Beauty and the Beast

The prologue score, which uses stained-glass images and narration to set out the spell and the condition of the rose.

• The opening phrases, unfolded quietly by woodwinds and strings, already hide fragments of the title song's melody. It is worth remembering them, because that melody returns in the final scene.
• Menken is said to have drawn inspiration for this passage from Saint-Saëns's “The Carnival of the Animals.” That is why it sounds in a French orchestral color, like a storybook falling open.
• At the moment the spell is cast, the music suddenly turns to dark harmonies, foreshadowing the shadows of the story. The narration is by David Ogden Stiers, who voices Cogsworth the clock.

The opening song, which stages as a single scene how the villagers see Belle as she walks through town with a book in hand.

• The way spoken lines interrupt the song here and there is modeled on nineteenth-century operetta (a light comic opera mixing song and dialogue). It was a rare approach for animation at the time.
• Where Belle's slow, dreamy line and Gaston's quick tune overlap at once, you can hear a countermelody (a technique of sounding two different melodies together). That the two characters want different things becomes audible.
• At the end, nearly the whole village sings together and the number swells like the opening of a Broadway musical. Critics found it reminiscent of “Fiddler on the Roof” or “She Loves Me.”
• Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to the same film's title song.

The feast Lumière and the servants lay on for Belle, a prisoner in the castle, and the most dazzling showpiece in the film.

• Lumière's opening bars sound like the patter of a French cabaret singer. As the song goes on, it grows to the scale of a Hollywood revue film (a show film parading one song-and-dance number after another), with the cutlery dancing in formation.
• Midway there is a passage taken up by Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Potts the teapot. It carries the excitement of servants who have had no guests to welcome since the spell was cast.
• A melody Menken had written as a placeholder became the final song as it stood. It was originally sung to Maurice.
• One of three songs nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

A short song capturing the moment in the snowy garden when Belle and the Beast discover sides of each other they had never known.

• Belle and the Beast, with each other right there, do not speak to one another but confess their feelings as if to themselves. The song becomes a window onto the characters' inner thoughts.
• The brief length of just over two minutes and the light accompaniment were deliberate choices. They suit a scene about the beginning of a very small change.
• This song was put in to replace “Human Again,” the big number that originally stood here. Listening to the two side by side shows what the filmmakers chose.
• At the end, the servants chime in, hoping for the couple's future, and that passage ties the song into the arc of the whole story.

The title song, sung lullaby-style by Mrs. Potts over the two dancing at the ball.

• The song is described as lullaby-like. With its unhurried, slow tempo and low-lying melody, it sounds less like a grand love song than like the voice of someone telling a long-familiar story.
• Late in the song a modulation (shifting the tonal center to lift the whole song up a step) makes the music swell, before it fades away into the sound of trembling violins.
• Angela Lansbury sang the song in a single take, and that recording went into the film as it was. Paige O’Hara, the voice of Belle, recalled that people in the studio were in tears.
• It won the Academy Award·Golden Globe for Best Original Song. The pop version by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson played over the end credits, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard chart and winning a Grammy.

A marching song in which Gaston stokes the villagers’ fear and drives them to the castle.

• One voice cries out first and many sing after it. As people join one by one, the chorus thickens, showing in sound how a crowd is formed.
• The marching rhythm, locked to the footsteps on the forest path, is the exact opposite of the swaying waltz time of the ball before it. That the film places this song right after the title song makes the contrast all the sharper.
• It pairs with the village chorus that whispered about Belle in the first song, “Belle.” The voices of the same people now return as a threat.
• The sounds of the servants inside the castle readying to fight back cut in here and there, so that time in the two places crosscuts.

A long score cue that carries the story from the moment the last petal falls to the very end.

• For the first few minutes the music lingers low, almost as if halted. It is a passage that conveys the weight of the scene by taking sound away.
• The melody heard in the prologue reappears, linking the story’s beginning and end as if answering the question posed in the overture. It is worth listening for whether the same tune now means something different than it did at first.
• Toward the end, chorus and orchestra unfold the title song’s melody on a grand scale. It is the final chapter of the score that won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
• Some early pressings carried an early version of this track, later corrected.