Music Becomes Emotions: The Musical Score in Two Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire

From today’s perspective, Alex North’s score for the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire, which was considered remarkable even at the time, can claim legendary status. The titles of the 16-track score suggest that the music focuses on the characters, the setting, main motifs, crucial events and states of mind. The film soundtrack could thus be denoted as integral to and harmonized with the dramatic action. This is not the case in the 2008 staging at the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor, where the music composed and selected by Hrvoje Crnić Boxer seems to focus on the protagonist only. The performance revolves around Blanche and could be interpreted as a psychoanalytic study of the play through her subconscious. Analysing the musical layers of these two considerably different productions of Williams’ play opens new interpretative aspects of this complex theatre and film classic from the Deep South literary tradition.