Eyes Wide Shut - Music

Music

Jocelyn Pook wrote the original music for Eyes Wide Shut, but like other Kubrick movies the film was noted for its usage of classical music. The opening title music is "Waltz 2 from Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra". One recurring piece is the second movement of György Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica ricercata". Kubrick originally intended to feature "Im Treibhaus" from Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, but the director eventually replaced it with Ligeti's tune feeling Wagner's song was "too beautiful". In the morgue scene, Franz Liszt's late solo piano piece, "Nuages Gris" ("Grey Clouds") (1881) is heard. "Rex tremendae" from Mozart's Requiem plays as Bill walks into the cafe and reads of Mandy's death.

Pook was hired after choreographer Yolande Snaith rehearsed the masked ball orgy scene using Pook's composition "Backwards Priests" - which features a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy recorded in a church in Baia Mare, played backwards - as a reference track. Kubrick then called the composer and asked if she had anything else "weird" like that song, which ended was reworked for the final cut of the scene with the title "Masked Ball". Pook ended up composing and recording four pieces of music, many times based on her previous work, totaling 24 minutes. The composer's work ended up having mostly string instruments - including a viola played by Pook herself - with no brass or woodwinds as Pook "just couldn’t justify these other textures", particularly as she wanted the tracks played on dialogue-heavy scenes to be "subliminal" and felt such instruments would be intrusive.

Another track in the orgy, "Migrations", features a Tamil song sung by Manickam Yogeswaran, a Carnatic singer. The original cut had a scriptural recitation of the Bhagavad Gita which Pook took from a previous Yogeswaran recording. Given Hindus protested against their most sacred scripture being used in such a context, Warner Bros. issued a public apology, and hired the singer to record a similar track to replace the chant.

The party at Zigler's house features rearrangements of love songs such as "When I Fall in Love" and "It Had to Be You", used in increasingly ironic ways considering how Alice and Bill flirt with other people in the scene. As Kidman was nervous about doing nude scenes, Kubrick stated she could bring music to liven up. When Kidman brought a Chris Isaak CD, Kubrick approved it, and incorporated Isaak's song "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing" to both an early romantic embrace of Bill and Alice and the film's trailer.