The Last Emperor
Inside the red walls of the Forbidden City a life begins, and Western orchestral music by a Japanese composer, joined by Chinese instruments, follows it to the end.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The makers ⏳🌊
- ComposerRyuichi Sakamoto
He joined the film as the actor playing Amakasu, went on to write half the score, and became the first Japanese composer to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
- DirectorBernardo Bertolucci
He directed the film as the first Western feature granted permission to shoot inside the Forbidden City, and won the Academy Award for Best Director.
- ComposerDavid Byrne
The leader of Talking Heads, he wrote five pieces including the main title theme and co-produced the soundtrack album.
- ComposerCong Su
A Chinese composer who wrote "Lunch" for the soundtrack and shared the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
- Lead roleJohn Lone
Played the adult Puyi from young manhood to old age.
- Lead roleJoan Chen
Played Empress Wanrong.
I. The composer summoned as an actor
(The work) The Last Emperor is a film about the life of Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty. It was directed by the Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, and the British producer Jeremy Thomas raised its budget independently. It was the first Western feature film granted permission to shoot inside the Forbidden City, and it won in every one of the nine categories for which it was nominated at the Academy Awards. (The role) Ryuichi Sakamoto first joined the film not as a composer but as an actor. Bertolucci had taken note of him in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" and cast him as Masahiko Amakasu, the man who runs Japan's intelligence network in Manchuria. Sakamoto was a musician who had made electronic music with YMO, and for "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" he had written a film score on synthesizers. (The commission) After shooting wrapped and Sakamoto had returned to Japan, the director entrusted him with half of the score. The rest was written by David Byrne of Talking Heads and the Chinese composer Cong Su. Sakamoto had in mind a score built mainly on synthesizers, but Bertolucci wanted broad, sweeping orchestral music. The director is said to have urged him to remember that, though it was set in China, this was a European film. (The deadline) He was given little more than two weeks to compose and record. The recording was split among several studios in Tokyo, London and New York. With the music made this way, Sakamoto became the first Japanese composer to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Ennio Morricone, who wrote "Cinema Paradiso" in this series, had scored Bertolucci's "1900"; Sakamoto followed in his footsteps, working with the director again after The Last Emperor on "The Sheltering Sky" and "Little Buddha."
The music that opens the film was written not by Sakamoto but by David Byrne. The score the three composers divided among themselves begins here.
- On the soundtrack album this piece stands at the head of Byrne's share. Heard alongside Sakamoto's Western orchestral writing, it makes the difference between the two men's sound unmistakable.
- In Byrne's pieces it is worth listening closely to the colors of the percussion and wind instruments. It is worth listening closely to the colors of the percussion and wind instruments.
- Byrne did more than compose: as co-producer of the album he also handled arranging and mixing (the work of blending many sounds into one).
- For the music that includes this piece, Byrne, Sakamoto and Cong Su shared the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Golden Globe for Best Original Score.
II. The child beyond the yellow curtain
(The frame) The film opens in 1950, as war-crimes prisoners handed over to China by the Soviet Union step down onto a railway platform. One of them, a middle-aged man, is Puyi. The film moves forward by alternating between his time in this prison camp and the past he recalls. (The enthronement) The memories begin in Beijing in 1908. A three-year-old child is summoned from his home in the middle of the night, brought into the Forbidden City, and named emperor before the dying Empress Dowager Cixi. On the day of his coronation the child grows bored among courtiers who bow and bow without end, then runs toward a yellow curtain stirring in the wind. Beyond it opens a vast square lined with countless officials. The image is majestic, yet at its very center stands a small child who understands nothing. (The wet nurse) Inside the palace, the person closest to the child is his wet nurse, Armo. In the film she sings him a lullaby from China's northeast, but the song was not included on the soundtrack album. Emperor in name only, the child grows up apart from his mother, in the arms of eunuchs and his nurse. (The music) In this passage Sakamoto did not simply imitate Chinese court music. In his autobiography he admitted that until he received the commission he had not felt much drawn to Chinese music. So he bought a stack of Chinese music anthologies, listened to them all in a single day, and chose instruments to suit each era and scene. That was how he settled on his method: laying the colors of Chinese instruments over a framework of Western orchestral music.
Sakamoto's cue for the 1908 coronation scene, in which a three-year-old becomes emperor without knowing why.
- This is music of courtly majesty, yet at the center of the screen stands a small child. Listen for whether grandeur and awkwardness can be heard together.
- Sakamoto did not transcribe Chinese court music as it was. In this piece he first brings out his method of blending the colors of Chinese instruments into a Western orchestral framework.
- This is track 1 on the album. It is also the first of Sakamoto's pieces, which are arranged in the order the story unfolds.
- A short cue (a fragment of music written to fit a single scene) lasting under two minutes. Rather than a long-spun theme, it is music cut precisely to the scene, offering a glimpse of how film scoring works.
III. The boy within the walls
(Parting) Once the child has grown a little, the court sends Armo away, declaring him old enough to be weaned. The boy runs down the palace's long passageways after his nurse as her sedan chair recedes, but he cannot catch her. In this scene he learns for the first time that even an emperor cannot choose for himself so much as one person to keep by his side. (Abdication) Meanwhile the world outside has already changed. The Xinhai Revolution has brought a republic into being, and the boy remains emperor only within the walls of the Forbidden City. Whenever he tries to go beyond them, the gates close. He grows up amid ritual and play, unaware of what is happening outside. (The tutor) With the arrival of his Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston, the boy discovers bicycles, eyeglasses and Western books. Johnston, played by Peter O'Toole, serves as a small window opening onto the world beyond the walls. Puyi takes Empress Wanrong and a second consort, Wenxiu, and tries to change the palace, but in 1924, when a warlord's troops storm in, he is driven out of the Forbidden City. (Melody) The music in this chapter moves with the boy's heart. The cue for the scene in which he searches for his nurse is not grand court music. It sounds like a small song holding one child's sense of loss. The wedding cue is less a celebration than a reflection of the awkwardness of a bridegroom who is not yet a man. In each scene Sakamoto follows what the character feels in that moment before the atmosphere of the court of the period.
The cue for the passage in which the nurse is sent out of the palace and the boy emperor runs after her. It is the moment the emperor is alone for the first time.
- The title itself is a question the child asks. Rather than explaining from outside the scene, the music seems to step inside the boy's heart and ask along with him.
- In his autobiography Sakamoto explained that he brought in Jiang Jianhua, an erhu (a two-stringed Chinese instrument played with a bow) player then studying in Tokyo, and the pipa player Yang Baoyuan, and wrote music for each scene while listening to them play.
- The northeastern lullaby Armo sings in the film is not on the album. You might listen to this cue as taking up the place left empty by that song.
IV. Rain in Tianjin
(The concession) After leaving the Forbidden City, Puyi settles in the Japanese concession in Tianjin. There he wears Western suits, listens to jazz and throws parties. Many Western popular songs of the era play in the film, but most of them were not included on the soundtrack album. This is the period in which a man who was once emperor lives like a guest in Western-style society. (Temptation) Around this time Japan reaches out to Puyi, offering to make him emperor again. He takes that hand as a way to reclaim his lost throne. Behind the glittering life, the people around him begin, one by one, to prepare to leave his side. (Divorce) His second consort, Wenxiu, demands a divorce and leaves him. The scene in which she walks out into the rain-soaked street is one of the most talked-about in the film. For an emperor's woman to leave the emperor of her own accord had once been unthinkable. The scene is brief, yet few scenes show more clearly that an era has ended. (Momentum) Sakamoto's cue for this scene, "Rain (I Want a Divorce)," runs less than two minutes. Even so, after the film's release the piece broke away on its own and became one of Sakamoto's signature works. The strings drive forward, repeating the same figure without pause, while a broad melody soars above them. The resolve of the one who leaves and the helplessness of the one left behind are held together in a single piece. Sakamoto later rerecorded it for piano trio and often played it in concert.
The music for the scene in which the second consort, Wenxiu, demands a divorce and walks out into the rainy street. Beyond the film, it became one of Sakamoto's signature works.
- The ostinato (a technique of stubbornly repeating the same figure), in which the strings repeat a short figure without pause, sounds like streaks of rain, and like the footsteps of someone walking away.
- Above the repeating foundation a broad melody soars. A single piece holds a scene that is liberation for one person and loss for another.
- In the film it lasts under two minutes, but Sakamoto later rearranged it for piano trio (piano·violin·cello), included it on the album "1996," and often played it in concert.
- This is the piece that shows most vividly what came of Sakamoto, who had originally envisioned synthesizer music, turning to the orchestra at the director's request.
V. The puppet's throne
(Manchukuo) In 1934 Japan installs Puyi as emperor of Manchukuo, the puppet state it has set up in Manchuria. He wears the dragon robe once more, but real power lies with the Kwantung Army. His orders must pass through the hands of Japanese officials, and the speeches he gives are written by others. (Amakasu) In this chapter Sakamoto appears on screen himself. The Amakasu he plays presents himself as the head of a film studio but in fact runs intelligence operations. The composer, in other words, took the role of a cold-blooded perpetrator in the very film he would score. The piece the band plays in the banquet scene is also his, written before he was formally commissioned to compose. (Downfall) Empress Wanrong sinks into opium addiction, and the child she bears dies as soon as it is born. Puyi has neither the power to prevent this nor the power to demand the truth. In this period, when the title of emperor hangs at its highest, he is at his most powerless. (Silence) The cue for the child's death lasts less than a minute. Sakamoto did not give this tragedy a long piece of music. The music appears briefly and vanishes, and its very brevity makes it weigh all the more heavily. When Japan surrenders in 1945, Amakasu takes his own life, and Puyi, attempting to flee, is captured by Soviet troops. The splendid pageantry of Manchukuo collapses overnight.
The cue for the passage in which the child born to Empress Wanrong during the Manchukuo years loses its life the moment it is born. It runs less than a minute.
- It is the shortest of Sakamoto's pieces on the album. Music that breaks off quickly, rather than explaining the tragedy at length, lingers all the more heavily for it.
- Puyi's powerlessness seems to sound alongside it, in the music's refusal to resolve easily.
- The parenthetical subtitle attached to the title on the soundtrack album simply records the scene. It makes no secret of which scene this cue was written for.
VI. From the prison camp to the garden
(Reeducation) We return to the prison camp of 1950. The governor, Jin Yuan, tells Puyi to look back on his own past and write it down. For a long time Puyi insists that he, too, was a victim. Then he is shown documentary footage from the Manchukuo years and comes face to face with what was done under his name. In 1959 he admits his collaboration and is released under a special pardon. (Gardener) Once free, Puyi works as a gardener at the botanical garden in Beijing. In 1967, amid a Cultural Revolution parade, he sees the governor who once taught him being dragged off and humiliated by the Red Guards. The man who changed him is now trampled in his turn by the hands of a new era. Through this scene plays the music of the Red Guard accordion band and dance troupe, which also appears on the soundtrack. It is not composed film music but the sound of the era itself that fills the screen. (Return) At the end of the film, the aged Puyi buys a ticket and enters the Forbidden City. The place where he was first enthroned is now a museum that admits visitors. What happens there is best seen for yourself. But what the music does in this passage can be told. Sakamoto's theme unfolds fully and broadly for the first time, and the memories scattered earlier gather into one place. (Afterglow) The theme carries on through the end credits. The child who ran out through the curtain into the courtyard at three and the old man who bought a ticket to enter the same place overlap within this music. The film ends with music that seems to look back over the whole span of time one man has walked.
Sakamoto's main theme, running from the final passage in which the aged Puyi returns to the Forbidden City through the end credits.
- The album also carries two separate variations on this theme (the same melody heard again in a changed shape). The melody scattered throughout the film unfolds whole here for the first time.
- The orchestration, with strings and winds piled layer upon layer, sounds like Sakamoto's answer to Bertolucci's demand that the film, though set in China, be made as a European film.
- With this music Sakamoto became the first Japanese composer to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score. The soundtrack also won a Grammy for score for visual media.
- In the final scene this music does not explain what has happened. Instead it wraps the scene in a gaze that looks back over an entire life.
The lesser-known story
The first piece Sakamoto wrote for this film came before he had formally been commissioned to compose. He had meant only to appear as an actor, but two days before shooting the banquet scene in which Amakasu puts forward his cover identity as the head of a film studio, he was asked to write a piece for the onscreen band to play. Retrospective articles on the film's music present this piece as something like a rehearsal for the larger work that followed. Once the film was finished, the Oscar became so big a story that this starting point is seldom mentioned. In his autobiography “Music Sets Me Free,” Sakamoto confessed that until the commission he had not much cared for Chinese music. So he bought an anthology of Chinese music some twenty volumes long and listened to it in a single day, then brought in two musicians studying in Tokyo, the erhu player Zhang Jianhua and the pipa player Yang Baoyuan, and set music to each scene while listening to them play. This story survives mostly in Japanese sources, and so it is barely touched on in the Western literature on film music. Accounts of how long the work took also vary slightly from telling to telling. At a 2017 screening at Quad Cinema in New York, Sakamoto said he was first given one week but asked for two, and that in that time he wrote 64 cues, about half of which were used in the film. This comes down to us through notes left by an audience member who heard the talk that day. Those two weeks were not smooth. According to a memorial article in a Japanese magazine, Bertolucci sent newly edited footage almost every day, and each time the footage changed, Sakamoto had to rewrite the music. He looked back on the period as a hellish forced march. In the documentary “Coda” he also said it was something he could pull off only because he was young, and that he could not do it now.
Glossary 📚🔎
Cue
(Literal meaning) The English word cue meant, in the theater, the signal telling an actor when to begin a line. In film music it came to mean a stretch of music that enters and exits on such a signal. (In film · musical scores) A piece of music written to fit a particular scene of a film, starting at a given minute and second and ending at a given minute and second. Some last less than a minute; others run on for several minutes. Picture a school play in which the AV club starts the music at a set moment when the lead walks onstage and stops it when they exit. That one stretch of music is a cue. (Elsewhere) The stick used to strike the ball in billiards is also called a cue, but it is a different word from the musical cue.
Ostinato
(Literal meaning) The Italian ostinato means stubborn. Its nature, stubbornly repeating the same figure over and over, is written right into the name. (In film · musical scores) A technique in which a short pattern of notes repeats without pause for as long as the piece goes on. Over the repeating foundation, other instruments sing the melody. In film it is often used to create tension, a sense of running, or the feeling of time slipping by. It is like friends singing over the steady, repeating slap of a jump rope. In “Rain,” the strings take on this repetition, laying down a ground like streaks of rain.
Variation
(Literal meaning) Byeonju (變奏) means to play (奏) with changes (變). (In film · musical scores) Bringing back a melody already heard, leaving it recognizable but changing its tempo, harmony, instruments, or mood. In film, the same theme appears in different clothes from scene to scene, telling us how a character has changed. It is like singing “Happy Birthday” brightly one day, quietly at the piano another, and playfully on yet another. The album of “The Last Emperor” carries, besides the main theme, two separate variations.
Orchestral music (orchestration)
(Literal meaning) Gwanhyeonak (管絃樂) means music made together by gwan (管, wind instruments) and hyeon (絃, string instruments). In practice it refers to the music of a large ensemble that includes percussion as well. (In film · musical scores) Orchestration is the work of deciding which instruments will carry the melody and harmony. The same melody feels entirely different depending on whether it goes to the violins or the trumpets. It is like deciding, in a class choir, whether a song goes to the boys' part, the girls' part, or everyone together. In this film Sakamoto blended the timbres of Chinese instruments into the Western orchestra.
Synthesizer
(Literal meaning) The English synthesize means to combine. A synthesizer is an instrument that creates sound by synthesizing electrical signals. (In film · musical scores) Press a key, and an electronic circuit or a computer produces the sound. It can imitate real instruments or create new sounds that exist nowhere in the world. Sakamoto was originally an electronic musician who made music with this instrument, but for this film he chose the orchestra at the director's request. Think of the electronic tones of video-game music or a cell-phone ringtone, and you can guess what a synthesizer sounds like.
Source music
(In film · musical scores) Music that actually sounds within the world on screen: music the characters hear too, like sound coming from a radio, a gramophone, a band onstage, or a character who sings. By contrast, background music that the characters cannot hear and only the audience hears is called the score. In a TV drama, the song the lead sings in a karaoke room is source music; the piano music laid under the lead's sorrow is score. In this film, the Red Guard accordion band's playing and the music of the banquet-hall band are source music. (Elsewhere) In programming, source refers to source code, the original code that makes up a program.
Erhu
(Literal meaning) Iho (二胡) means a two-string (二) huqin (胡琴, a string instrument that came from the northern peoples). In Chinese it is read erhu. (In film · musical scores) A Chinese string instrument played with a bow threaded between its two strings. It makes a trembling, sobbing sound like a human voice. In film it is often used as a timbre that instantly calls a Chinese setting to mind. Sakamoto brought in an erhu player studying in Tokyo and set music to the scenes while listening to them play. It looks something like a violin, but because it has no fingerboard, pressing the strings with the fingers to set the pitch allows a far freer feel.