The film’s most dominant musical force is Russian-born composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky. His dramatic ballet scores Petrouchka and L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) (taken from recordings conducted by Stravinsky himself) underpin the characters’ emotional and geographic journeys. In addition to pieces from Stravinsky’s ballets, Anderson and Poster zeroed in on the soaring final movement of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète. “Apotheosis” plays during the opening credits sequence, a way to introduce Zsa-zsa as “epic.” “Our film is about a man who is like a mountain,” says Anderson. “He is himself of epic scale, his life is on an epic scale.”
