Gladiator Soundtrack CD Review

This is a soundtrack that has impressed me greatly and which I would listen to several times a day while I worked. The themes were not necessarily unique - I can hear Sigfried's Funeral Music from Wagner (used in Excalibur), Holtz's Mars from the Planets, lovely Celtic music, Spanish guitar work, and much more. Some hear Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King. Each fits perfectly into its location. The Roman empire was huge, encompassing a quarter of the known population of the entire Earth. The music moves from location to location - from the military machine that was the Roman Army in the depths of Germania, across to the middle east, and back into Rome itself.


You take that journey through the music - the strength and honor of the Roman soldiers, the code of the gladiators, the love, the deception. There are common themes running through the music, and yet each piece represents and entirely different slice of the world that was the Roman Empire. There are other similar soundtracks that I've loved - those to Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian come to mind - but in those cases they often just lifted classical works known for their power. In this case Zimmer created entirely new works which pay homage to those classics but bring them to a new level, tailoring them to fit within the pathway of the movie.

My two favorite passages are The Battle and The Barbarian Horde. You can definitely hear the similarities to Mars and Sigfried in both. If anything, that has me enjoy them even that much the better.



There's even a second CD you can get if you want more of the music, but this one is a definite must-have. You don't get familiar with the tunes as you replay them. Instead, you find even more nuance, even more meaning in the songs you thought at first were 'less good'. I consider this a masterpiece up with my favorite classical music CDs.

I love in "The battle":
Right at the start, the stirring march at 4:17, theme back at 5:55


Zimmer does this in the style of a "Viennese Waltz" to show the finely tuned mechanics of the Roman army - professional soldiers paired with gorgeous silks and statues in their emperor's war tent. He says in an interview: "There is a complete intellectual trick in it that I always wanted to bring off. It starts off in one key and it keeps moving through keys but you can't tell where the changes occur. By bar 32 you are an augmented 5th higher and you cannot catch where the key change actually occurs!"

I love in "Barbarian Horde":
energy at 4:38; power at 5:05/5:21; theme at 5:38; Sigfried homage at 7:15 (with a Spanish guitar, for the Spaniard general!) and 8:08 - 8:50. Note: in Sigfried's Funeral Music, this part beings at 3:30.

Another exchange with Zimmer goes:

Reviewer: Interestingly, it is reported that you were not classically trained. But you clearly have a wide interest in the classics. I could hear influences of Holst ('Mars' from The Planets and something, too, of 'Battle in the Air' from Walton's music from the film Battle of Britain in Gladiator's battle music; and definitely Wagner ( Siegfried's Journey to the Rhine and Siegfried's funeral music from Götterdamerung) in 'The Might of Rome'

Zimmer: Yes, the Wagner was a very conscious choice. The scary thing for me was when after I saw the entry into Rome it seemed so apposite. I managed to assume the style of Wagner so easily that I was able to write that piece in an hour. I think the Holst evolved as an accident, I was more conscious of striving after Stravinsky's sort of brutality. The Walton music you mentioned is one of my favourites

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