Schindler's List

Based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark, Steven Spielberg’s black-and-white film tells the story of real-life German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of Polish-Jewish refugees by employing them in a munitions factory. It not only draws on the very best in acting talent, with Liam Neeson in the title role alongside Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley, but features one of the all-time great director–composer collaborations in the history of film music. John Williams’ score—which earned him his fifth Oscar, in 1994—puts the violin centre stage, with virtuoso Itzhak Perlman bringing the main theme, intended to evoke a Hebraic lullaby, rousingly to life. Hear how he gives full voice to the sorrow of the Jewish people and their unbroken will to survive; like the film’s other main theme, “Remembrances”, a lamentation for the dead, it is filled with expressive lyricism. Elsewhere, Williams finds new emotional depths in a requiem for strings and mixed choir that’s filled with searing pathos. Overall, it’s a score that combines all the expressive resources of 19th-century Romanticism with the emotive power of the traditional Jewish music of central Europe.