How an Opera Aria Crashed the Oscars Best Original Song Competition

This year’s Best Original Song nominees at the Oscars are a blues number, a K-Pop ditty, a Nick Cave ballad, an inspirational Diane Warren track … and an aria?

Well, yeah. Nicholas Pike’s “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” which edged out entries from Miley Cyrus, Billy Idol, Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile, Ed Sheeran, Nine Inch Nails and Stephen Schwartz to land a nomination, was inspired by opera and sung by Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez. At times, the piano-based song from “Viva Verdi!” feels fully operatic; at others, it nudges toward grandiose pop territory.

Nominated alongside work from “Sinners,” “KPop Demon Hunters,” “Train Dreams” and “Diane Warren: Relentless,” it may well be the most classical-sounding nominee since David Lang’s “Simple Song #3” from “Youth” a decade ago.

The funny thing is, “Sweet Dreams of Joy” wasn’t written long after “Simple Song #3.” “It’s been a long road,” said Pike, a musician and composer born in England and raised in South Africa whose experience includes playing improvisational jazz with musicians such as Bill Frisell and writing scores for “In Tahir Square” (for which he won an Emmy), “The Prince and the Pauper,” “Tales from the Crypt” and the TV version of “The Shining.” “Been a very long road.”

In 2016, Pike was having lunch with songwriter and Academy Music Branch member Allan Rich when Rich spotted producer Christine La Monte and said, “There’s somebody you should meet.” La Monte was looking for a composer for a documentary about Casa Verdi, a retirement home in Milan for singers and musicians built by the famed 19th-century composer Giuseppe Verdi. “That got my interest right away,” he said. “We chatted and she sent me a 12-minute teaser that Yvonne Russo, the director, had put together” from footage they’d already shot.  

“It was so moving that I just went over to the piano and wrote the piece,” Pike said. “There was no directive of any kind from anybody, no specific scene that I was writing for. It was just purely emotion to music. The footage was so full of energy and joy and possibilities that it just all came pouring out.”

The speed with which he wrote the song wasn’t entirely unusual. “I’m generally a pretty quick writer because I have sort of a dual personality, music-wise,” he said. “I come from a classical world and from an improvisational jazz world, and the improvisational part is a big factor in my composing. When I’m in the moment, composing usually happens pretty quickly.”

At first, the song was strictly instrumental. “Within a couple of days, I thought, Well, this is Verdi,” he said. “It might be nice if it was an operatic singer singing it. I need to write some lyrics.” Putting “one foot in front of the other,” he came up with lyrics that spoke to the joys of creation: “Burning ever yearning over rhyme/Spreading whispers of desire/Resisting and pressing and finding the road to salvation/Sweet fragrance of joy.”

“I think the core of the piece is a celebration of life as an artist — for Verdi and for all the residents at Casa Verdi,” Pike said. “And I think it helped them focus the film to have this piece of music.”

Initially, he recorded a demo version with Liv Redpath, a soprano who at that point was part of the Los Angeles Opera’s Young Artist Program and has gone on to work with the Santa Fe Opera, the Seattle Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Bayerische Staatsoper, among many others. “That was really enlightening for me, to go from it being in my head and on the computer to actually hearing it performed,” he said. “It really helped me get a sense of what it should ultimately sound like.”

He made contact with Martínez through an engineer who had recorded her with Plácido Domingo for the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle,” then recorded the final version at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley while Martínez was performing in the San Francisco Opera. “It was an amazing experience to hear it performed at such a high level,” he said. “The emotion, the power was just overwhelming.”

That recording happened nine years ago, and a video of the song was uploaded to Vimeo in 2017. While “Viva Verdi!” was shot over a seven-year period, production slowed and its release was delayed by the pandemic. The song retained its Oscar eligibility and became one of the biggest surprises of nomination morning.

But Pike himself won’t say he was shocked by the nomination. “I thought it could go either way,” he said. “You don’t really know what people think, but I thought that if they heard it, they would respond. It was obviously completely different from anything else on the shortlist, and I think it’s kind of a refreshing change to have an operatic aria there, you know?”

Now that he’s landed the nomination, is Pike disappointed that Oscar producers decided to have only two of the five nominated songs performed on the telecast, robbing viewers of a repeat of the overwhelming experience he had seeing the song performed in that studio in Berkeley?

He paused and chose his words carefully. “Obviously, I’m thrilled to be in this position of being nominated,” he said. “Would it be great to perform it live? Yes, it would.” Another pause. “And beyond that, I don’t know anything.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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