Ennio Morricone

Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM, Universal Music Publishing Ricordi and EMI General Music Publishing, presents a CD focused on two WWII soundtracks by Ennio Morricone, pairing his dramatic scores for Massacre in Rome (1973) and Gott Mitt Uns (1970)

Massacre in Rome was directed by George Pan Cosmatos and starred Marcello Mastroianni, Richard Burton and Leo McKern. The story takes place in Nazi-occupied Rome, where an assault on an SS brigade draws retaliation from the military governorship. The film tells the true story of how this partisan attack led to the mass execution of Italian nationals under the orders of SS Lieutenant Colonel Kappler. Morricone’ score avoids traditional forms or classical thematic development. Instead, the composer built short motifs, ostinatos, hypnotic repetitions and descending harmonic progressions that reinforce the sense of fatalism and inevitability.

Gott Mitt Uns, directed by Giuliano Montaldo, and starring Franco Nero, Richard Johnson and Bud Spencer, takes place at the end of World War II, when German deserters are tried for desertion by their fellow prisoners of war inside a prisoner-of-war camp for Germans. Morricone constructs a soundscape that reflects the absurdity, emptiness and dehumanizing logic of military machinery. The composition follows a logic of expressive restraint in which the instruments do not emit conventional sounds, but rather generate audible textures—whimpering, friction, pulsations, breathing—creating a soundtrack in the form of unstructured chamber music in which the dramatic tension gradually intensifies. The only emotional foothold in the score is found in “Lontano,” a piece that refers to nostalgia, to the ordinary life that deserting soldiers long for. Its title—which means “far away”—already anticipates a poetics of distance, of waiting, of emotional echo.

Although the film had some success, the music from Massacre in Rome was not released until the early 1990s, when ten tracks were included on a CD by RCA Italy, paired with the soundtrack album of LA Battaglia d'Algeri. In 2009, it was reissued by GDM in a program that included three bonus tracks, virtually everything Morricone recorded for one of his shortest scores. Gott Mitt Uns, on the other hand, was only released on a 45 RPM disc with the cues “Lontano” and the main theme. In 1998, part of his score was rescued by the Screen Trax label and paired with another score from a film set in WWII: L’Agnese va a Morire. An expanded program was released by the Dagored label in 2003.

This 70-minute Quartet CD, supervised by Claudio Fuiano, includes all the available music from both films, painstakingly restored and mastered by Chris Malone. The booklet includes an essay by Miguel Angel Ordóñez, discussing the film and score.