For a few concerts more: Morricone’s performing persona and the construction of a modern classic

During an oft-quoted conversation with music scholar Sergio Miceli in 1979, Ennio Morricone stated that he had thus far turned down several invitations to perform his film music in concert. Not much later, however, he started conducting film music programmes all around Italy and Europe, most notably in venues that are associated with pop and rock music, such as the Sport Palace in Antwerp (1987), where he performed in front of a crowd of 12,000 people. This marked the beginning of a new sphere of activity that reframed Morricone’s public persona in the perception of audiences, media and critics globally: his concert tours grew in number, size and types of venues (concert halls, theatres, public squares, arenas, etc.), superseding his appointments in film in the last phase of his career, from the late 1990s until the very last months of his life. Aspects of Morricone’s choices concerning his concert activity concurred to construct an all-encompassing retrospective narrative of his career, bridging the disparate facets of his former production in film, television, popular music and avantgarde: one can cite how Morricone carefully reshaped the orchestration of his earlier hits, aiming towards ‘symphonification’, as it were, and how he systematically excluded some of his most famous tunes from his live selections (he rarely, if ever, performed music from the two earlier westerns of the ‘Dollar Trilogy’, for instance), while including lesser known titles and works from his concert music catalogue. Most importantly, live concerts helped Morricone renegotiate his public image, smoothing the corners of previous ideological diatribes and nurturing his current perception as a vessel of Italian cultural heritage. The visual motif on the poster of Giuseppe Tornatore’s posthumous homage film Ennio (2021), where the composer is seen conducting an invisible orchestra, can perhaps be considered the most glaring media translation of the representational shift of Morricone-as-performer. Taking this film as my main case study, I aim to discuss how it constitutes a sort of final touch in the rebranding of Morricone’s persona into the avatar of a post-ideological ‘genius’, and how the emphasis on the idea of the ‘performing conductor’ plays out decisively to this outcome. From the outset, Morricone is presented in his domestic intimacy, as he performs his daily routine of physical exercise, sketches his scores, plays piano in his private studio, up to the mentioned image of conduction mimicry. The camera’s close point of observation indulges on the bodily presence of the elderly musician, subtly nuancing the spoken narration and the clips of his films and concerts. Morricone seems to actively, albeit perhaps not fully consciously, partake in this staging strategy, which is ultimately compliant with the rhetoric of self-representation that he pursued in the numerous dialogic biographies that were published in the last decade of his life. Drawing on the framework of this conference, I thus argue that Ennio presents itself as a compelling, yet problematic exercise in visualising and narrativizing the twisted link between the movies and the concert hall.