Richard Robbins

Born on December 4, 1940, in South Weymouth (Massachusetts) Richard Stephen Robbins was considered a musical prodigy at age 5. After graduating from the New England Conservatory, he received a scholarship for promising musicians that allowed him to continue his studies in Vienna, a city where he became a fan of various classical composers, especially Maurice Ravel, Franz Schubert and Claude Debussy, who would mark his later work.

Devoted body and soul to the piano, Richard Robbins did not consider composing for film until the late age of 39. At that time he directed the preparatory school Mannes College, in New York, where he had the daughter of the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a student . She introduced him to two great friends of hers, the director James Ivory and the Indian producer Ismail Merchant . The four end up associating to adapt to the cinema in 1979 The Europeans , the novel by Henry James . In the film, Robbins shined with his score in which he gives priority to the piano, accompanied by string instruments.

After the tape, Ivory, Merchant and Jhabvala launched into a series of literary films, always with Robbins in charge of the music. After Jane Austen in Manhattan (about two theater teachers who try to get hold of an original work by this author), Quartet (version of a novel by Jean Rhys), East and West (based on a book by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala herself) and The Bostonians (a new foray into the universe of Henry James), the team established itself with the excellent A Room with a View , based on the novel by EM Forster, whose score with an Italian setting became a huge sales success. The film won three Oscars (costumes, artistic direction and adapted screenplay).

With Maurice – again based on a text by Forster – Robbins won a prestigious award, best soundtrack at the Venice Festival. They are followed by the discreet Slaves of New York , the excellent Waiting for Mr. Bridge –where Robbins created his favorite score–, and the absolutely brilliant Return to Howards End (again EM Forster) and The Remains of the Day , which he covered in Japanese. Kazuo Ishiguro . For these last two, Robbins earned his two Oscar nominations.

From that moment on, and despite the unquestionable average quality of their works, the team began to have a somewhat lesser impact. They shoot two biographical films, Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso , and also A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (based on a novel by Kaylie Jones in which she recounts her relationship with her father, the writer James Jones ) . . They again take up James in The Golden Cup .

“James’s characters strongly conceal their feelings, which I have tried to reflect in my scores,” Robbins explained in an interview. “To understand what the characters have inside, I am often inspired by the actors’ performances, as in the case of Emma Thompson , in What Remains of the Day , where I started working after seeing an image of her walking through the mansion.”

Robbins occasionally composed for other conductors, such as Simon Callow ( The Ballad of the Sad Café ), Nicole Garcia ( Place Vendôme ), and Sande Zeig ( The Girl) . He also created the music for Cotton Mary , which Ismail Merchant co – conducted with Madhur Jaffrey . But in general his film career was dedicated almost exclusively to Ivory. His last two joint works were Le divorce , which crashed at the box office, and The Russian Countess , an interesting film based on a script written for the cinema by Kazuo Ishiguro . when ivory rolledThe City of Your Final Destination , Robbins was already very ill, so the director had to turn (for the first time since 1979 in a feature film) to another musician, Jorge Drexler .