In a very different mood from his most familiar film music style, the music for the film Schindler's List is as serious as music can be. Without much action music or a love theme, the score is mostly elegiac in tone. In the end, a soaring statement reinforces the film's recognition that goodness can exist and effectively contend in an atmosphere of almost irresistible evil. Steven Zaillian's screenplay from Thomas Keneally's novel told the story of Oskar Schindler, an apparently amoral German businessman who finds his opportunity for wealth in the exploitation of Jews forced into slave labor by the Nazi domination of Central and Eastern Europe from 1933 to 1945. Schindler comes to see his workers as human beings and himself as their employer, honor-bound to take care of "his" people. When he realizes that their eventual final destination is extermination in the death camps, he risks everything and succeeds in saving over 1,000 of them. The film score is a notable accomplishment, serving the picture with dignity, respect, and genuinely beautiful inspiration. Its most touching music comes in violin solo sections, played on the film track by Itzhak Perlman. (John Williams conducted members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) However, the score was not designed as a concert experience, so listening straight through tends to diffuse the emotional power of the score. The best arrangement of music from this great score is the 16-minute set of Pieces (3) From Schindler's List that the composer arranged the same year as the film score's composition. These he presented as a concert piece for Itzhak Perlman. The opening piece is entitled "Theme. Lente." As the title says, this is primarily a statement of the film's haunting, heartmelting main theme. The theme has mildly Jewish tonal inflections, but it is also straight out of the Germanic musical tradition and thus is perfectly suited to reflect the situation as seen through Schindler's conscience. The second piece, "Jewish Town (Kraków Ghetto—Winter '41) Andante" is, by contrast, deeply Jewish in character. After a rhapsodic violin introduction, bass drum and low winds echo a Jewish dance, but in a tempo so slow that it verges on being a funeral march. Exotic coloration in the orchestra reflects the role Nazi regulations made of the Jews as "aliens" in their own country, and a flash of hatred accompanies scenes of some of their Gentile former neighbors mocking their plight. "Remembrances. Andante" starts with a richly harmonized string setting expressing grief, a mood extended by harp and violin. But the theme takes on a mood of fulfillment as the film distanced itself from the years of horror, focusing on the Schindler survivors and their growing number of offspring—all who lived after the Holocaust because one man discovered his own goodness when it was most needed. Williams symbolizes this fact in the suite's coda, where the violin, all by itself, plays "Schindler's Theme" before soft chords in the orchestra wrap it in a tonal embrace.

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