole Normale de Musique , he was able to attend classes from Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana . Dutilleux, astonished by Yared's talent, encouraged him to learn the rules of musical composition .

First steps to a professional career

At the end of the 1971 academic year, Yared traveled to Brazil to visit his uncle. The planned fourteen-day stay turned into a year and a half. During this time the President of the World Federation of Light Music Festivals , Augusto Marzagao , asked him to write a song for the Rio “Maracanazinho” Song Festival , which should represent Lebanon. Yared was not able to perform herself, but the artist Gwen Ovens stood in for Yared and won the competition. A little later, Yared himself took third place at the Vina del Mar Festival in Chile .

In Brazil, Yared composed a bossa nova , and after a month he spoke Portuguese as well as a Carioca, a native of Rio de Janeiro . Here Yared met contemporary composers such as Don Salvador , Ivan Lins , Jorge Ben , Edu Lobo and Elis Regina . He had a small orchestra of six musicians and every night he played with them in Ipanema's most famous nightclub , Number One , the pieces he had composed hours before. He gave a concert with a sax - quartet , led by Paulo Moura in the Cecilia Meres Hall and completed for Ivan Lins an album as a conductor .

The stay in Brazil influenced Yared in his later musical work, e.g. B. for his compositions for the score of Betty Blue - 37.2 degrees in the morning , or the songs that Yared would later write for Michel Jonasz or Françoise Hardy .

The musical breakthrough

While Yared applied for a carte desanove (Brazil's equivalent to the US green card ) to move to Brazil entirely, he decided to travel to Lebanon for a few days to say goodbye to his parents. But luck would have it that, after a short stay in Paris , he decided to stay entirely in France. During this time he lived with the musicians Georges and Michel Costa . Together with the brothers, Yared tried to gain a foothold as a songwriter . During this time, he also conducted an orchestra for the first time, which consisted of string instruments , a brass band and a choir . To support his friends, he also included drums , bass and percussion instruments in his orchestra . The musicians Yared worked with in the recording studio were enthusiastic about his talent as a conductor, and he soon had such a good reputation that he conducted two or three orchestras a day for the next six years and his work as a musical composer was forgotten. In 1979 Yared had such a good repute as an orchestra conductor that he quit his career for a while to give lessons with Julien Falk , a former teacher at the Conservatoire de Paris .

After the collaboration with the Costa brothers came to an end, Gabriel Yared worked for Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan , Enrico Macias , Charles Aznavour and Gilbert Bécaud . From 1974 to 1980 he wrote and learned, seized opportunities and tested orchestral and rhythmic combinations. With the money Yared earned, he bought classical scores and continued to work as a music composer.

In order, as he himself says, not to be enslaved by the orchestra , he decided to try his hand at songwriting in 1976. He worked with Françoise Hardy, for whom he produced the album Star , which included rhythmic direction, orchestral work, vocal tuning, song selection and mixing . He continued to work with artists such as Michel Jonasz, Michel Fugain and Mina . During this time he stepped away from the role of conductor and placed more emphasis on composing, artist directing and producing. He worked increasingly on advertising and composed many radio - and TV - Jingles . In 1980 he created the jingle for the TF1 news . He also recorded a music album on which he interpreted vocal pieces.

Career as a film composer

The introverted Gabriel Yared was actually not made to be a film composer, as he himself revealed in interviews . He is not a film expert or a man of pictures, and he does not go to the cinema . Yared is severely nearsighted, and because of this, it was a tough time for him to resist the ubiquity of the image on canvas . As a composer, he found the images within himself, inspired by the words and the magic of his imagination. Nevertheless, in 1975 he composed the music for the film Miss O Ginie ou les hommes fleurs by the Belgian director Samy Pavel . He had his first real experience with the medium of film with the pieces he wrote in 1979 for Jean-Luc Godard's Rette sich, wer kann (life) .

When Yared worked with Françoise Hardy, her husband Jacques Dutronc became aware of Yared. He was in discussion for a role in Godard's film and mentioned Yared's name when Godard was looking for a classical musician to develop musical variations on an already established theme. Yared met with Godard, who had been fascinated by four bars from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera , La Gioconda . Yared was supposed to find the music passage, conduct it and edit variations of it for Godard's film. Yared was averse to this commitment and replied to the French director that he should buy a show business guide in which he could look up the contact address of a conductor. Oddly enough, Godard had enjoyed the conversation and contacted Yared for a second meeting. Again, Godard did not reveal the core elements of the film, but Gabriel Yared wrote the score based on what they had previously agreed without Yared seeing a single scene of the film.

Yared thought this first experience made sense because it went hand in hand with his way of working and thus justified it. For him, it is a healthy attitude not to be fixed on too many elements when composing or not to be overwhelmed by the images, which increases the freedom of creation and imagination. From 1979 to 1983 he maintained these basic rules with a certain stubbornness. During this time Gabriel Yared only worked on his compositions before and during the shoot, rarely afterwards. In 1987 he was nominated for the film music in Jean-Pierre Mocky's Agent Trouble - Accidental Murder for the César , the French equivalent of the Oscar. In the next two years he was nominated again and won the 1989 film award for the compositions in Bruno Nuytten's artist biography Camille Claudel .

Over time, Yared became more flexible in the way he worked. Before shooting a film, he decided to devote himself to his film music, before he had to orientate himself on any existing pictures, and increasingly after the end of shooting. He practiced this method in Jean-Jacques Annaud's film The Lover , for which he won his second César, and in Anthony Minghella's film epic The English Patient . With this film he celebrated the greatest success of his career to date in 1997 and was awarded, among other things, the Oscar, the Golden Globe and a Grammy for his film music .

Yared has no set system or method in his work. His work varies, depending on the subject, depending on the individuals. It is important for the film composer to read the script, the relationship with the director, and gradually the relationship with the film editor and sound mixer. Although it has made him more flexible, he still rigorously approaches a theme, his compositions and their harmonious exploration. This way of working is relatively time-consuming, and so the film composer allowed himself a year, sometimes longer, for his pieces of music. A director who works in a similar way is Anthony Minghella who, after the great success of The English Patient, also engaged Yared for his two following productions The talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and On the way to Cold Mountain (2003). Gabriel Yared was again nominated for an Oscar in the category of best film music for both films, and in 2004 he won the British Academy Film Award for his work on On the Road to Cold Mountain .

Different successes

After more than 70 film compositions, mainly for French and American cinema, Gabriel Yared was commissioned in 2004 to create the score for Wolfgang Petersen's monumental film Troy . He worked with an orchestra that was additionally equipped with twenty-five brass players, percussion players and a powerful choir. After he had often performed vocal parts in his film scores, among others by artists such as Sinéad O'Connor , Miriam Stockley or Ramon Vargaz , he used the Macedonian vocal soloist Tania Tzarovska , who sang in her native language, for the film music in Troy . The film music, described as dark , rhythm-driven and powerful , was described by critics as the highlight of Gabriel Yared's artistic oeuvre, but tragically failed in test screenings. Yared was fired and then posted some excerpts from his movie soundtrack on his website , explaining in a comment that his music was felt to be too old-fashioned . James Horner was signed to replace Gabriel Yared shortly before the film release of Troy . In the Troja Director's Cut, which was published later, some music passages by Horner were then replaced by music by Yared and other composers.

The German production The Lives of Others , a film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in which Yared's film music is of decisive importance, received the Oscar in 2007. In 2006 he worked again with Anthony Minghella on Breaking and Entering (2006) and created the film music together with the formation Underworld . As a film composer, Yared always strives to find “new vocabulary” and “new ways of expression” . “What we need in order to develop further is an open ear as a counterpart. Not acceptance at any price, but someone who is also willing to take a risk - unless we want to carry out the same reflexes forever, the same habits from film to film. The appropriate, suitable music for every type of scene: for the love scene, for tension and so on. This way, as it was practiced in the past, is no longer justified today. "

The musical autodidact , who also wrote the music for ballet performances by Carolyn Carlson and Roland Petit , is the founder of the Pléiade Academy , which aims to train and promote young composers. In 2010 he was awarded the prize for the best European performance in world cinema by the European Film Academy .

In 2017 he was appointed to the competition jury of the 70th Cannes Film Festival .

Film music (selection)

Awards

Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award

2019
  • Awarded for extraordinary achievements in the field of film music genre.
Oscar
  • 1997: Best Dramatic Score for The English Patient
  • 2000: Nominated for Best Score in The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • 2004: nominated for the best film music in On the Road to Cold Mountain
British Academy Film Award
  • 1997: Best score for The English Patient
  • 2000: Nominated for Best Score in The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • 2004: Best score for On the Road to Cold Mountain (together with T-Bone Burnett )
Golden Globe Award
  • 1997: Best score for The English Patient
  • 2000: Nominated for Best Score in The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • 2004: nominated for the best film music for On the Road to Cold Mountain
César
  • 1987: nominated for the best film music in Betty Blue - 37.2 degrees in the morning
  • 1988: Nominated for Best Score in Agent Trouble
  • 1989: Best score for Camille Claudel
  • 1993: Best Score for The Lover
  • 2004: nominated for the best film music in Bon Voyage
  • 2007 : nominated for the best film music in Azur et Asmar
ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards
  • 1999: Best score for a top box office film for City of Angels
Australian Film Institute
  • 1993: nominated for the best film music in Escape from the Ice
Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards
  • 2000: Best Score for The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • 2004: nominated as best composer for On the Road to Cold Mountain
German film award
  • 2006 : nominated for the best film music for The Lives of Others
Emmy
  • 2009: nominated in the category Best Music for a TV Series (Drama) for The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Golden Satellite Awards
  • 1997: Best score for The English Patient
  • 1999: nominated for the best film music in City of Angels
  • 2004: nominated for the best film music in On the Road to Cold Mountain

literature

  • Mark Russell, James Young: Film music. Boston: Focal Press, 2000, ISBN 0-240-80441-4 , (English edition).
  • Heather Laing: Gabriel Yared's The English patient: a film score guide. Lanham, Md .: Scarecrow Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8108-4965-8 , (English edition).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b cf. Portrait at br-online.de ( Memento from October 16, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ cf. Criticism at original-score.de ( Memento from August 22, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ cf. Nervousness . In: Stuttgarterzeitung, May 15, 2004, p. 36
  4. ↑ cf. Press release at europeanfilmacademy.org, October 23, 2010 (accessed October 28, 2010)
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 17, 2005 in this version .
personal data
SURNAME Yared, Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lebanese composer
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Beirut