Organist and other musicians accompany gladiatorial combat. Roman mosaics, 2nd Century C. E., Zliten, Libya.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II boasts plenty of convincing weaponry and legions of CGI effects that recreate the carnage of the Colosseum and the architecture, if not the vibrant color, of Ancient Rome.
Even more amusing sport is to be had watching the parade of ahistorical fantasies pass by: from the digital sharks and mega-rhinos made to participate in the deathly games, to newspapers (paper hadn’t yet been invented) read by a toga-clad patrician in a Senate Starbucks. The face-lifts of the actors who re-upped for the sequel a quarter century on involve plastic-surgical techniques way beyond the skill-set of a Galen. The famed Roman doctor lived during the historical time of both movies, and even served as personal physician to Commodus (the evil Emperor played by Joaquin Phoenix in the first film) and accompanied Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) to the German frontier, which is where Gladiator began. Galen didn’t appear in the first film and doesn’t in the sequel, though a kindly medic undertakes some necessary stitching of the battered hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), in Gladiator II. These wrinkle-and-sag-proofed countenances are modern in aspect, yet they do remind us of the vanity of the Roman ruling class.
Hollywood has long taught us how to suspend belief, just as in Imperial America, realism is not the point.
Nothing is more fantastical yet also crucial to cinematic success in the globalized movie market than the soundtrack. The verisimilitude of the chariot and trireme is far more important to filmmakers than the sound and sight of the Ancient Roman tuba, cornu, and hydraulis, the musical instruments that accompany gladiatorial combat in so many of the depictions that survive from Antiquity.
In his PR-spot for the soundtrack of Gladiator II, Director Scott asserts that “music is a language” that “gives the film that added dynamic, as and when you need it.” Both the Romans and Barbarians speak English in this movie. The language of the music is equally anachronistic: Romantic—not Roman—symphonisms with select updates. As befits a would-be epic, the sonic scenery is grandiloquent, sentimental, manipulative, and excessive, the music toggling between the slily subliminal and sledgehammer obvious.
Heavyweight Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer scored the first Gladiator in 2000 and duly received one of his many Oscar nominations. In that soundtrack, Zimmer proved his mastery at marshaling soft-focus Wagnerian motives to conjure the requisite plot and personality points. The doomed hero of that picture (Russell Crowe’s Maximus) is at pains to remind the legionnaires under his command and, later, his fellow gladiators that “what we do in life echoes in eternity.” And so, Zimmer’s score does lots of echoing—ringing and reverb being the default signifiers of portent and promise.
Over his many decades in the movie business, Zimmer has proved himself an assiduous scorer of sequels. But he did not re-enlist for Ridley Scott’s latest sword-and-sandal campaign, claiming with supreme self-assurance that he had already, Zeus-like, “done that that world” and, in his not-so-humble estimation, “done it well.” Rome was not built in a day, but the original soundtrack didn’t take too much longer than that, maybe a few months. Gladiator was just one of four blockbusters that Zimmer scored that year. Even a less-than-discerning listener can’t help but notice that the main theme of that “world” is hardly distinguishable from that created for Pirates of the Caribbean, which came out a few years later. Zimmer’s swashbuckling symphonisms continue to prove lucratively fungible, from the sands of the Colosseum to the beaches of the Bahamas and beyond.
But rather than risk his reputation and fail to measure up to the musical glories of the first Gladiator, Zimmer handed the baton—or perhaps papyrus scroll— over to his protégé, Harry Gregson-Williams. In Gladiator II, we see the occasional image of Maximus flashed in from the first film, and Gregson-Williams also takes that hero’s theme and deftly transforms and reclads it as the motive for his successor, Lucius.
Gregson-Williams’s score for Gladiator II spreads to one hundred minutes—more than two-thirds of the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. At his disposal are a chorus and orchestra phalanxes, each a hundred strong. From these massed forces, the composer draws misty anticipations before clangorous battles, selfless strivings, hymns to Republican ideals, woozy dreams of the Elysian fields, dark schemings, and scratchy subterfuges. Gregson-Williams is a canny musical strategist, executing his battle plan with a marketable mix of the expected and the ingenious.
Even with the many New Age lessons learned from his mentor, Hans Zimmer, Gregson-Williams’s work is fundamentally as Romantic as so many of the scores in Hollywood’s catalog from a century soundtracks. His symphonic gestures have been carefully calibrated to make the viewer identify with the hero, despise the villain(s), feel the stirrings of love, the creeping dread of oncoming danger, and the noble demands of destiny. In the first Gladiator of 2000, Zimmer used serpentine melodic figures heard on a wooden flute to conjure the mystique of Iberia (Maximus was a Spaniard and assumed that sobriquet after being enslaved as a gladiator) and visions of the afterlife.
Like Zimmer, Gregson-Williams loves winding, exoticized cantillations, as when the Roman fleet arrives to conquer the African kingdom of Numidia at the outset of Gladiator. But the composer is also intent to add antique flavors to his symphonic palette. He discovered Spanish instrument-maker and performer Abraham Cupeiro and his Roman horn (cornu) and Greek flute (aulos). These instruments, described as “weird and wonderful” by Gregson-Williams, give texture and punch to the orchestral score, notwithstanding unconvincing claims that these sonic elements also add a layer of period authenticity. As if to acknowledge these musical adventurers and experiments, Scott even offers us a glimpse of some Roman street musicians doing some period piping as we follow our hero on the way to the amphitheater.
What is never heard in either Gladiator is the real instrument of the Colosseum: the organ. Scott fills the Colosseum with water for a thrilling naval clash, but his historical advisers didn’t add the vital water-organ—the authentic sound of the so-called games.
This mighty noisemaker and musical marvel had been invented in the 3rd century B.C.E. by the Alexandrian engineer Ctesibius. He devised a system in which a cistern filled with water was used to equalize the pressure of the wind supplied to the pipes by pumping two cylinders. This strong and steady wind pressure helped produce high decibels from the hydraulis (water-organ). Most of the forty or so surviving images from Antiquity place the instrument alongside gladiatorial combat. In the Satyricon by Petronius, the confidant of Nero, a slave seen carving meat at a party, is likened to “a gladiator in a chariot fighting to the accompaniment of a water-organ.”
The evil emperor from the first Gladiator film, Commodus, was known to be an organist, but none was more obsessed with the instrument than Nero, as Harry Morgan details in a recent article in the Classical Quarterly. One account describes how the Emperor, having hastened back to Rome to deal with a major slave revolt, “suddenly summoned the foremost senators and equestrians as a matter of urgency, as if to make some communication to them regarding the present situation, and then said to them (I quote his exact words): ‘I have discovered a way by which the water-organ will produce louder and more tuneful music.’”
Unlike horn or trumpet players, the hydraulis would not crack or waver. The near-miraculous machine could always outlast human breath, so long as slaves were pumping the cylinders and an adept organist, like Nero, operated the pipes. A multi-instrumentalist on aulos, lyre, and organ, Nero fancied himself not just a fabulous performer but a technical innovator, eager to make the hydraulis more impressive to the plebes in the circus and the amphitheater. Nero piped not just because of his artistic mania but for political purposes.
The water-organ was loved by the masses and obsessed over by more than one power-hungry Roman emperor. With what for Hollywood would be a mere modicum of license, Gladiator II could have let loose the crazed and musically adept emperor Caracalla (played by Joseph Quinn) to vamp on a fabulous reconstruction of the hydraulis as men slaughtered each other on the sand below in a scene to rival, indeed surpass, Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea with James Mason as a Captain Nemo playing not a water-organ, but an underwater-organ.
Mozart called the organ the Queen of Instruments; now, it’s thought of as the King. If the aged Scott or some future Hollywood Centurion mounts a third Gladiator, let that film help the organ regain, at long last, its throne as Emperor of Instruments.
