The Best uses of Classical Music in the Movies 

The Truman Show is one of my all-time favorite movies! It also brilliantly used a sections of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1. And didn't Phillip Glass appear on screen at one point as a keyboard player, "improvising" the score to the show? Just brilliant!

Orson Welles’ « The Trial », based on Kafka book, has almost all time Albinoni’s Adagio as score. Great film with Anthony Perkins, Jean Moreau, Romy Schneider and Welles himself

Great topic. I always feel that knowing the music used in a movie gives me a special advantage and depth of enjoyment. The use of Mahler in Death in Venice is astoundingly poignant and is one of my first choices. Also memorable for me: Gallipoli - Bizet's "Au fond du temple saint" from Les Pêcheurs de Perles - near the end of the film. Talk about heartbreak!

Great list! Mahler in Shutter Island was great too! I’m curious to see what your top film scores are.

Awesome channel! Just watch a couple of videos and looks like I'll be watching the rest. Well done and thank you.

Personally, the one movie that really brought home the use of classical music is the death scene in Soylent Green using Beethoven's 6 symphony. There are many others but as a child that one stuck with me the most. Later, in the movie the Hunger, the use of The Lakmé Flower Duet is just sublime.

I'm such a massive cinema fan. I think that is pretty much because I was already a classical music lover and much of classical music is in the soundtrack of my favorite films. Here is my list of some of my favorite uses also using the rules from this video: Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" used in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" used in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" (2011) Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons: Winter" used in Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy" (2003) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Lacrimosa" used in Elem Klimov's "Come and See" (1985) Johann Sebastian Bach's "Johannes Passion" used in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror" (1975)

Master & Commander had so many great scenes enhanced by classical music. The one that stood out the most for me was the storm scene with the rigging damage and lone sailor that went overboard. All happening with Ralph Vaughn Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis playing as Captain Aubrey makes the tough decision to cut the rigging away.

Thank you for putting in Badlands and Orff's Gassenhauer in your list. Hans Zimmer wrote You're So Cool based on how Gassenhauer was used in Badlands.

Great list. As a fellow cinephile, really appreciate your choices and didn't know of that Jon Boorman film (and might check it out). I also very much enjoy classical music in film, and have special love for Mahlers Adagietto (that you featured). I don't personally have a top five of classical music in film, but I'm now considering.

The Disney Fantasia movies, 1941 and 1999, were so important for instilling in millions of children and adults an acquaintance with or appreciation of classical music, and i suspect they have far more "views" or "spins" (to use a modern metric, meaning familiarity,) than any movie listed here.

I have a soft spot for the use of Madame Butterfly in Memories, "Magnetic Rose". The whole segment is beyond poetic

Prior to number 1 I was thinking "is he crazy... no Stanley Kubrick?"😂

One of my favorites is in Lucas (1986) when Lucas and Maggie are listening to a live orchestra play Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony from the sewer below the amphitheater. That scene could be a short film in its own right.

My favourites are the use of Bach's Ich ruf zu dir in Solaris and Schubert's Andantino in The Piano Teacher.

Great list. I’d nominate the use of Saint Saëns Symphony 3 ‘Organ’ in ‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising’.

I would highly recommand a french 2022 movie called "Incroyable mais vrai" (Incredible but True). It only lasts about an hour but there's an extensive use of a dozen Bach pieces in it. All of them are in an electronic version (a bit like in Clockwork's orange), and there's a realy nice job done on the matching between the screen and the music.

Late Soviet cinematography is full of classical music, whether it is a sitcom or a science fiction.

You could do a whole cartoon/animated feature as well on this theme.

Although maybe it is not of the same calibre, I really liked the use of Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, Op. 103, Movement I in the movie Another Round.

Good examples. Unfortunately, the vast majority of 'modern' movies with classical music only use it ironically. See Silence of the Lambs for example, where peaceful classical music is used to contrast against the scene of violence and gore in Hannibal's cage. Or, there's endless amounts of comedy movies that use classical scores to highlight undignified moments in people's lives. That has always bugged me.

Truman show also has Chopin op 11 ii

Platoon, Adagio for strings

I hope you can do a video about advertisements.

Three obvious choices are 2001 A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and A Clockwork Orange and Indonesian classical music in The Year of Living Dangerously.

Die Hard - Freude schöner Götter Funken? Anybody?

Well I'd add that montage in The triplets of Belleville that had Kyrie from Mozart's Great mass in C playing. That music elevated the montage to celestial heights

yeah, show me the worst! Heh heh!