Todd Giles
played out, and brought together at the end, as is the case with The Young
Person’s Guide, in a full-ensemble fugue.
Two further Britten compositions are included in Moonrise in the form of
extradiegetic selections from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“On the Ground,
Sleep Sound”) [1960] and Friday Afternoons (“Cuckoo!”) [1935], both of which
extradiegetic music from Franz Shubert and Hank Williams, and diegetic
selections from Camile Saint-Saens’s Le Carnaval de Animaux and Mozart’s
Cosi fan Tutti. “Britten is the big one,” though, according to Anderson. “The
other music to me is stuff on the side,” he says, “but Britten is what the movie
is sort of built on. I was in Noye’s Fludde when I was eight years old, nine
years old, and loved that music. I’ve always been interested in Britten, and
it happens that he’s written and made quite a number of pieces that are
expressly for children, so that was sort of what I built from the sound of the
movie—the world of it” (Pinkerton 19). In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross,
Anderson also says, “I kind of connect to this period that the movie is set in,
which is classical pieces that are meant to have an audience of children but
that are not written down to chil