In the case of Saturday Night Fever, “[t]he use of disco-inflected classical music in the film represents the economic and social success to which Tony and his friends ultimately aspire,” argues McLeod. “The disco milieu represents one form of illusion—the illusion of power in the outside ‘real’ world that Tony imagines.”
Indeed, classical music represents an exotic world of sophistication, elitism, and wealth which, especially when merged with a homogeneous disco beat, becomes an enticing symbol of the unattainable, illusory, and artificial nature of Tony’s dreams.
Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” makes its appearance when Tony and his friends arrive at the 2001 Oddyssey (sic) disco club.
“To some extent he is represented as the new heir to the cultural prestige of classical music,” writes McLeod of Tony’s appearance. The soundtrack, with its
seemingly contradictory and almost synthetically forced fusion of classical music and disco underlines the artificiality of his entrance and of the world into which he has crossed. It is likely no accident that the famous “fate” motive, heard here near the beginning of the movie, functions as a foreshadowing of the dramatic events that will soon unfold within this world.
“A Fifth of Beethoven” is easily the highest-profile instance of disco appropriation of classical music. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is typically associated with notions of monumentality, heroism, fate, and relentless transcendence of the will. And while Beethoven’s version is about transcending humanity, Murphy’s is steeped in humanity, as it represents acceptance of common human desires—such as dancing—rather than superhuman transcendence of them.
January 22, 2022 In 1980, The Grammys gave disco its own category, but the genre was already receding into invisibility.
The soundtrack also featured another instrumental disco–classical interpretation: David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain,” which adapts Mussorgsky’s orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (which is also the Chernabog segment in Disney’s Fantasia). “Night on Disco Mountain” is heard when Tony and his friend pretend to jump off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
“The faked suicides are symbolized by the ‘fake’ classical music,” writes McLeod.
Shire’s track adds another layer of grotesque ambient sounds to further heighten the atmosphere of chaos and alienation, producing what McLeod calls “an international and futuristic potpourri of sounds.”