New Wes Anderson film ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is scored with Stravinsky’s music

28 May 2025, 18:25

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s music takes centre stage in the new Wes Anderson film, The Phoenician Scheme. We explore Anderson’s musical choices and influences...

Wes Anderson’s new film, The Phoenician Scheme, tells the story of ‘Zsa-Zsa’ Korda (Benicio del Toro), one of the richest men in Europe, and the indifferently power-hungry set of quests he sets out on after being subjected to another in a long line of assassination attempts.

In this typically stylised and humorous Anderson film, which is set in the 1950s, the protagonist aims to fulfil a grand plan, the ‘large-scale exploitation of a geographical region with huge potential’, with his reluctant sidekick, his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who really just wants to be a nun.

The film, which premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, explores the nuances of family ties while borrowing tropes from espionage thrillers and action-adventure romps. Anderson co-wrote the screenplay with Roman Coppola, who also wrote Asteroid City (2023), Isle of Dogs (2018) and others with Anderson.

The title of The Phoenician Scheme, although using the real historic term for an ancient region of the world, refers to a fictitious place in Anderson’s universe, and Korda’s efforts to have economic dominion over it, in the same vein as Zubrowka in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Read more: The 50 best film scores of all time

Watch the trailer for The Phoenician Scheme

What music features in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme?

The score for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is written by award-winning French film composer, Alexandre Desplat, who’s known for The Imitation Game (2014), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2011) and The King's Speech (2010), as well as previous Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

His score is fittingly meticulous and humorous, bringing the Anderson world extra colour.

Alongside Desplat’s original music, Wes Anderson features the music of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky prominently throughout The Phoenician Scheme.

The music from the Shrovetide Fair scene from Stravinsky’s ballet, Petrushka, is heard at a couple of points in the film. And you can also hear the ‘Apotheosis’ from the Russian composer’s ballet, Apollo.

Anderson draws on another popular Stravinsky ballet, The Firebird, in the film, as well as in its theatrical trailer. The director, who learnt music growing up and who has dedicated film plots to his reverence for classical music, very deliberately chose the music of Stravinsky to help evoke the right mood and Soviet era aesthetic for the film. Such is his wonderful attention to detail.

The official trailer for the film even uses Stravinsky: a strident moment from Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet music prominently, as well as a short excerpt from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which also features in the film itself.

Read more: Concertgoer falls asleep during The Firebird, wakes up with shriek

Other classical music in The Phoenician Scheme includes the fourth movement ‘Rondo’ from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.2 in A, and Bach’s cantata, ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Lieben Cantata’. There are also some great jazz and swing moments in there, including an arrangement of Dizzy Gilespie’s ‘A Night In Tunisia’, Glen Miller’s ‘A String of Pearls’ and Gene Krupa’s ‘Drum Boogie’.

Wes Anderson’s use of music in film

Wes Anderson has a habit of returning to classical music in his films. He once said, “I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That’s always essential to me.”

Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is a plot point and recurring theme of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), something we can thank the director’s childhood influences for:

“The Britten music [in Moonrise Kingdom] is not just my memory of learning about this music when I was a kid, but it’s also music I got interested in over the years – more like my own kind of little study – and sharing that is a personal thing to me,” he has said. “Britten’s music is full of possibility and opening up to the world, there’s something grand about it.”

He used Prokofiev’s score for the film Lieutenant Kijé to just as significant effect in The Isle of Dogs.

Who is in The Phoenician Scheme cast?

The film features some go-to Wes Anderson actors, including the great Scarlet Johansson, Tom Hanks, Benicio del Toro, Willem Dafoe and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as famous faces new to the Anderson-verse, including Michael Cera, Mia Threapleton and Charlotte Gainsburg.

The Phoenician Scheme release date

The Phoenician Scheme is out now in UK cinemas, with a release date of 29 May in Germany and 30 May in the United States.