There is more than just nostalgic interest in finally getting to hear the music score that David Shire provided to the intense award-winning domestic drama from 1979, Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer. After all, the film won all the big awards that year for Best Director, Best Actors Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, even Best Picture to boot. In the end, though, its soundtrack ended up featuring only some referenced orchestral cues from Bach and Vivaldi and there was not a single note of Shire to be heard, his full score having been "rethought" by producers and then, piece by piece, being discarded altogether.
Now, the German CD company known as 1st Floor Entertainment operating under the label of Caldera Records has just released Shire's original studio tapes of the full Kramer score together with two other Shire items for similarly small orchestras: a 1978 TV movie, The Defection of Simas Kudirka and the farcical World According to Garp from 1982, each with similarly modest, even reticent, musical results.
Disc producer Stephan Eicke relates the tale of how Shire's own marriage was undergoing rough times headed for divorce even as he worked on the Kramer music which needed to underline and emotionalize the bitter divorce story on screen – with special emphasis on how divorce effects the young son in the Kramer household. Shire very much valued the film and the scoring assignment, but was understandably skittish about coming too close to the subject matter – for instance, sentimentalizing it too much or identifying with it too much, taking too strong a stand. The result, as we're now able to hear the rejected score on this disc, is fairly reticent music: i.e. not the bold thematic scoring that Shire has been known for like The Hindenburg's aerial waltz or The Conversation's eccentric chromatic piano or Return to Oz's multi-themed patchwork of orchestral showpieces.
On this archival CD, we get to hear two alternate Main Title musics to the Kramer score, perhaps reflecting Shire's own reticence: one is a solo clarinet against baroque strings which seems to suggest the productive, ambitious young couple, the Kramers, in a modern setting – the alternative cue is a rather more sober legato, almost liturgical, theme for strings that seems to announce a more emotional, conscience-stricken story-to-come.
The body of this unused score, then, explores various question marks around those moods, none very assertive – seemingly cautious, undecided as perhaps Shire was feeling during the whole composing process trying to score this emotionally painful story that was so close to his own. Brooding solo winds join some baroque-flavored strings in rhythmic figures venturing into wistful harmonies, tentative and unresolved, flirting with dissonance. There are two alternative End Title musics too, like those opening cues: one busy and baroque, the other sober, concerned, and conscience-struck again. That very indecision is probably what discouraged the producers about Shire's POV and sent him home. How great, now, though, to be able to hear the actual relationship between this very personal film and this always very sincere composer.
Interestingly, the other two Shire scores from this archive seem equally reticent so that, heard on disc as music alone, their profiles are just as sharp but just as modest as Kramer. Alan Arkin starred in the TV movie The Defection of Simas Kudirka, true story of a Lithuanian sailor seeking political asylum from the KGB circa 1970 in the U.S. – Shire's score uses a small orchestra probing a minor-key folk tune with strings and oboe eventually offering up two fugue-like versions of the theme in as many as three twining lines. Only as Kudirka's journey starts to take on a homecoming finality does the score gather a more assured tone in the form of a more solidly harmonized rendition of the fugue, now for strings and oboe. In Eicke's liner notes, classical influences like Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky are invoked though their echoes are faint. Like the Kramer score, Kudirka's ultimate musical profile is modest but behind the screen it aides and underlines most effectively.
As for Garp, the disc includes Shire's piano demo recording of the film's satiric circus waltz, music which interacted in a cartoonish way with its wild Robin Williams film.
The Eicke booklet notes are a good introduction to each of these scores and his collaboration with Shire in issuing such archival material via Germany has produced welcome results before: namely their 2023 Caldera disc featuring six Shire TV scores like Runaway and Olly Winter. A few years earlier, this same 1st Floor Entertainment company likewise released a Goldsmith disc that called its label Tsunami: archival music from Flim Flam Man and Studs Lonigan. So, more power to these guys!
Meanwhile, we're left to imagine how this Shire/Kramer music would have affected its already-powerful film. Would its subtlety have strengthened its film or did it just hang back too much without asserting itself: i.e. music too personal on the part of the composer or not personal enough?
Kramer vs. Kramer, unused score
The Defection of Simas Kudirka, score
The World According to Garp, score
Bonus:
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