‘The maestro: How Ennio Morricone defined the music of the movies’

There have been a few occasions when I’ve cracked up in public, sometimes when trying to read while clinging to a stanchion in a wildly swaying bus. With other commuters glaring at me as I shook with suppressed laughter over a passage from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Yet the award for the funniest piece of writing that ever passed my eyes — and I still chuckle over its cleverness, 30-plus years later — goes not to the work of a celebrated writer, but to a piece of frothy journalism by the Sydney-based bon vivant and scribbler Leo Schofield.

At the zenith of his social prominence, around the early-1980s, Schofield wrote a regular Saturday column, a sort of cultural ‘My week’, and in the one in question he was dabbling in a bit of this and a bit of that while visiting Vienna — sachertorte and curdled kaffee for the high brows, perhaps. He recalled that while wandering along a Viennese street he was nearly bowled over by a bleary-eyed group of Australian tourists who were part of an organised ‘opera tour’.

An ‘opera tour’, so he informed us slyly, was like a culture-vulture version of running a marathon — 10 operas in 14 days — and when he encountered this particular party, they had just been disgorged from a performance of Parsifal (Richard Wagner’s take on the Holy Grail myth), an opera Schofield explained to puzzled readers as “best described as Hamlet without the laughs”. It was brilliant — so brilliant that I, for one, laughed so loudly I wish I had dreamt it up myself.

Now, I know some will think I’ve drawn a very long bow in thinking of Leo Schofield’s smart one-liner when I learned of the sad death of Ennio Morricone, the composer of more than 400 film scores, including some of the greatest Hollywood blockbusters of the past 60 years. Especially considering the great loss we all have suffered from his passing.

To my un-musicological ear, the thing that stands out about Morricone film scores is the emotional power he always seemed to bring to a movie that resulted, in many cases, with us remembering the music, or particular phrases from it, long after the dramatic action on screen has slipped away to the deepest recesses of memory. Need I go any further than the score of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly where that whipcrack-whistling introduction is instantly recognisable, even more so than Lee Van Cleef’s slit-eyed malevolence.

Or take his spinal-shivers-inducing soundtrack of The Mission. Its entwining of haunting oboe and pipes of Pan is also instantly recognisable and always a winner in surveys of the most popular film soundtracks ever, while that of Herbie Hancock’s Round Midnight, which inexplicably pipped it for the 1987 Original Film Score Oscar, has vanished into the ether.

Film music, at the highest level, as created by a Morricone or a John Williams, grew naturally out of the musical accompaniment to silent movies that needed an extra medium to convey depths of feeling to overcome a two-dimensional experience on screen and the jarring injection of text panels to describe the progress of the action. The best evidence for this can be found by turning off the silent-movie sound to recognise the absurdity of the stage direction and the grotesque over-acting by those on camera.

But film music, in the hands of a genius like Morricone, does much more than that: at its best, it is not only a heightening accompaniment to the action, it is also the key to those introspective silences in which the actors on screen and the audience spread out in rows before them, engage with the plot at a much deeper, more intuitive level.

While the direct ancestor of today’s film score lies in the commercial need to pump life into an otherwise flat silent-movie experience, its true origins, I believe, lie in the 19th century. Here’s where Parsifal comes in, laughs or no laughs. I think the true antecedent of the Ennio Morricones and John Williamses of movie making is … the composer Richard Wagner, who died in 1883, a dozen years before the Lumiere brothers revealed the first successful experiments in capturing moving images on celluloid.

I make this claim for Wagner because what he set out to do, and either succeeded or failed according to your own particular taste, was to create a total enveloping experience — music, drama, stage sets, common speech, good versus evil — that could replicate the true pulses of our existence, freeing what he called ‘music drama’ from the ludicrousness of ‘opera’ with its obsessive disguises, mistaken identities, aristocratic trivia, preposterous plots and overblown emotions. In short, to replace drivel with real life as we know and feel it.

Wagner thought he was recreating the golden age of Greek tragedy from ancient Athens, the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, about 450 BCE, which he interpreted as reflecting life as it was lived or as commentary intended to inspire audiences towards more vibrant lives of their own. But the irony, given the controversy that still clings to Wagner, lies in the technology that could only make a total experience possible — visual, aural, emotional, intellectual — being just then in its infancy a few hundred kilometres away in Paris.

The movie industry we have inherited from the Lumiere brothers, and from Wagner, is a total experience. It is virtually impossible to walk out of a cinema, or press the eject button on a DVD player, utterly unmoved by the experience. Even sitting through The Kettles in the Ozarks is an experience worthy of engaged derision and contempt. But sit through the silences of Sam Mendes’s 1917, say, and they are anything but enigmatic.

I believe deeply that if Ennio Morricone owes a debt to anyone, it is to Richard Wagner. I also believe that he would be the first to acknowledge it. While offering a fleeting smile in doing so, as he would wonder whether in the age of ‘Me Too’, the German anti-Semite would have survived his own ritual statue-toppling.

I am certain that Morricone was a sufficiently nuanced man to argue that if Mozart’s reputation could survive his scatological portrayal in Amadeus, and people choose to ignore the appalling treatment of women meted out by Pablo Picasso and Bertolt Brecht, then we should put to one side the knowledge that the Prelude to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was not only Dear Uncle Adolf’s favourite piece of music, but its iconography certainly informed the production of those abominable Nazi rallies of the 1930s.

If Daniel Barenboim could risk all by taking Wagner to Tel Aviv, Ennio might say, then perhaps we should, too.

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