MRH:  A suspense sequence has a life of its own, in terms of structure and rhythm, etc. When you’re spotting a sequence and you recognize that it has its own driving, brooding identity, does that influences how you write the more melodic parts of the score?

JO:  Absolutely. I mean I’ve said many times in the past that the best film scores are ones that when they’re taken away from the film, you can sense a sort of musical story being told, especially in the more melodic scores.

Valkyrie isn’t a particularly melodic score, but it sort of evolved because the trick of the music and the trick if the movie is to slowly evolve from a suspense thriller into a tragedy, and the music had to sort of push all the entertainment buttons for the suspense, but then slowly pull you along into the tragic nature of the movie; so it slowly becomes more melodic as the film goes on.

The soundtrack album is different from the movie. You’ve got to make an album more exciting to listen to, so it’s completely out of order with the film. The opening cue in the album, “They’ll Remember You,” is actually the end title piece of the movie, because that’s where the film is headed.

You’ve got to have a master plan for the score. I used really small motifs that recur whenever specific types of things are happening in the film, like a sort of ostinato I got on the low strings that recurs every time the conspirators are plotting.

MRH:  One of my favourite examples of that would be John Williams’ Black Sunday (1977), because it’s a really simple theme. It’s addictive, it gets you going, it propels a scene, and Williams keeps layering and texturing each permutation.

JO: I can’t believe that I don’t even know that score, but that’s classic film scoring, which I try to keep alive in what I do. The movies aren’t exactly the same things they used to be, so you don’t have as many opportunities to push that musical agenda… but I try, and it really depends on the type of movie.

MRH:  Your end title music really feels like an elegy both for the leading conspirators that were executed, as well a class of military officers who did not begin their career under the Third Reich, and had a totally different viewpoint of war, how one behaves towards enemy combatants, and a certain kind of honour that was completely thrown own once the Nazis came into power.

JO:  I wanted the end of the movie to feel like some heroism had occurred; [I wanted the audience] to feel the sacrifice, and to walk out of the theatre feeling these guys were heroes… I didn’t know how to convey that musically, because the end scene of the movie is very emotional.

So basically to make a long story short, it suddenly hit me that if it was choral, it would feel like a piece of music that I could reflect upon the honour and the heroism of their sacrifice, but even the choral music sounded too cheesy, because it was all ‘Ooos’ and ‘Ahs,’ and then I realized it’s got to be lyrics in German, and it would be awesome if somehow it could reflect loosely about what they did.

A friend [suggested] Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II / Wayfarer’s Night Song II,” a little poem about birds falling silent in the woods. The last phrase of the poem is ‘Soon you too will be at rest” and it just gave me chills. It wasn’t on the nose, which I liked about it, and it enabled me to basically have lyrics,  which to the American audience will sound like gibberish but it will sound pretty, and the Germans would hopefully pick up on it, so that’s how the idea came about.