The film score was written and composed by Meredith Willson, later known as composer and librettist of the 1957 musical comedy The Music Man:
Chaplin in the globe sceneI've seen [Chaplin] take a soundtrack and cut it all up and paste it back together and come up with some of the dangdest effects you ever heard—effects a composer would never think of. Don't kid yourself about that one. He would have been great at anything—music, law, ballet dancing, or painting—house, sign, or portrait. I got the screen credit for The Great Dictator music score, but the best parts of it were all Chaplin's ideas, like using the Lohengrin "Prelude" in the famous balloon-dance scene.[23]
According to Willson, the scene in which Chaplin shaves a customer to Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 had been filmed before he arrived, using a phonograph record for timing. Willson's task was to re-record it with the full studio orchestra, fitting the music to the action. They had planned to do it painstakingly, recording eight measures or less at a time, after running through the whole scene to get the overall idea. Chaplin decided to record the run-through in case anything was usable. Willson later wrote, "by dumb luck we had managed to catch every movement, and that was the first and only 'take' made of the scene, the one used in the finished picture".[23]
James L. Neibaur has noted that among the many parallels that Chaplin noted between his own life and Hitler's was an affinity for Wagner's music.[24] Chaplin's appreciation for Wagner has been noted in studies of the director's use of film music.[25] Many commentators have noted Chaplin's use of Wagner's Lohengrin prelude when Hynkel dances with the globe-balloon.[24][26][27] Chaplin repeated the use of the Lohengrin prelude near the conclusion when the exiled Hannah listens to the Jewish barber's speech celebrating democracy and freedom.[28] The music is interrupted during the dictator's dance but it is heard to climax and completion in the barber's pro-democracy speech.
Commenting on this, Lutz Peter Koepnick writes in 2002,
How can Wagner at once help emphasize a progressivist vision of human individualism and a fascist preview of absolute domination? How can the master's music simultaneously signify a desire for lost emotional integrity and for authoritative grandeur? Chaplin's dual use of Lohengrin points towards unsettling conjunctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Like Adorno, Chaplin understands Wagner as a signifier of both: the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the total work of art and the origin of mass culture out of the spirit of the most arduous aesthetic program of the 19th century. Unlike Adorno [who identifies American mass culture and fascist spectacle], Chaplin wants his audience to make crucial distinctions between competing Wagnerianisms. Both...rely on the driving force of utopian desires, on...the promise of self-transcendence and authentic collectivity, but they channel these mythic longings in fundamentally different directions. Although [Chaplin] exposes the puzzling modernity of Nazi politics, Chaplin is unwilling to write off either Wagner or industrial culture. [Chaplin suggests] Hollywood needs Wagner as never before in order to at once condemn the use of fantasy in fascism and warrant the utopian possibilities in industrial culture.[29]
