Ennio Morricone’s current world tour is billed as My Life in Music. For an 86-year-old with more than 500 film and television scores to his name, that’s a lot of life and a lot of music. It requires a lot of people, too: 86 members of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, 76 singers from Hungary’s Kodály Choir and a brace of soloists including soprano Susanna Rigacci, whose only job is the aerobatic vocals on The Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
There is more to Morricone than movies. He has composed more than 100 classical pieces and belonged to the Italian improvisational collective known as Il Gruppo. But he became a superstar only after venturing into scores and forming a 20-year alliance with his old schoolfriend Sergio Leone. Schooled in the avant-garde, and initially unable to afford an orchestra, Morricone shook up cinema’s musical grammar with gunshots, pocket-watches, eerie vocals and boldly anachronistic electric guitars. So symbiotic was the two men’s partnership that you simply cannot picture Leone’s desert plains and taciturn killers without hearing Morricone’s music. In fact, sometimes the music was written before the cameras started rolling.
No wonder Morricone has stayed in demand. He is both a consummate professional and a visionary. He respects the needs of his directors, whether Bertolucci or Argento, Malick or De Palma, while leaving his own indelible signature. He isn’t a flamboyant conductor, but it is a thrill just to see the man – small and serious in a rumpled suit; oddly Pope-like when he waves to the crowd – from whom all this extraordinary music sprang. Returning to the stage after a year recovering from a spinal injury, he has to lean on a chair to bow. We may not see him on stage in Britain again.
The two-hour show is divided into themed suites, which demonstrate how soundtrack work can spur innovation. While Morricone’s dramatic melodies unite his starkly experimental 60s work with the graceful lyricism of Cinema Paradiso or Once Upon a Time in America, each movie demands its own soundscape. A piece might open with a harp, an oboe, a piano or, on Come Maddalena, a bassline as exciting as a car chase. Even when the music swells, it never bloats into the rote bombast that makes so many orchestral movie scores such a bore.
The only drawback of yoking your career to the big screen is that the success of the films tends to dictate awareness of the music. Morricone has created many pieces as deserving of fame as the galloping title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The section devoted to political cinema, which begins with the tense, martial drums from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, is particularly startling. The percussive, choral Abolisson from Burn!, Pontecorvo’s less-celebrated follow-up about a colonial slave rebellion, is Morricone at his most hair-raising. The woodblock on Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is as chilling as a midnight knock on the door. The harsh synthesiser riff that opens the theme from Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven evokes the hiss and clank of the factory floor. Even if you haven’t seen these movies, their message is in the music, as clear as a protest song.
Hans Zimmer has said that “Morricone invented a type of music that we associate with America and that hadn’t existed before.” He could do this because, like Leone, he wasn’t American. It’s interesting how international his work is, and how many of the movies deal with immigrants or invaders in strange lands. Among them is Roland Joffé’s The Mission. Voted the greatest score ever in a 2012 poll of 40 Hollywood composers, it forms the show’s final section and illuminates the spiritual dimension of Morricone’s work.
The transporting climax of On Earth As It Is in Heaven inspires a standing ovation and three encores, including a vast choral arrangement of his Joan Baez collaboration Here’s to You, in which the words of executed Italian-American anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti are transformed into a transcendent roar of defiance. We only know the night is truly over when Morricone puts his sheet music under his arm and shuffles across the stage, modestly acknowledging the applause and cries of “Bravo maestro!” If this tour represents his career’s end credits, he has done himself proud.
