Ennio Morricone

Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and Universal Music Publishing, presents a remastered reissue of one of Ennio Morricone’s most celebrated collaborations with Mauro Bolognini (ARABELLA, L’ASSOLUTO NATURALE, METELLO), the 1975 drama PER LE ANTICHE SCALE, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Barbara Bouchet, Lucia Bosé, Marthe Keller and Françoise Fabian.

The film is set in fascist Italy in the 1930s and takes place in a Tuscan mental hospital. There, Dr. Bonaccorsi (Mastroianni), a charismatic, progressive and contradictory psychiatrist, works with mentally ill patients while simultaneously maintaining romantic relationships with three women: a nurse, a colleague’s wife and the hospital secretary. The decadent and labyrinthine atmosphere of the asylum acts as a metaphor for the state of Italian society at the time. Morricone’s score combines melancholic passages with atonal and dissonant moments, reflecting the clash between the lyricism of the human soul - the patients, their dreams, their poetic delusions - and the oppressiveness of the system - the treatments, the medical language, the hierarchy in the asylum.

PER LE ANTICHE SCALE was originally released on an Italian 45RPM featuring only two cues from the score. It wasn’t until 1997 that RCA released on CD the mock-up album prepared by the composer in 1975, which was ultimately canceled. In 2007, GDM released an expanded edition with the complete score recorded by Morricone in a 74-minute edition, supervised by the composer and produced by Dániel Winkler and Claudio Fuiano. This is a reissue of the same program, revised and mastered by Chris Malone from first-generation stereo master tapes. The booklet includes liner notes by Miguel Angel Ordóñez discussing the movie, the music and the composer.