A lullaby after the war
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) · Javier Navarrete
Javier Navarrete has scored almost all of Guillermo del Toro's Spanish-language films. For Pan's Labyrinth, the story of a girl who escapes into a fairy world in post-war Spain, he made a very simple choice: the whole score grows out of a lullaby.
The first time we hear it, it is a woman's voice humming over strings, with no words. Inside the film, Mercedes hums the same lullaby to Ofelia to help her sleep. The music stops being something only the audience hears and becomes part of the house.
As the story turns crueller, the orchestra changes too: choir, brass and percussion come in for the soldiers and the creatures of the labyrinth. But the lullaby never goes away. It keeps coming back, each time with more orchestra, and on the album's last track it is reduced to a single violin.
The score was nominated for the Oscar and the Goya; that Goya went to Alberto Iglesias for Volver. Some of the music was cut from the film, and del Toro made sure the album included all of it.