Harry & Rupert Gregson-Williams On Turning Mundane Events Into Grand Affairs with the Music of ‘The Gilded Age’

No other show on television can make the delivery of a bowl of soup to a dinner table as dramatic as The Gilded Age can. In season two of Julian Fellowes drama, battles are waged over opera house memberships and entering society, but the score, by brothers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams, ticks the tension up so high that no amount of fans will cool you down. Their music is lush, grand, and absolutely necessary to bring that tension through time.

With a clear arc from the season opener to the finale, the sophomore season of The Gilded Age is even stronger than season one. Now that we know who everyone is and what their relationships and station are, the scripts can shift into a higher, speedy gear. The same goes for the production of the score this time around.

“With Michael [Engler] as our showrunner, and we spoke to him before we wrote any music,” Rupert says. “In season two, there is a journey that culminates with the opera war coming to an end, and he wanted us to write it like an opera up into the end. It is punctuated throughout with set pieces like the fireworks at the bridge.”

“We didn’t know how the season ended when we started scoring it,” Harry adds. “The twist was really pleasing, wasn’t it? Most of our job this season was to help the characters blossom in their respective drama. Because of the writing, it’s so rich in character, so we were able to express ourselves over the course of the season with that.”

When you listen to the soundtrack of The Gilded Age‘s second season, you may notice that the cues are a lot longer than that of other shows. They really breathe to give you a sense of the scope and size of the show since, sometimes, we enter as a character exits a carriage and into someone’s grand party. The music doesn’t simply score tiny moments but the complete length of a large set pieces.

“The way that HBO wanted to go about this from the outset, from season one through season two, is that they came up with the necessary budget to be able to record this really well with a live orchestra,” Harry says. “It’s just as you’d imagine in the old days [with how] TV would have been done. These days, quite often on a project like this, we’d be told to do it in the box, as it were, which is basically samplers and to emit instruments, but we had such fun doing that. Michael has been very supportive about music from the outset and was really keen that the music helped tell the story and underpinned all the richness of a lot of the characters.”

“You only have to see the costumes and the hats and the sets and everything to know the size and scope and imagination–and cost–of all that,” Rupert says. “The music has to sweep in and pick them up and deliver them to you, so that’s probably the reason why it all feels of a certain weight and size and swirl and swish. The whole production is trying to show that off.”

For “Ada’s Date,” Cynthia Nixon’s character is matched with gentle piano. It’s respectful, but it underpins her excitement of being on a date for the first time in a long time. It’s such a lovely tribute to Nixon’s characterization.

“There’s an innocence to her, and she gains in confidence,” Rupert says. “Has she ever dated anybody in her whole life? Maybe she did once when she was a young lady. That innocence is nice to write for, because she represents the sort of purity and purity of heart but you always know, we knew where she was going. We did know what was going to happen for her at the end of the season, so it’s nice to be able to deliver that moment at the end. She’s always been quietly important with guiding words. Always been a strength in the background, but in a gentle way.”

“Sabotage” is the kind of cue that supplies a dramatic undercurrent to the ordinary actions of someone attending a party. Mrs. Winterton is sour that Bertha Russell is taking all the attention from The Duke of Buckingham. Unbeknownst to everyone else, she has elicited the aid of another servant working the party, and… something is going to happen to the Duke’s soup. The speediness of the tempo represents the hustle and bustle of what might be going on behind the scenes, but then it transforms into a grand parade of swirling music not dissimilar from the opening titles. It’s glorious in how it builds off itself to transform the emotions of a scene that are typically hidden from view.

“That particular scene was really interesting to do, because there was a necessity,” Harry says. “There was no dialogue for a while and butlers coming out with plates of soup, so it needed to be grand and quite expected what you would expect in a moment like The Gilded Age. Quite soon, though, it has to duck into a more furtive nature, and what the scene is really about is not the grander of a posh dinner going on but more about the plotting of some of the people at the table.”

“Julian can spin a whole operatic dance around things,” Rupert says. “He can make something that seems mundane like it’s the most important thing going on.”

The Gilded Age is streaming now on Max.