A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (34 page)

Joanne understands the attraction between Anna and Bates: ‘When they first meet, they’re both good people trying to stay on the right side of the moral line. They have strong ethics and a strong moral code, as well as being emotionally intelligent. They’ve come to the same stage at different ages and for different reasons, but they have that in common. Bates tries to be a good man and do the right thing – Anna admires that in him.’

The rape scene was not something Joanne approached lightly. ‘I spoke to Gareth and the director and we had not so much a rehearsal as a discussion, working out how we’d shoot it, thinking about what it meant for Anna and Bates. I planned it with Nigel Harman [the actor playing Mr Green, her attacker] and planned the emotional journey. That was really helpful because of the subject matter – we needed to do that. I spoke too to Alastair [Bruce] about what it meant for a woman in those times. He explained that then a woman had no rights, only her reputation, her family and her career. If society found out what had happened to her, she would be in danger of losing all three, because people would say there was no smoke without fire. It sounds barbaric, but that’s how it was. I understood the enormity of something like that happening, the political and social implications added on to what was already a horrific and terrifying experience.’

The biggest challenge in the filming was, for Joanne, to get it absolutely right: ‘I like a challenge, but you certainly feel much more under pressure. Viewers might be watching it thinking of something like that having happened to them or to someone they knew – if they saw an actor doing it not very believably or not giving it their all, that would be hugely insulting and wrong. I knew I had to get it right.’

Fortunately, for someone like Anna, although she would not feel she could talk about what had happened to her, she would at least draw comfort from the close society around her. The servants below stairs were another kind of family, after all, and those living on the estate would have had the sense of being all together, part of the same community. They watched out for one another, helped and lent a hand when it was needed. In the end, they didn’t have much – but they did have each other.

SPOTLIGHT ON

Hearing the rousing music for the
Downton Abbey
theme tune signals across the world that it’s time to stop what you’re doing, grab a cup of tea or glass of wine and settle down in front of the television for an hour or so, immersed in the world of the Crawley family. There must be an almost Pavlovian connection now between the
Downton
score and a sharp increase of serotonin in viewers from Buckingham to Boston.

The entire score for the show, since it first began, is the work of one man, composer John Lunn. John and Gareth Neame are old friends and long-term collaborators and, for Gareth, there was little question as to whom he would turn to for
Downton:
‘He is remarkably versatile and can do anything.’ John’s work includes scoring dramas such as
Bleak House
and
Little Dorrit –
Dickensian adaptations with modern scores. It is this approach that informed his new project. ‘From the first episode, we couldn’t ignore the fact that it was 1912, but we wanted a modern feel to it,’ says John. ‘I decided to keep the orchestration very clean – piano, strings, an occasional cor anglais (it’s like an oboe, and very evocative of the English landscape), saxophone or vibraphone. It’s an unusual combination, but all of those instruments were around then.’ John explains that while Edwardian music is harmonically quite advanced, ‘It is too overwrought to work as an underscore for a drama. I needed something much slower and clearer.’

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa as Dame Nellie Melba.

John is the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle, coming on board when the episode has been filmed and edited: ‘As so much of the music is about the timing and linking scenes, we can’t compose until that is absolutely set in stone. I usually have around two to two and a half weeks for my work on each episode. I had more time for the first, as that was absolutely key.’

The very first episode, in fact, did not feature the opening title and score with which we are now all so familiar, but began with John Bates sitting on the train. We followed him, looking rather nervous and apprehensive, and trailed the tracks of a telegram as it flew through the telegraph lines overhead, before arriving triumphantly at the magnificent Downton Abbey. ‘I used just a solo piano tune for Bates, with a rising emotional string melody for the picture of the house,’ says John. ‘The next scene was watching the servants as they got up and got the house ready – we referenced the music and its energy from the train, almost showing another kind of well-oiled machine.’ Having worked on this first episode, it informed the rest: ‘By the time we’d finished it, it was clear to us what the music would be for the title. It was a real stroke of luck and I wish they all worked out like that! Even now, having done four series, we can still see the music stem from that very first episode.’

A few episodes have opened without the iconic titles for a variety of reasons – such as when the show returned after the shocking death of Matthew. ‘There was a feeling that we couldn’t go back as if nothing had happened, although time had passed,’ says John. ‘We used that opening episode of series four to establish how the rest of it would go – it was about the rehabilitation of Mary.’ Twitter went berserk, with people believing the music they knew and loved had been ditched, but of course it returned for the next episode.

The fans of the show have taken the music to their hearts, as they have everything else. Much to his surprise, John has been told of heavy-metal versions of his score and ‘There’s even a ukulele version – you name it! [Comedian] Will Ferrell was skating to it in a sketch on
Saturday Night Live.
It’s really taken on a life of its own.’

John has helped the fans along by recording two albums of
Downton
music, writing lyrics with Don Black ('Born Free', ‘The Man with the Golden Gun'), the second of which reached No.1 of the USA’s classical music charts. The hit song on the album was inspired by the scene in series two when Mary rushes to the train station to say goodbye to Matthew and gives him her lucky stuffed dog. It happens to be one of Julian Fellowes’s favourite scenes and, it turns out, John’s too: ‘I recently showed that scene to film students without the music and with the music, but as I sat there, I realised that it’s such a good scene, the music didn’t actually make enough of a difference to prove my point!’ None of the cast feature on the album, but given the skills of Elizabeth McGovern (who sings with her own band, Sadie & the Hotheads) and Michelle Dockery (an accomplished jazz singer), this seems a shame: ‘I’ll try to persuade them for the next one,’ laughs John.

Series four portrayed the beginning of a very exciting new world for music. ‘The whole of the twentieth century is really about black music – we wouldn’t have pop music today without it and even avant garde classical music is defined by how it approaches that genre,’ says John. There were technical challenges with the music of the jazz band as both background and storyline for some of the scenes: ‘It’s to do with the timing – you can’t cut away from a song, wait for the line to be delivered and cut back. It was complicated in post-production. There seems to be less live music in series five …’

One other significant time that the music was featured was in series four, when Dame Nellie Melba – a cameo appearance by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa – came to sing for the guests at Cora and Robert’s house party. John says the music chosen for the pivotal scene, when the guests are rapt listening to Melba sing, not knowing of the brutal attack on Anna taking place below stairs, was deliberately romantic, creating the juxtaposition of mood. The choice of music was ultimately made by Dame Kiri herself. She was given the choice of songs so long as it suited the situation and in the end, sang ‘Mimi’s Farewell', ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’ and ‘O Mio Babbino Caro'.

John is always thinking about what will happen in the musical world of
Downton:
‘When I’m working on it, I never turn the dialogue off and I’m always looking at the picture. Every tune is separately recorded, even if it sounds familiar – there’s no manipulation. Hopefully, the music beneath the dialogue is what makes it work. It’s about helping the storylines, and in a long-running series where people might miss an episode, the music is a shorthand to help them hear what it’s about and understand the relationships between the characters.’