The Great Dictator - Score

Score

The score was written and directed by Meredith Willson, later to become well-known as creator of the 1957 musical comedy The Music Man. Willson wrote:

I've seen take a sound track and cut it all up and paste it back together and come up with some of the dangdest effects you ever heard—effects a composer would never think of. Don't kid yourself about that one. He would have been great at anything — music, law, ballet dancing, or painting — house, sign, or portrait. I got the screen credit for The Great Dictator music score, but the best parts of it were all Chaplin's ideas, like using the Lohengrin "Prelude" in the famous balloon-dance scene.

According to Willson, the scene in which Chaplin shaves a customer to Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 had been filmed before he arrived, using a phonograph record for timing. Willson was to re-record it with the full studio orchestra, fitting the music to the action. They had planned to do it painstakingly, recording eight measures or less at a time, after running through the whole scene to get the overall idea. Chaplin decided to record the runthrough in case anything was usable, and "by dumb luck we had managed to catch every movement, and that was the first and only 'take' made of the scene, the one used in the finished picture".

James L. Neibaur has noted that among the many parallels that Chaplin noted between his own life and Hitler's was an affinity for Wagner's music, and Chaplin's general fondness for Wagner has also been noted in studies of Chaplin's overall use of film music. Many commentators have noted simply Chaplin's use of Wagner's Lohengrin prelude where Hynckel dances with the globe-balloon. Actually, Chaplin had a dual use of Lohengrin prelude in the film, both where dictator Hynkel dances with the globe-balloon, and then near the conclusion, as the exiled Hannah listens to the Jewish barber's speech celebrating democracy and freedom. The music completes and climaxes only in the barber's pro-democracy speech, but is interrupted by the globe-balloon popping in the dictator's dance.

Commenting on this, Lutz Peter Koepnick writes

How can Wagner at once help emphasize a progressivist vision of human individualism and a fascist preview of absolute domination? How can the master's music simultaneously signify a desire for lost emotional integrity and for authoritative grandeur?
Chaplin's dual use of Lohengrin points towards unsettling conjunctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Like Adorno, Chaplin understands Wagner as a signifier of both: the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the total work of art, and the origin of mass culture out of the spirit of the most arduous aesthetic program of the nineteenth century. Unlike Adorno, Chaplin wants his audience to make crucial distinctions between competing Wagnerianisms...Both...rely on the driving force of utopian desires, on...the promise of self-transcendence and authentic collectivity, but they channel these mythic longings in fundamentally different directions. Although exposes the puzzling modernity of Nazi politics, Chaplin is unwilling to write off either Wagner or industrial culture. Hollywood needs Wagner as never before in order to at once condemn the use of fantasy in fascism and warrant the utopian possibilities in industrial culture.