The Lilt You Taught Me

Where do we start this time?

From the music? From its composer? From the film and its director? From the deeply emotional tie most of us have with this melody? From the extraordinary violinists who have already played this piece? Or from the deep curiosity we feel about how David approached — how he dared to touch — something like this?

I’ve started this article many times already, and even I find it difficult to settle on the cut I want to give it. There is so much in this tune I could write another book about it: a melody that is, this time, contemporary — carved onto our souls, awakening real memories in every one of us. Personal memories, because we have lived the pain and the beauty it brings. Not just lived through a performance, or through a recording that reached us via the domino effect, hand to hand, across centuries — but today: alive, vivid, epidermal, felt on the skin.

For the two or three of you who don’t know it, Track 04 of Immortal is the theme from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I won’t dig into the film, for several reasons — not only because most of you have probably seen it, but because it is a delicate and painful subject to raise in a community as multiethnic and multicultural as ours.

There are no politics here, no races, no religions, no differences… only the music, and its power to unite souls. Whichever soul.

So… here’s the link to the Wikipedia page about the film, though you’ll find millions more online: here.

I have a very deep, very personal connection to this film and this music — but I suppose that doesn’t matter much to anyone here, so I’ll stick to our usual format as much as I can (not easy this time ;)).

Let me just say this: it is almost impossible to keep the mind from going straight to that red coat, in the black-and-white abyss. The only touch of colour in an opaque, darkened world.

Genius cinematography, in a film that became a milestone for so many reasons.

You hear John Williams’s Schindler’s List, and you love it — for the melody, the depth, the intensity.

Then you truly listen to it, and your soul stretches from the inside out, because you cannot help reliving, in your mind, everything these notes are bound to. And not only that — it is what the music itself does to you. Because every note drips sorrow, and every stroke of the bow strikes a chord inside us too — one that vibrates so intensely it almost hurts. Because this melody is a journey into our deepest sensitivities, our most exposed vulnerability, our truest, unguarded self.

And here is the thing worth knowing about the man who wrote it.

When John Williams first watched an early cut of the film, it broke something in him. He had to leave the room to compose himself. When he came back, he told Steven Spielberg the truth as he felt it: “Steven, this is a great film — and you really need a better composer than I am for this film.” Spielberg, who could have offered a hundred kind reassurances, said only: “I know. But they’re all dead.” Williams likes to joke that this is how he became “the live composer.”

Sit with that for a second. The man who gave us this melody did not sit down at his desk feeling equal to it. He sat down feeling too small for it. And maybe that is the whole secret. He didn’t try to explain the unexplainable, or illustrate it, or fill the silence. He wrote something that only grieves, and only holds — a melody that keeps its head bowed the entire way through.

Then he did something quietly wise. He didn’t reach for grandeur; he reached for a single human voice. The violin you hear in the film is Itzhak Perlman’s — and Perlman has carried the piece with him ever since. He has said that wherever he plays in the world, “ninety-nine per cent invariably request that music. It doesn’t matter where I am.” Somewhere along the way it stopped belonging only to a film, and started belonging to everyone.

And here is where, for David, it turns personal. Because Itzhak Perlman was his teacher. At Juilliard, the young David Garrett studied under the very man whose bow first gave this melody its voice — the maestro he still, simply, calls his own. And maybe, who knows, this is a way for David to pay him a tribute, and make him, in his own way, Immortal.

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That is the strange life this melody has had. Almost every great violinist alive has taken it up. Anne-Sophie Mutter recorded it with Williams himself standing on the podium. And here is what moves me most: unlike the other pieces on Immortal — the ones that travelled three centuries, hand to hand, to reach us — this one was born in our own lifetime, and already it is being passed like an heirloom between the finest bows on earth. A melody young enough to be contemporary, and old already in the way it lives inside us.

Even Williams is not immune to it. In 2016, when he was honoured with the AFI Life Achievement Award, a young violinist named Simone Porter played this very theme back to him — Gustavo Dudamel conducting, the film flickering behind her, Spielberg seated at his side. And Williams, the man who wrote every single note, sat there and could barely hold himself together. If the one who composed it can be undone by hearing it, what chance do the rest of us have — and why would we want one?

• • •

Which brings us, finally, to David — and to why this track, of all of them, may be the most personal on the whole album.

David has said of Williams: “He is an absolute genius… of all film composers, probably the greatest presence of all when it comes to melody.” So of everything he could have chosen, this is the only film score he allowed onto an album called Immortal. Everything else — Bach, Debussy, Paganini — earned that word slowly, across centuries. This one earned it in a single generation.

This isn’t the first time David has laid his bow on this melody. On 31 August 2015, for Perlman’s seventieth birthday, he recorded his own demo of it as a gift — and sent it with a message that says everything:

With all the lilt you taught me. The melody the world hears in Perlman’s voice was handed down, phrase by phrase, lilt by lilt, to the student who now records it for Immortal. So when you hear David play Schindler’s List, you’re hearing something older and warmer than a cover of a famous theme. You’re hearing a pupil playing his teacher’s signature piece back to him — the way this music has always travelled: not across centuries this time, but from one hand to the next, master to student, in a single unbroken line. The Domino Effect.

To lay your bow on a melody this exposed, this loved, this bruised — with Perlman’s version living in everyone’s memory — takes a very particular kind of daring. Not the daring to reinvent it. The opposite: the courage to get out of its way. To disappear into it and let it pass through you clean, without leaving fingerprints. That vulnerability I spoke of at the very beginning — the unguarded self, the chord that vibrates until it almost hurts? That is not the risk of playing this piece. That is the playing of it.

And that, in the end, is why it’s here, and why it belongs on this album more than anything.

No politics. No borders. No faith, no race, no difference of any kind. Just one melody, the silence it leans on, and a room full of strangers breathing in the same place at the same time — every soul, whichever soul.

That is what this music does. That is what makes it immortal.

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Sources & notes: John Williams recounts the “they’re all dead” exchange on CBS Sunday Morning; Itzhak Perlman’s “ninety-nine per cent” remark via classical-music.com; David Garrett’s words on John Williams from his Klassik Radio interview, June 2026; David’s birthday demo for Itzhak Perlman, 31 August 2015.