With Barbenheimer on everybody’s lips, Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson has emerged through the fog of cinematic war as one of the biggest names in film music this year.

Lauded for his score for Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama Oppenheimer, spotlighting the story of the eponymous central force of the Manhattan project, Göransson, 38, already has an expansive discography behind him as a film and television composer and record producer.

Ludwig Göransson shows how the score for Oppenheimer was made. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios

The composer, whose namesake is indeed Ludwig van Beethoven, has been composing and playing guitar since the age of seven. He made his debut as an orchestral composer with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, who gave the world premiere of this first orchestral work when Göransson was just 17.

After graduating from Stockholm’s Royal College of Music in 2007, he moved to Los Angeles to commence a film and television scoring program at the University of Southern California (USC). He got...