While filming Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone played Ennio Morricone’s music on set before shooting began. The actors heard it as they performed, moving to its rhythm. It reversed the usual order of things: the music was not added to a finished image. The image was created in the presence of the music.
Leone and Morricone had known each other since their school days, but their collaboration did not begin until the 1960s. Together, they developed one of the most distinctive musical languages in the history of cinema. Whistling, harmonica, bells, electric guitar, the human voice treated as an instrument – Morricone drew on sounds that had rarely belonged to the conventional vocabulary of film music.
In Once Upon a Time in the West, this approach was taken particularly far. Musical themes were attached to characters before their stories had fully revealed themselves. Edda Dell’Orso’s voice rising above the orchestra needed no words. The music could disclose the emotional meaning of a scene before the dialogue did.
Morricone wrote music for more than four hundred films and television productions. His best-known compositions, however, have long since outlived the images for which they were written. Gabriel’s oboe from The Mission, the theme from Cinema Paradiso, the harmonica and wordless voice of Once Upon a Time in the West now have lives beyond the cinema. You may forget the scene. The melody remains.
On 24 and 25 September at Eldborg, that relationship will be reversed once again. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra will perform Morricone’s music live while excerpts from the films appear on screen. The programme includes music from Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in the West and The Mission. Thiago Tiberio conducts, with Icelandic soprano Dísella Lárusdóttir as soloist.
When the music came first, it guided the actors and the camera. Decades later, the film will take its place behind the orchestra. It is hard to think of a better way to ask what, in Morricone’s cinema, was illustrating what.
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ENNIO MORRICONE – THE OFFICIAL SYMPHONIC EXPERIENCE
24–25 September 2026, 20:00
Eldborg, Harpa, Reykjavík
Iceland Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Thiago Tiberio
Soprano: Dísella Lárusdóttir
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