In a classic director/composer partnership, Georges Auric composed the score for Jean Cocteau's fifth film as both writer and director, Orphée (1949), based on his 1926 play. In many ways the score is similar to Auric's score for Cocteau's classic La belle et la bête. The mood, while not as fantastical as the earlier film, is still otherworldly. The woodwinds and reed instruments are used to carry much of the melody in the score, adding a pastoral tone, but also in keeping with the overall style of the music of Les Six, the group of French composers, friends of Cocteau, which included Auric. The score includes a heroic main theme, eerie strings, and throbbing drums to represent the underworld, and a love theme that is moving, yet shadowed by tragedy. Auric also made a nod to an earlier French version of the Greek myth by including his own lush orchestral arrangement of the "Complaint of Eurydice" from Gluck's opera Orphée et Eurydice.

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