Take two lonely romantic leads, one naive and the other tortured, add a bleak manor and a dash or two across punishing moors, put it on the big screen and what do you get?

A tumultuous tale so timeless and compelling that it has been adapted for film and television at least 18 times. Jane Eyre’s best cinematic outings come with a smouldering score to match the mood – just think of Bernard Herrmann’s stormy orchestral music for the 1943 version starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

Now Dario Marianelli, one of today’s leading film composers, has made his contribution to the Jane Eyre canon, in close collaboration with young violin virtuoso Jack Liebeck. American director Cary Fukunaga’s version, starring Australia’s Mia Wasikowska, opens in cinemas this week.

It’s the first major film Liebeck has worked on, but the latest in a long line of Marianelli masterpieces that includes Pride and Prejudice and his Oscar-winning score for Atonement. No stranger to capturing by turns the fraught and the pastoral in his music for film, Marianelli found his match in Liebeck, who has won critical acclaim plumbing the greatest emotional depths and...