The Rehearsal Alexandre Desplat The King’s... • The Automaton

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The Rehearsal
Alexandre Desplat
The King’s Speech (2010)

Oddly, the track titled The King’s Speech in Alexandre Desplat’s splendid score for the Harvey Weinstein-powered, quadruple Oscar-winning The King’s Speech is not the piece played over the climactic scene, where His Majesty King Colin Firth is standing behind an ancient microphone and delivering King George VI’s first wartime speech over the airwaves, replete with dramatic pauses and tricks of elocution prescribed by Lionel Logue as portrayed by Geoffrey Rush, ever a servant of regal films; an adaptation of the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, renamed Speaking Unto Nations and conducted by Terry Davies, was used for that purpose. Desplat’s The King Speech was appropriated instead for the film’s opening scene, which focuses on the then Prince Albert, Duke of York’s closing speech for an exhibition at a stadium filled with spectators. Initially inviting and imbued with sophisticated whimsy reminiscent of the composer’s brilliant work in Fantastic Mr. Fox (one could just imagine Roald Dahl’s canine character blithely skipping along to the track’s first half), it eventually segues to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows territory with an unsettling near-silence of strings that sound almost like a cry for help coupled with intermittent attempts by a piano at giving solace as poor Bertie in front of his subjects struggles with his bloody stammer. But named as it was after the film, The King’s Speech is not the most memorable of Desplat’s compositions for The King’s Speech. That distinction belongs to The Rehearsal, the elegantly endearing music accompanying the public speaker and the speech therapist’s rehearsal not for the king’s speech but for the coronation oath. Superbly modulated to evoke the growing bond of (to borrow the compound word of director Tom Hooper) man-love between the two central characters, it’s but one of the many excellent pieces of modern film music from one of the most prolific and most eloquent film composers working today.

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