By Patrick Cremona

Published: Wednesday, 23 February 2022 at 12:00 am


After a couple of delays, a new musical version of Cyrano De Bergerac – titled simply Cyrano – arrives in cinemas this week, with Peter Dinklage taking on the title role.

The new film is actually an adaptation of an adaptation – with screenwriter Erica Schmidt having previously devised a stage show based on the original Rostand play a few years ago, which swapped out some of the famous monologues for brand new love songs.

Those songs were written by acclaimed rock band The National, and most of the compositions – in addition to a couple of new ones – have made it into the film.

RadioTimes.com spoke exclusively to The National member Bryce Dessner about writing the songs, and you can also check out the full tracklist below.

Cyrano soundtrack

When The National were first approached by Erica Schmidt to write the music for Cyrano, Bryce Dessner wasn’t entirely convinced, and even told her: “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

But Schmidt wasn’t about to give up, and after staging a reading of the script – with Dinklage playing Cyrano and Amanda Seyfried as Roxanne – he was eventually won over.

“She underscored instrumentals that we had given her of our music…. and something about the music, the sort of heartbeat, emotional kind of sound of our music with Peter playing that part really clicked,” he explains. “So we started working on some songs, and it was really a kind of a close collaboration with her in figuring out how the songs could suit the narrative.”

So what was the starting point in terms of composing these songs? “Well, at the time, we had just made Sleep Well Beast, which was this sort of very elaborate, electronic record with more ambitious orchestration and I think that with Cyrano we decided to pull it back and write simpler, almost folk songs.

“All those songs work with one instrument, or maybe two, with very little production, and a good National song always works like that – no matter how much you dress up a song, if the song itself isn’t really compelling, the lyrics and the melody, it doesn’t work.

“We don’t write Broadway-style songs, so it was kind of a stretch, to begin with,” Dessner continues. “And in a way the version in the theatre was different – I think it works better on-screen, to be honest, because the intimacy of the songs is easier to translate.”