Maurice Jarre

FILM COMPOSERS DON’T write melodies so much as emotions; their music is the heartbeat that gives movie images instant and lasting resonance. Jarre, who died in Los Angeles on March 29 at 84, put this knowledge to use in his first famous scores: the heroic theme that lent a galloping grandeur to David Lean’s 1962 Middle Eastern western, Lawrence of Arabia, and the chorus of balalaikas in Lean’s 1965 Doctor Zhivago that promised ecstatic reunion after the grimmest separation. In a half-century of movie work, Jarre wrote the music for more than 150 features, but it’s his underscoring of Lean’s films that won him his renown–and three Oscars, for Lawrence, Zhivago and 1984’s A Passage to India.

Born in Lyons, France, in 1924, Jarre made his way to Paris after the war and contributed incidental music to theater pieces. In 1951, Georges Franju, maker of uncompromising documentaries, hired Jarre to score Hôtel des Invalides, his study of wounded veterans; it was the first of many Jarre pieces (The Longest Day, The Train, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) that found a sepulchral undertone in martial music. Old masters like William Wyler (The Collector) and Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz) and Young Turks like Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction) and Jerry Zucker (Ghost) called on Jarre to provide music that was subtle and looming, like a shiver in the shadows.

Jarre once said that in the flush of his career, he took so many assignments because he had three ex-wives and a lot of alimony to pay. The first of his marriages produced a son, Jean-Michel Jarre, a renowned composer of electronic music. But it is Papa Maurice’s “Lara’s Theme” from Zhivago moviegoers recall whenever they think of snow, sleds and the ache of lost love.