An Unexpected Blockbuster: What is the best selling classical music album of all time?
When looking at the major heavy hitters on the album charts, there’s a reason why classical music never sees the light of day all that often.
That’s normally reserved for its own separate chart half the time, and in the modern age, it can be written off as elevator music, but it can be heartwrenching if it has the right grip on culture.
Because, really, there shouldn’t be anything different between classical instruments and what is going on in pop music. Yes, the harmony is a lot more sophisticated, but both of them rely on the idea of getting people to feel something when they’re listening to them. A piece by Beethoven has as much potential to resonate with audiences as a Taylor Swift song; it’s only a matter of how people get hooked into it half the time.
But out of all the efforts that people have made to get classical music on the charts, it was always going to be a tough sell. Billy Joel had his Fantasies and Delusions record of piano pieces, and even Metallica brought an entire symphony to help them out on the wildly adventurous S&M album, but all of them were still considered odds and ends in both artists’ catalogues compared to anything too substantive.
Aside from the pop market, though, there’s one thing that can’t be discounted in chart history: the movie soundtrack. It’s not a mistake that everyone from Phil Collins to Kendrick Lamar has made a massive impact by tying themselves to a major blockbuster movie with their projects, but even when standing next to a massive Hollywood monolith like Disney, they were no match for the unyielding power that James Cameron had over people when he made Titanic.
How did the Titanic soundtrack become the biggest classical music album?
Then again, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why that music resonated with so many people. Countless big-budget franchises may boast about having some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. However, Cameron’s tale of two people falling in love and meeting a bittersweet end is all that anyone needs to be invested, which explains why people are still trying to justify why Rose didn’t have enough room for Jack on the door to pull him out of the water.
And let’s not forget the massive power that Celine Dion brought to the soundtrack with her voice. James Horner’s arrangements are absolutely perfect for this kind of story, but hearing Dion’s voice soar over ‘My Heart Will Go On’ is absolutely spellbinding, especially during the last chorus when the key changes and Dion sounds like she’s doing everything she can not to break down when singing to her lost love.
But given what the rest of the album entails, it makes sense why Dion was the only familiar face that was allowed on the record. Sure, most people may have bought the record for her performance and made it the highest-selling classical album of all time at 25million copies, but for anyone looking to go deeper, the score is easily one of the finest that Horner ever composed, even featuring instruments that would have been popular at the time the Titanic set sail.
While it’s a little bittersweet knowing that we will never hear another score from Horner again, his spirit lives on in this music every single time someone watches Titanic or his countless other musical scores. Because, despite Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet both being phenomenal performers, watching their iconic kiss at sunset wouldn’t be half as good as it was without that music behind them.
