The musical hobbits have been keeping it hidden away in the Shires for the past three years. But now, in our exclusive free download available only on Times Online from today, readers can listen to the sound of Middle-earth. The creators of the stage version of The Lord of the Rings have given The Times the first hearing of one of the most emotionally charged tracks from the musical.

The title of this track, sung by the Elves, is Lothlórien and comes as the Fellowship — emerging from Moria on the far side of the Misty Mountains — are offered refuge in the Elvish haven Lothlórien. Frodo learns from Galadriel, Lady of the Golden Wood, that destruction of the One Ring will mean the end of magic in Middle-earth.

The music you will hear is by A. R. Rahman and the Finnish folk collective Värttinä, with Christopher Nightingale, the musical supervisor whose job it was to find the right composer (and who also happens to be the son of the Times chief theatre critic Benedict Nightingale).

Getting the music right was vital to the success of one of the world’s most ambitious theatrical productions. When the British director Matthew Warchus agreed to direct the stage version of The Lord of the Rings, it was with some heavy provisos. Warchus knew that he wanted the staging to be more evocative than literal; more Lion King than Les Mis. And he knew that he had to make sure that the music would not be the usual West End mediocrity. “From early on,” he says, “I always said the music has to be the star of this production. If it’s not going to seem like an imposter it’s got to blow you away.”

The £13 million show had its first night in Toronto last night. By next year £11.5 million more will have been spent preparing the London production, which opens next spring. The stakes are high: it’s the most expensive orginal musical staged in either country. But the way it was put together was surprisingly experimental.

“At first I found it impossible to imagine it as a musical,” Nightingale says. “How could you find a route in — musically — that could do this work justice, and avoid cliché and cuteness? Frodo singing about how heavy the ring is and how he just can’t go on? It seemed to me like a very bad idea.”

But he found out that music was important to Tolkien’s writing — both in the folk songs characters sing (and which the casual reader flicks past) and in the way he described Middle-earth as “sung into being” in his dense introductory book The Silmarillion. Evil was described as discordance.

When Nightingale and Warchus heard Tom Waits’s nightmarish early-1990s opera The Black Rider, they realised that they had their starting point. “There was a dark and chaotic quality to the piece that clearly revealed how what we wanted to do could be done.”

Then Nightingale heard an album by Värttinä, and he knew that he’d found what he was after: a sound that was dark and exotic yet melodic. But the range of cultures and creatures depicted in the show made the producers think that they needed another composer too. Nightingale had worked with Rahman on the West End musical Bombay Dreams. Now he suggested to the man behind some 90 film soundtracks that he should, for the first time, share a credit.

“Certain things were given to me to finish,” says Rahman. “In other cases I was asked to come up with new ideas. I’ve never worked in a collaborative way before, but I think, because of the scale of this, it’s the right thing to do. Värttinä’s contribution to the sound, the whole folk aspect, is incredible. But Chris is the foundation.”

Each set of composers wrote more than a hundred tunes for the score, with Nightingale refereeing. The end result is a richly orchestrated mix of styles, much less jagged but far more varied than Waits’s The Black Rider, starting with folky optimism in the Shire in songs such as The Road Goes On and the Bree Inn drinking song The Cat and the Moon.

From there on the music gets both darker and, occasionally, more romantic — Elves singing Lothlórien (as you will hear in our exclusive download), Frodo and Sam longing for home in Now and for Always. The tone is good-humoured but careful to avoid camp — no I’m a Little Rascal, Me showcases for Gollum or sung-though salutes to evil from Saruman.

Lord of the Tings free download

Available exclusively on Times Online: a demo recording from the stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which had its official world premiere in Toronto this week and is coming to London in spring next year.

It’s the first time this music has been heard outside Middle-earth . . . and Toronto.

The title of this track is Lothlórien, played as Frodo and his friends escape from Moria to the Elves’ safe haven. The music is by A. R. Rahman and Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale.