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The Grand Budapest Hotel: Original Soundtrack is the soundtrack album composed by Alexandre Desplat for the 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel directed by Wes Anderson. The 32-track album was released on March 4, 2014, through ABKCO Records, produced by Anderson along with music supervisor Randall Poster. Unlike their previous ventures, the soundtrack to this film did not feature contemporary pop hits due to the classical roots of the film's music.

The film marked Desplat's third collaboration with Anderson after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012). It consisted of a classical score emulating Central European regions and utilized exotic instruments from the country, particularly the balalaika, which formed the musical core.

A critical success, the soundtrack fetched Desplat his first Academy Award for Best Original Score at the 87th Academy Awards after eight nominations. He also won the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Music, among numerous other accolades. It has been considered as one of Desplat's best original scores.

Background and production

For The Grand Budapest Hotel, composer Alexandre Desplat was tasked with creating a score that articulated the Republic of Zubrowka, a fictional country in Central Europe, that represented an amalgamation of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Germany.

Very early on, when I read the script he mentioned some kind of a sound that would emerge from Mitteleuropa ... And Mitteleuropa, for that film goes from Switzerland to Turkey. It's a wide band of land in which there are instruments and rhythms and melodies that you can quickly identify, of course you can think of the zither, the balalaikas, the percussion instruments that come also from the east, the Alpenhorns. It was all these things put together in a big, big, big pot. When you start mixing them together it becomes kind of a strange, special, weird sound. And that's what we were excited to do.

To underscore the folk sound of the film, Desplat and music supervisor Randall Poster made heavy use of the balalaika, a stringed instrument used extensively in Russian folk music; it served as the core of the film's music palette. Poster admitted the instrument had "more primal humanity and to enduring human values that have nothing to do with fashion" and it juxtaposed with Antonio Vivaldi's music in one of the tracks. Since both Anderson and Poster were not purely anchored in the world of classical folk music, they spent six months consulting various experts to hone their vision. Desplat assembled a 50-person ensemble of French and Russian balalaika players, which required the presence of two translators. The score was further performed by the members from the Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra, along with several exotic instruments being utilised by Desplat including zithers, cimbaloms, and alphorns, and sampled recordings of folk music.