Spectacles of Light & Sound

The 1950s were important years in the career of Georges Delerue. He had already composed for the theater, the ballet, and the opera and he was just beginning to compose for television.

At the same time, a new form of aesthetic expression began to appear what the French call "Son et Lumière" or "Spectacles of Light and Sound." These are night-time presentations, often very technically sophisticated, involving fascinating light and sound effects, professional and amateur actors, and historical scenarios usually played against an important architectural structure or monument. The spectacle is accompanied by an historical and literary narration and, of course, by music. These historical spectacles are now presented everywhere in France and, indeed, around the world.

Often invited to compose for this form of popular entertainment, Delerue usually enthusiastically accepted and would write for such spectacles during the next thirty years.

In 1954 his first Light and Sound Spectacle was premiered to the sound of blazing trumpets at Lisieux and in the same year Paris celebrated the tenth anniversary of its Liberation from the Nazis with the light and the sounds of Delerue's music.

In 1961 he composed for the spectacular lights streaming over the Pyramids, in an Egyptian version of Son et Lumière. In the years after he composed for one of the most ambitious historical spectacles of all, the lighting and historical narration of the medieval and Renaissance castles of the Valley of the Loire. Chambord, Meillant, Blois, Sully-sur-Loire. These were truly royal nights of wonder.

In the south of France, in Marseille, he wrote a captivating oratorio for Shell-Berre, and in a completely different style he delivered music up to America at Mount Vernon during the Bicentennial of American Independence in 1976.
In another Light and Sound spectacle, Shades of Glory written to celebrate the Invalides in Paris, he had the brilliant idea of writing a march modeled on the seventy-nine disciplined steps of the troops who marched across the courtyard. The music ended precisely with their collective step at the final halt.

In 1988 he would write his last composition of this kind for the nocturnal spectacles of The Tunnel of Time at the amusement park Les Schtroumpfs.

Most recently, in 2002, in music composed twenty years before, Delerue's choruses sang and his trumpets sounded again in the Cinéscénie of the Puy du Fou of the Vendée region in the west of France.

That particularly large historical spectacle allowed Delerue to display his vast and intimate knowledge of musical styles that he could invoke whenever called upon to do so.