1 Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto xii, section 40. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1980–93), v (1986), 507.

2 From a 1971 interview in Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor and Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis (rev. edn, New York, 1999), 37–43 (p. 38).

3 A Clockwork Orange opened in the US in December 1971, then in the UK in January 1972. Kubrick would have known perfectly well, from the response to his previous films up to and including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), just how poorly some critics responded to his enigmatic directorial style.

4 Key instances include Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker, and Christopher Ricks, in the New York Review of Books (both April 1972). For reprints of these reviews, see Kael, ‘Review’, and Ricks, ‘Horrorshow’, in Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Mark Rawlinson (New York and London, 2011), 307–11 and 311–19 respectively. My page references to the novel refer to this edition, cited hereafter as ACO.

5 ‘I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. […] Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful.’ Stanley Kubrick, ‘Words and Movies’, Sight and Sound, 30/1 (winter 1960), 14; repr. in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (Cologne, 2005), 338. Examples of more positive, but still overly conclusive, responses include Robert Benayoun, ‘Stanley Kubrick, le libertaire (sur A Clockwork Orange)’, Positif, 139 (June 1972), 34–44, and Charles Barr, ‘Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and the Critics’, Screen, 13/2 (summer 1972), 17–31. For a rare early response to the film as an open-ended allegory, see Don Daniels, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Sight and Sound, 42/1 (winter 1972), 44–6, repr. in ACO, 325–32. More recently, Peter Krämer's fine monograph A Clockwork Orange (New York, 2011) acknowledges the ‘highly ambiguous’ nature of the film (p. xxv), but slips questionable certainties even into an ostensibly objective ‘Synopsis’.

6 Kael, for example, writes that the movie follows the novel ‘so closely that the book might have served as the script’, and dismisses the soundtrack with a sniff: ‘Yes, the music is effective, but the effect is self-important’ (‘Review’, ACO, 307, 310).

7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London, 1964).

8 At one point in the novel, Burgess makes clear that ‘nadsat’ means ‘teenager’; he later explained that he took the term Nadsat from the Russian equivalent of the English ‘-teen’ suffix. See ACO, 20, 133.

9 Burgess never uses any of the notoriously problematic generic labels for Alex's beloved symphonic or concert tradition, but he does clearly distinguish it from the popular songs preferred by some other characters.

10 At the end of Part 2, the names of Schoenberg and Orff appear in a question to Alex about what he would like to hear (p. 113). The last chapter (excised from the first US edition and from Kubrick's screenplay) includes a general invocation of ‘romantic songs, what they call Lieder’ (p. 118), as well as nods to ‘Felix M. with his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture’ and ‘Benjy Britt’ (p. 120).

11 One tiny exception: a doorbell sounds the famous first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. With the invented figures Plautus and Skadelig the canon extends to America and Scandinavia, but none of the fictive names bring much trace of Latin or Slavic heritage to the musical mix. In a discussion of Burgess and music, Paul Phillips deciphers another invented name, ‘Claudius Birdman’, as a coded reference (via a Dutch ornithologist named ‘de Bussy’) to Claude Debussy. Be that as it may, the encoding effaces all trace of ‘Frenchness’. See Paul Phillips, ‘Burgess and Music’, ACO, 236–45 (p. 237).

12 These include ‘Berti Laski rasping a real starry oldie called “You Blister My Paint”’ (p. 5) and ‘Neal Achimota singing “That Day, Yeah, That Day”’ (p. 115).

13 Claudia Gorbman, ‘Ears Wide Open: Kubrick's Music’, Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film, ed. Philip Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Aldershot, 2006), 3–18 (p. 4). The accounts in question exemplify this imbalance in varying degrees. At one extreme we find the titular emphasis of Krin Gabbard, ‘Redeemed by Ludwig Van: Stanley Kubrick's Musical Strategy in A Clockwork Orange’, Cine-Sonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, ed. Philip Brophy (North Ryde, NSW, 2001), 149–67; and James Wierzbicki, ‘Banality Triumphant: Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films’, Beethoven Forum, 10 (2003), 113–38. Almost equally single-minded in its (highly critical) focus on the film's use of Beethoven is Peter J. Rabinowitz, ‘“A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal”: Music in A Clockwork Orange’, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, ed. Stuart Y. McDougal (Cambridge, 2003), 109–30. At the other extreme, more even-handed discussions of the music can be found in Kate McQuiston, ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized: A Clockwork Orange as Musicology’, Stanley Kubrick: Essays on his Films and Legacy, ed. Gary D. Rhodes (Jefferson, NC, 2008), 105–22; and Christine Lee Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in his Films (Lanham, MD, 2013), 147–78. But Gengaro highlights the ‘narrative importance’ of the Ninth and blithely deems it Alex's ‘theme song’ (p. 124), while McQuiston, claiming that the film is ‘dominated’ by the Beethoven (p. 105), subjects the Ninth to much more in-depth study than any other piece. Substantial comments on the music also crop up throughout the film-critical literature; the most useful are in the relevant chapters of Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (rev. edn, Bloomington, IN, 2000); Randy Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed (Jefferson, NC, 2001); and James Naremore, On Kubrick (London, 2007).

14 As reprinted on the Warner Brothers UK home DVD version, © Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2005. All timings and stills are from this version.

15 See James Buhler, ‘Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing Interactions of Music and Film’, Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Kevin J. Donnelly (Edinburgh, 2001), 39–61, esp. pp. 42–3.

16 Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (London, 1967), 194.

17 For some useful overviews, see Nicholas Cook, Beethoven, Symphony no. 9 (Cambridge, 1993); Esteban Buch, Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago, IL, 2003); and David Benjamin Levy, Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony, Yale Music Masterworks (rev. edn, New Haven, CT, 2003).

18 He often insisted on this point. For example: ‘I don't regard A Clockwork Orange as being primarily, or even significantly, a topical, social story. I use Alex to explore an aspect of the human personality.’ John Hofsess, ‘Mind's Eye: A Clockwork Orange’, Take One, May/June 1971, repr. in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Philips (Jackson, MS, 2001), 105–7 (p. 107).

19 Gene Siskel, ‘Kubrick's Creative Concern’, Chicago Tribune, 13 February 1972, repr. in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Philips, 116–25 (p. 118). As ‘topical’ material Kubrick specifies the behavioural psychology most notably exemplified, at that time, in Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (London, 1972).

20 Penelope Houston, ‘Kubrick Country’, Saturday Review, December 1971, repr. in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Philips, 108–15 (pp. 110–11). Krämer further explores Kubrick's notions of the ‘work of art’ in his A Clockwork Orange, esp. pp. 12–19.

21 I have found no mention of the suggestive parallel between Burgess's three parts of seven chapters and the Dreimal sieben Gedichte of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. Perhaps this is coincidental: Burgess often explained his form with reference to ‘traditional arithmology’, in which 21 is ‘the symbol of human maturity’ (see, for example, ACO, 134). But as Paul Phillips points out, the fact that ‘Alex matures at eighteen instead of twenty-one is one of the novel's chief inconsistencies’ (‘Burgess and Music’, 244).

22 This assumption, propounded most influentially in Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York, 2001), inflects many studies either implicitly or explicitly. See, for example, the tinge of resentment for Kubrick's ‘high-art’ pretensions (and contempt for his self-congratulatory audience) in Gabbard, ‘Redeemed by Ludwig Van’ (e.g. p. 159). For a more nuanced variant, see McQuiston's emphasis on audience ‘recognition’ throughout her ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’ and the dissertation from which that article is drawn, Kate McQuiston, ‘Recognizing Music in the Films of Stanley Kubrick’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004).

23 I borrow the description of classical Hollywood as an ‘excessively obvious’ film style from the well-known discussion in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, 1985).

24 Hofsess, ‘Mind's Eye’, 106.

25 Kubrick also significantly compresses the model, which includes more episodes of violence in both Part 1 and Part 3.

26 There is a slight ambiguity about the precise number and distribution of Purcell excerpts, because one of them is interrupted by the ‘Ode to Joy’ and resumes after it; the same excerpt then leads directly to a different one (see Figure 6 below, p. 367). I do not think this ambiguity affects the point at issue.

27 With some slight approximation for overlaps and fades, the total time given to Kubrick's three main composers, in ascending order, is: Beethoven, 13′ 50″; Purcell, 15′ 30″; and Rossini, 21′ 45″. In other words, we hear Rossini in this film more than one and a half times longer than we do Beethoven.

28 For a detailed discussion of the imagery in the first (fantasy) Scherzo scene, see Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick, 124–6.

29 Wierzbicki, ‘Banality Triumphant’, 120. The same point is made in McQuiston, ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’, 107.

30 The Chelsea Drugstore, which was not just a record shop but also a bookshop and newsstand and much else, opened in 1968 on the King's Road in Chelsea, west London. Its quick rise as a haunt of the hippest is most easily illustrated by its namecheck in the 1969 Rolling Stones hit ‘You Can't Always Get What You Want’ (third verse: ‘I went down to the Chelsea Drugstore / to get your prescription filled […]’). Kubrick's camera catches the name of the shop a few times, for example on the front of an Island Records display.

31 Many others appear earlier in the scene: e.g. Rare Bird, As Your Mind Flies By (1970); Rare Earth, Get Ready (1969); the Keef Hartley Band, The Time is Near (1970); John Fahey, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965). As has often been noted, the soundtrack LP for 2001; A Space Odyssey (1968), also visible, adds to the up-to-date pop-music selection a wink at the meticulousness of Kubrick's own scoring practices. We do get one brief glimpse of a carousel that might bear ‘classical’ albums, but only the generically ambiguous Missa Luba LP (Père Guido Haazen with young African singers, 1965) can be seen clearly; another shopper largely obscures what looks like a yellow ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ label on another. Kubrick could have shown this side of the collection more clearly if he had wanted to.

32 Although the first widespread success of the Moog had come with Carlos's 1968 Switched-On Bach, it had been quickly picked up by leading pop musicians – for example, by the Beatles on Abbey Road (1969).

33 See, for example, the accusations that Kubrick himself traffics in fascist propaganda in Rabinowitz, ‘“A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal”’, 126, and Wierzbicki, ‘Banality Triumphant’, 126.

34 McQuiston, ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’, 113.

35 See the pamphlet produced for the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 and later included as ‘Supplement: Propaganda and the Nazi War Film’ in Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ, 1947), 273–331, esp. pp. 275–6. Key examples include Der Feldzug in Polen (Campaign in Poland, 1940), Feuertaufe (Baptism of Fire, 1940) and Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West, 1941).

36 The details in this paragraph are drawn from several accounts, which contain some inconsistency of detail. See Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: Biografía crítica (Barcelona, 1969), ed. and trans. David Robinson as Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography (New York, 1975), 125; Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigal Israel (New York, 1983), 183; Tomás Pérez Turrent and José de la Colina, Buñuel por Buñuel (Madrid, 1993), 42; and Manual Rodriguez Blanco, Luis Buñuel (Paris, 2000), 89.

37 In Kracauer's apt phrase, the showings of the ‘documentary’ films in (for example) Bucharest, Oslo and Belgrade amounted to ‘psychological holdups’. He critiques their supposed ‘documentary’ nature (i.e. the propagandistic requirement that they convey a compelling illusion of truth) at length and from various different angles. See his From Caligari to Hitler, 277 and passim.

38 Chaplin was predisposed to such a reaction since by this time he had already been planning his Hitler parody The Great Dictator (1940) for some years.

39 Quoted in Carlos Fuentes, ‘The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel’, The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism, ed. Joan Mellen (New York, 1978), 51–71 (p. 67).

40 Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (London, 1998), 57.

41 Recall Tovey on the ‘military character’ of this passage: ‘Beethoven indulges in no silly realism […] he tells us no details about war; but he unfailingly gives the note of terror wherever war is symbolized.’ Donald F. Tovey, ‘Beethoven: Ninth Symphony, Op. 125: Its Place in Musical Art’, Essays in Musical Analysis, 6 vols. (London, 1935–9), ii (1935), 1–45 (p. 40).

42 On this point see McQuiston, ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’, 108.

43 The reference is to the last chapter heading of Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (Leipzig, 1834).

44 The fact that some critics find hints of ‘rape’ in this scene exemplifies the power of this film to elicit preformed moral opinions (see, for example, Rabinowitz, ‘“A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal”’, 113). A frame-by-frame analysis gives the lie to such notions. Given what it really shows, I wonder if perceptions that the women are unwilling participants signal unexamined presumptions that they ought to be (cf. my epigraph from Byron).

45 Strangely, it has even occasioned critical opprobrium, as if Kubrick has somehow cheated by effacing the most odious, paedophilic side of his anti-hero. See for example Ricks, ‘Horrorshow’, ACO, 314–15. I offer another suggestion below (see p. 371).

46 For more on Beethoven in this light, see, for example, Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley, CA, 2004); for Rossini, see Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge, 2007), esp. Chapter 6, ‘Searching for the Revolution in Guillaume Tell’ (pp. 257–92). Richard Taruskin usefully summarizes the two cases in his Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols. (rev. edn, New York, 2010), iii, 7–13. In short, the 1824 symphony was something of a belated monument to lost ideals in the context of Metternich's post-Napoleonic Vienna, while Guillaume Tell (the first ‘grand opera’) was the last and greatest blazon of Rossini's pre-eminence in the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration. As Taruskin puts it, the ‘antiheroic’ or ‘pessimistic’ aspect of such later works (their ‘resigned detachment’, politically speaking, in the words he borrows from Carl Dahlhaus) was ‘one sphere – perhaps the one sphere – in which Rossini and Beethoven were not dialectical antagonists but comrades’ (p. 13).

47 Cf., for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. The practice varies: 2001 uses descriptive title cards (e.g. ‘The Jupiter Mission’); Barry Lyndon (1975) uses elaborate, literary descriptions in keeping with its Thackeray source novel (e.g. ‘Part II: Containing an account of the misfortunes [etc.]’); The Shining (1980) uses temporal markers (e.g. ‘Three Months Later’).

48 Kubrick visually reinforces this pre-existing demarcation by ending his ‘Part 1’ with a close-up of Alex's face that echoes the very first image of the film.

49 Some near-exceptions include Nelson, who notes that ‘parts two and three’ are ‘characterized by the slow movement from Rossini's “William Tell Overture”’ (Kubrick, 156), and Gengaro, who takes passing note of both excerpts in Listening to Stanley Kubrick (pp. 117–18), but does not propose any formal implications. See Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN, 1987), esp. pp. 70–91.

50 Such distinctive moments of self-conscious lyricism are also formally pivotal, for example, in 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. See David J. Code, ‘Real Feelings: Music as Path to Philosophy in 2001: A Space Odyssey’, Twentieth-Century Music, 7 (2010), 195–218, and ‘Rehearing The Shining: Musical Undercurrents in the Overlook Hotel’, Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner (New York, 2010), 133–51.

51 The degree of approximation itself seems studied: the gang's white garb and funny hats unmistakably refer to the droogs, but in the first film they beat a younger man in a grey suit and cravat rather than an old tramp; the bright pink curly hair of the woman in the second film seems a clear reference to the writer's redheaded wife.

52 The novel (but not the film) refers at this point to ‘gromky [loud] atmosphere music […] very fierce and full of discord’ (p. 67), and ‘very pathetic and tragic music’ (p. 68). Carlos's synthesizer music here is not wholly free of pastiche elements, but the sources are far less clear than in the fully fledged arrangements.

53 A different selection from the ‘prison hymnal’ appears in the equivalent place in Burgess (p. 54); no pop song is mentioned on Alex's return home (p. 87).

54 Rimsky-Korsakov rejected the assumption that his musical motifs were associated with ‘the same poetic ideas’ throughout his suite, but his initial identification of the themes of Sheherazade and her husband is clear enough to apply to these isolated instances. See Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (3rd edn, New York, 1936), 247–8.

55 The ‘starry yahoodies [old Jews] tolchocking [striking] each other’ and then ‘getting onto bed with their wives' like handmaidens’ are described on p. 53; the image of the scourged Christ with the cross follows on p. 54.

56 Kael, ‘Review’, ACO, 310; McQuiston, ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’, 108.

57 Jonathan Finney, from the unpaginated programme for ‘“By Means of Music”: A Concert for Stanley Kubrick, 1928–1999’, given by the London Concertante at the Barbican Centre on 16 April 2000 (one typo silently corrected). I am grateful to William and Haide Aide for providing me with their personal copy of this lavishly produced programme. My second ‘sic’ signals that Elgar could hardly have loathed a text added after his death. (Nor would he have loathed the different text, by his wife, previously added to the trio of the fourth march to create the song ‘The King's Way’.)

58 He thus exemplifies the mixed evidentiary value of first- and second-hand testimony, which is granted unqualified authority in some recent, repressively positivistic accounts of Kubrick's films. See, for example, Paul Merkley, ‘“Stanley Hates This but I Like It!”: North vs. Kubrick on the Music for 2001: A Space Odyssey’, Journal of Film Music, 2/1 (2007), 1–34.

59 George Sampson refers to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in these terms in his 1921 essay ‘Elgar and Strauss’, repr. in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne, 1983), 203–8. The same considerations lend an ironic tinge to Percy Young's comment that ‘it is by his less ambitious pieces that Elgar has “gained the Empire of the ear”’ (Elgar: A Study of a Musician (London, 1955), 376–7). For recent reflections along these lines, see Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer’, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2004), 214–34.

60 This text is Ernest Newman's amalgamation of several closely related poems by the late-Victorian writer John Warren, Third Baron de Tabley. See Basil Maine, Elgar: His Life and Works (London, 1933), 196, which gives the poem and identifies it, imprecisely, with only one of its source texts, ‘The March of Glory’.

61 See again note 18 above. The persistence of this point is perhaps best exemplified by Krämer, A Clockwork Orange, a thorough and thoughtful book that nonetheless remains almost wholly contemporary and topical in its fields of reference.

62 In an important survey of this archetype, Leo Weinstein lists Hamlet, Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan as the four modern heroes of similarly vast import. See his The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, CA, 1959), 1. These days we might wish to question the gender-exclusive nature of this list. I have also found useful points in Jean Rousset, Le mythe de Don Juan (Paris, 1978), and John William Smeed, Don Juan: Variations on a Theme (London and New York, 1990).

63 See, for example, Nelson, Kubrick, 152, 161–2, and Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick, 115, 159. Of my musicological interlocutors, Gengaro gives most attention to the Purcell, and her emphasis on its signification of ‘authority’ offers a suggestive alternative reading (Listening to Stanley Kubrick, 111–12). McQuiston makes no mention at all of Purcell in ‘Value, Violence and Music Recognized’ (even when listing all other music in the film on p. 107); Wierzbicki mentions three of the six instances of ‘the slow march from Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary’ in a footnote in ‘Banality Triumphant’ (119, note ²³); Rabinowitz hears ‘the adaptation of Purcell (Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary)’ as the most ‘striking’ of Carlos's electronic arrangements, but comments only that it ‘launches the film and returns, in a variety of guises, as a leitmotif throughout’ (‘“A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal”’, 112).

64 See J. A. Fuller-Maitland, William Barclay Squire and H. C. Colles, ‘Purcell’, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edn, ed. Eric Blom, 9 vols. (London, 1954), vi, 996–1020 (pp. 1000–1); and The Works of Henry Purcell, The Purcell Society, 32 vols. (London, 1878–1962; rev. edn, London, 1961–), xx: Dramatic Music, Part II: Songs and Instrumental Music for the Stage, ed. Alan Gray (1961), rev. Ian Spink (1998), 48–73 (p. 58), and xxxi: Fantazias and Miscellaneous Instrumental Music, ed. Thurston Dart (1959), rev. Michael Tilmouth (1990), 97–8 (p. 97). See also the thorough account, with complete scores, in W. Barclay Squire, ‘Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Mary II’, Sammelbände der Internationale Musikgesellschaft, 4 (1902–3), 225–33.

65 See Thurston Dart's editorial commentary to ‘The Queen's Funeral March and Canzona’ in The Works of Henry Purcell, xxxi (1959, rev. 1990): ‘Both works almost undoubtedly had parts for kettledrums, though these have not survived’ (p. 125).

66 See Johann Sebastian Bach, Magnificat in D major, and Henry Purcell, Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, ed. Thurston Dart, performed by the Geraint Jones Singers and Orchestra, CLP 1128 (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, His Master's Voice, 1960). The fact that the funeral music for a beloved monarch was also used in this racy play has occasioned debate about which version truly came first. Ian Spink summarizes the case in The Works of Henry Purcell, xx (rev. edn, 1998), p. xxii; see also Curtis A. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984), 116–17.

67 This omission is less surprising given how briefly Rimsky-Korsakov's music features in the film.

68 Philip Strick and Penelope Houston, ‘Modern Times: An Interview with Stanley Kubrick’, Sight and Sound, 41/2 (spring 1972), 62–6, repr. in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Philips, 126–40 (p. 132). It is not clear from the context which of the six scenes he means.

69 LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 353. LoBrutto credits this anecdote to a personal interview with Carlos (p. 545, date unspecified).

70 Northrop Frye, ‘Myth, Fiction, and Displacement’, in his Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, 1963), 21–38 (p. 37).

71 See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (London, 1946), esp. pp. 68–84 (p. 73).

72 Krämer offers further detail about this scene's studied challenges to seeing in his A Clockwork Orange, 36–9, and has much of interest to say (of a purely visual nature) about the film's pervasive play with ‘point of view’.

73 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Swenson and Swenson, 68.

74 This titular convention was typical of earlier versions, e.g. L'athée foudroyé (Rosimond, 1669); L'ateista fulminato (author unknown, seventeenth century); La pravità castigate (Denzio, 1736). Later tradition would feature several pointedly reversed versions, for example the opera Don Juan Triumphant included in Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of the Opera (1910), and the play Don Giovanni ou O dissoluto absolvido (2005) by the Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago. The question of appropriate punishment, though problematic in later, secular contexts, would continue to be encapsulated in variants of the other titular convention of referring to the avenging statue, as in Molière's Le festin de pierre (1665) and Pushkin's The Stone Guest (1830).

75 A suggestive reading of the film in terms of Freud's ego, id and superego can be found in Daniels, ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

76 Price, Henry Purcell, 111–13.

77 Price (Henry Purcell, 111) refers to Shadwell's play as a ‘perversion’ of its sources (e.g. Molière and Dorimon). The original 1676 edition of Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine: A Tragedy Acted by His Majesty's Servants, is available for consultation through Google Books; the exchange between Clara and Flavia on the eve of their weddings (e.g. ‘Oh that we were in England! There, they say, a woman may choose a footman, and run away with him, if she likes him, and no dishonour to the family’) is in Act 3, starting at p. 44.

78 Weinstein devotes a complete chapter to Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, which in spite of its dramatic weaknesses remains one of the most frequently produced plays in Spain. The ‘Don Juan in Hell’ episode in Act 3 of Shaw's Man and Superman (1901–3) is often presented as an independent stage piece. See Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, 119–29, 152–4.

79 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York, 1952), 122–3.

80 Bernard Williams, ‘Don Giovanni as an Idea’, W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, ed. Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 1981), 81–91 (pp. 90–1).

81 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (2010), ii, 495.

82 These viewers should note, however, that invocations of funereal or regal overtones are just as much artefacts of the music's textual (i.e. titular) appendages as references to Shadwell's libertine. The proof is the simple fact that the composer deemed the same music appropriate to both contexts.

83 The wildly varying accounts of the gender dynamics in this final scene have ranged from Vincent Canby's early reference to ‘another one of Alex's sado-masochistic sex fantasies’ involving ‘forcibly putting the old in-out to another helpless, faceless [?] woman’ (‘Disorienting but Human Comedy’, New York Times, 9 January 1972; repr. as ‘Review’ in ACO, 304–7 (pp. 304–5)), through Rasmussen's reference to ‘screwing’ and ‘certainly not making love’ (Stanley Kubrick, 171), to a few critics who do see some (variously qualified) vision of consensual love-making, and at least one – at the opposite extreme to Canby – who recognizes this scene as an exceptional instance of ‘pleasure (for both sexes)’ in place of ‘Alex's violent domination of a woman’ (Krämer, A Clockwork Orange, 82).

84 For an instance of the reductive polemic that springs from a critical presumption of moral superiority (in this case rooted in the reflexively Marxist perspective characteristic of its era in popular culture studies), see Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Screen Violence: Emotional Structure and Ideological Function in A Clockwork Orange’, Approaches to Popular Culture, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (London, 1976), 176–200.

85 Naremore registers the puzzling nature of this setting when he hesitates over ‘white feathers or snow’ (On Kubrick, 159).

86 ‘Don Juan aux enfers’ is a poem in Les fleurs du mal, sometimes translated as ‘Don Juan in Hell’, sometimes as ‘Don Juan in Hades’. Baudelaire also left a fragmentary plan for a play, La fin de Don Juan.

87 Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (rev. edn, New York, 2001), 105.

88 Some critics see particular resonances of the ‘Ascot’ scene in the film My Fair Lady here, which further strengthens the Edwardian associations. See, for example, Naremore, On Kubrick, 159, and Robert Kolker, ‘A Clockwork Orange … Ticking’, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, ed. McDougal, 19–36 (p. 35).

89 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1994), 61 (translation slightly modified).

90 She notes only in passing that ‘Don Juan was unaffected by Elvira's tears’. Beauvoir, The Ethics, 61.

91 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Woman on Top’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA, 1975), 124–51 (p. 151).

92 I know of no previous reference to this figure, which seems to be an exception to Michael Herr's claim that Kubrick ‘never had the impulse to slip around to the other side of the camera like Orson Welles or John Huston or Alfred Hitchcock’. ‘Kubrick’, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Castle, 520–9 (p. 521).

93 Krämer, in his overview of early criticism, puts this point well when he writes, ‘The final shot of the story […] could be seen as a redemptive fantasy of socially approved and mutually satisfying sexual intercourse, [but] was most likely to be understood as “rape”.’ A Clockwork Orange, 84.

94 For a slightly richer picture of Edwardian Britain, we might note that Emily Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 – around the time Elgar wrote his first Pomp and Circumstance march.

95 Quoted in Houston, ‘Kubrick Country’, 111.

96 Walker, Taylor and Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, 198.

97 Lord Byron, ‘Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn’, The Complete Poetical Works, iii (1981), 22–31. I cite lines 181–3 and 113–16.

98 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 22. The extraordinary influence of McLuhan's study on Kubrick's generation is captured by a recollection of the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that ‘during my grad school days in the mid-1960s, there was an undergraduate course in existentialism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook which used Understanding Media as its sole textbook’. Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 165.

99 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 282.

100 John Cullinan, ‘The Art of Fiction XLVIII’, interview with Anthony Burgess, Paris Review, 56 (1973), 136–9, 162; repr. as ‘Interview’ in ACO, 154–7 (p. 156).

101 LoBrutto, quoting a radio interview with Nat Hentoff, Stanley Kubrick, 366.

102 John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (London, 1997), 259. Baxter attributes the quotes from Corri and others in this chapter to ‘conversations with the author, London, Hollywood, and Paris, 1995 and 1996’ (p. 374).

103 Strick and Houston, ‘Modern Times’, 127.

104 See Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 259. To be precise, Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown first wrote the song for a 1927 Hollywood stage revue. After the success of The Jazz Singer in the same year, they were invited by Irving Thalberg to contribute to the first MGM all-talking musical films, including this one. See Peter Wollen, Singin’ in the Rain (London, 1992), 30–1.

105 In the novel, the recognition is triggered by the word ‘dim’, which reminds the writer of Alex's former droog. In his original screenplay, Kubrick tried using the distinctive Nadsat adjective ‘horrorshow’ for the same purpose. See the page reproduced in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Castle, 411.

106 See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1994), 129–31. As examples of dramatic ‘de-acousmatization’ he gives the unmasking of powerful, once-hidden figures in Kiss Me Deadly and Dr No.

107 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 287.

108 Frye, ‘Lord Byron’, in his Fables of Identity, 168–89 (p. 189).

109 Pierre Jean Jouve, Le Don Juan de Mozart (Paris, 1942), 129 (my translation).

110 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 289.

111 Quoted in Fuentes, ‘The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel’, 65.