ABSTRACT
Like all of Stanley Kubrick’s later films, Barry Lyndon (1975) features extensive and varied cues of pre-existing music. In this, Kubrick’s signature ‘period’ film, the cues seem to be carefully situated both historically and geographically to match Thackeray’s rise-and-fall tale of an eighteenth-century Irish adventurer. Works by Handel, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Paisiello complement Kubrick’s celebrated visual references to eighteenth-century painting, while commentators have mapped the sequence of styles and genres (from Irish traditional music and other folk music to European art music) to the social hierarchy represented in the film. It is the kind of sophisticated music practice typically associated with Kubrick the auteur, a director who represents the very definition of what Claudia Gorbman defines as ‘auteur music’.
Though aware of Kubrick’s distinctively close involvement in the music production process, I want to problematise this kind of reading. As I will show, some of the most heavily featured music in Barry Lyndon itself already incorporates and cites other music in ways that introduce a complex and unstable intertextual weave, triggering chains of meaning that challenge interpretative reach, and with it, authorial control.
