Four years ago, on a warm September night in Paris, I met Ennio Morricone backstage at the Palais de Congres an hour before he was set to take the stage. The journey that brought me to that moment began when I was a kid watching old movies with my parents. I was about ten years-old when I first saw Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and heard Morricone’s sweeping score. Odds are if you haven’t seen the movie you’ve heard his song The Ecstasy of Gold and just didn’t realize it, likely while watching a Modelo commercial. Or perhaps you remember Jack Black’s character talking about how great Morricone was in Nancy Meyers’ early aughts rom-com The Holiday during that scene in Blockbuster with Dustin Hoffman, but had no idea who he was talking about.
The love of movies and Morricone’s ability in the 500 he scored — Days of Heaven (1978), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Cinema Paradiso (1990), and almost anything of late by Tarantino (Morricone finally won his Oscar in 2015 for The Hateful Eight) to name a few — to evoke feeling and stir emotion always captivated our family. Who can listen to “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission and not feel moved? Or “Deborah’s Theme,” the heart song from Once Upon a Time in America, a movie for which Morricone wrote the entire score before director Sergio Leone even finished filming.
Morricone’s music makes you want him to compose the soundtrack to your life. And in some ways, he did with mine. In 2016 I wrote an essay for Salon called Chasing Morricone that captured how following Ennio Morricone across continents became a way for my family to grieve. In junior high my mother started what she called The Italy Fund, an ambitious endeavor to save money for the family’s first trip to Europe. Over the years money was saved but plans were never made. Like most big dreams, life got in the way. My older sister went to college, then two years later me, and each year we’d talk about the trip and say “we’ll do it next year.” We did this for years until 2007 when my mother died in a car accident. Suddenly, the idea of next year went right out the window along with everything else we thought we could count on.
Nine years later my father was turning 70 and engaged to be remarried. My sister and I, both in our 30’s and living in New York City, realized it was our last chance to do the trip as “The Three Musketeers,” our moniker for nearly a decade. We weren’t just going to take our father to Italy for the first time, we were going to see Morricone in concert. Chasing Morricone follows the many plane tickets, first to Rome, then to Paris, to see Morricone who kept cancelling his shows due to back pain. In May of 2016 my sister and I hauled our father to France and Italy and bought tickets to see Morricone not once, but twice, and we never actually got the chance to see him. Of course, like any good movie would tell you, the trip ended up not being about seeing Morricone at all. What mattered was how the hope of seeing him brought us together and allowed the three of us to move forward through our grief and on to the next act.
Not long after my Salon essay ran, I received this message on Twitter:
Dear Victoria,
Coincidentally we came across your article mentioning your unfortunate attempts to see Maestro Morricone live in concert. Now, we are the actual production company that realizes these shows and we thought it would be more than appropriate to give you the opportunity to meet him in person after the concert in Paris. Hopefully that would be a figurative plaster on the wound.
Morricone was scheduled to play in Paris in September two weeks after my father’s wedding. And so we went back, only this time it was a new iteration of our family of four. That’s how I found myself in a green room in the basement of the famed concert hall in Paris with champagne in my hand and a VIP pass around my neck waiting for the man himself. He spoke no English. He was gracious and kind. He laughed at my dad’s jokes on delay as the translator attempted to relay them. We shook hands and took photos and talked about music and movies and the importance they have in our lives. Then finally, sitting in the darkened theater it felt like I was a character in one of the movies he scored. And when the orchestra played its encore, The Ecstacy of Gold, it brought tears to my eyes. Not just because of how powerful the music was, but because of the long road it took for us to get there.
There is a picture of the four of us outside the concert hall holding a commemorative book Morricone gave my father. We’re smiling, giddy, all coming down from a high where we knew we’d been a part of something special. I think about that night often the way you think about the handful of moments in your life that truly change you. I think about it especially now because it was the last big thing the four of us did together. Just eight months after we took that picture, my father’s wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She passed away two years later.
Life isn’t the way it is in the movies, but sometimes it does feel like that cemetery scene at the end of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Clint Eastwood (The Good), is searching for gold buried in a cemetery somewhere in a post-Civil War southwest. He’s up against his rival, Lee Van Cleef’s extra sinister character Angel Eyes (The Bad) and the slightly dim-witted outlaw Tuco (The Ugly), played by Eli Wallach. In the scene, Tuco is running through the vast cemetery where he knows the $20,000 in gold is buried in a soldier’s grave. The way Leone filmed it, the camera spins, following him as he runs in wide, vast circles. Morricone’s The Ecstasy of Gold builds the faster Tuco runs.
Life is at once the constant search for something, love or money, success or happiness, always at odds with heartache and pain, hardship and loss. But every so often, just as the music reaches its crescendo and before the credits roll, the endless wheel stops and you find yourself in the exact place you’re meant to be, having found the thing you’ve long been searching for. Once found it will live on forever in your memory like a scene from a movie, there for you to look back on whenever you need it. Soundtrack and all.