“The Piano Lesson” is a uniquely African American story: Based on the 1987 August Wilson play, it’s about a family torn between its painful past as slaves in Mississippi and a new life in Pittsburgh during the 1930s, all symbolized by an old upright piano that bears the scars, blood and tears of a mighty ancestry.
Directed by Malcolm Washington — the youngest son of Denzel Washington, who produced — and starring his brother, John David Washington, along with Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts and Danielle Deadwyler, the Netflix film is a family affair and a celebration of Black artistry.
But Malcolm Washington, a 33-year-old cinephile, was keen to welcome French composer Alexandre Desplat, 63, into the family for his feature directorial debut. He considers “A Prophet” and “The Tree of Life” — both scored by Desplat — among his favorite films, and the pair immediately hit it off talking about their shared love of the late Quincy Jones.
“There is a big Americana, pastoral element to this movie,” says Washington, “and I wanted that huge string section, like a beautiful piano line,” he adds, noting Desplat “has a just-left-of-center melody through a lot of his work, and I was curious what his take would be.”
The composer, who played flute with West African musicians in the 1980s and has a lifelong passion for jazz and African American musical traditions, was excited by the opportunity to work on “The Piano Lesson.” The first thing he talked about with Washington was Duke Ellington in the late 1930s and early ’40s — “a great moment in the sound of his orchestra,” Desplat says.
“I have the sound in my head because I’ve been listening to Duke Ellington since I was born, through my parents,” Desplat says. “And I thought that by injecting some of that high clarinet, the muted trombones and the piano groove, I would take the audience back to that era without playing jazz.”
There are no drums: “I’m not trying to do a big-band sound — not at all,” he says. “It stays very intimate.” The score is “my love of Duke Ellington through the filter of the film.”
A two-time Oscar winner, Desplat has lots of experience writing for the stage in his native France; even in films he often likes to just listen to dialogue and write his score around the words. But he also helped Washington adapt the Wilson source material onto a more cinematic canvas and “create a new dimension, suddenly open the depth of field.”
The score roils with melodic drama in the film’s prologue, which vibrantly depicts a tense heist to steal the titular piano under the cover of darkness and a Fourth of July fireworks show in Mississippi. Desplat introduces his main theme, a melancholy, bluesy tune that he wanted to evoke both eerie film noir and the “tragic story of the heritage of slavery.” That melody is taken up by a ghostly female choir (mirrored by flute) in this story full of ghosts both malevolent and salvific.
One obvious question was whether to even use a piano in the score, and at first he and Washington both decided against it. Characters already play the family upright at important moments in the story, and it plays a crucial role in the emotional climax.
“We said, ‘No, no piano. It sucks,’” Desplat says with a laugh. “And then I started working, and at some moment I just put my hand on the piano and I went” — the composer hums a rising-falling bass line. “I said to Malcolm, ‘Listen,’ and then we went, ‘You know what? Let’s use the piano.’”
The instrument is mostly used in nonmelodic ways, either playing that jazzy walking bass motif, insistently hitting the same high note for a percussive effect or plunking discordant chords to convey darkness from the past.
When Berniece (Deadwyler) speaks about her own conflicted relationship with the instrument in her living room, Desplat has the bass line walking up and down the top register of the piano, offset with bluesy notes plucked on an electric cello and shifting harmonies on strings.
Washington says that might be his favorite cue in the whole movie.
“She’s telling this reason why she can’t engage with the piano,” the director explains, “that her mother used to play, and it will wake these spirits up. He wrote this incredible cue that’s so simple and haunting, but it just grows, and it’s rhythmic. I didn’t hear that until we recorded the score. He just pulled it out of his back pocket — like, ‘I had an idea, I want you to hear it.’”
Desplat’s score complements several monologues, punctuates scene transitions and montages, and raises the heat on the supernatural finale.
“What he added was this wonderful, kind of mythical, mystic thing,” says Washington.
Desplat admired how this first-time director “expanded the supernatural segment of the story, which also, of course, calls for music. So it allowed me a very large spectrum of emotions — from intimate, to bluesy, to jaunty, to a little bit scary, eerie, to very strange, to brutal.
“It’s rare that a movie has all these many elements.”