Music in the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Carmelo Bene

This paper attempts to relate some common elements in the choice of music in Pier Paolo Pasolini's films and Carmelo Bene's plays and movies. In both their works, music is detached from its practical use as a soundtrack, and both authors freely use pieces ranging from more sophisticated works of operatic and symphonic repertoires to more popular genres. Another feature shared by them is their collaboration with some of the most prominent composers of their times. Pasolini worked with Ennio Morricone, Luis Bacalov, and Benedetto Ghiglia, while Bene cooperated with Gaetano Giani Luporini, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Sylvano Bussotti—who, incidentally, also composed the music of Pasolini's Alla bandiera rossa (Calabrese, 2020: 180–220).

Between Bene and Pasolini there were certainly some contacts since the beginning of the 1960s, as, in some of his plays, Bene made use of actors who came from Pasolini’s “roster” like Franco Citti, Giovanni Davoli (father), and Ninetto Davoli (son). ¹ As early as 1966, Pasolini positively discussed Bene's theater.

My desire to take action does not coincide with this kind of experimentalism even though I can appreciate it. For instance, a few days ago I saw for the first time a play by Carmelo Bene. Bene certainly gives a solution to the problem because in the falsely dramatic moments he makes a parody of the theatrical language, and in other moments he breaks the language, he disjoints it, he overlaps noises and sounds on it, he whispers it. But all this is not in my taste. Were I to do theater as director, I would like to serve the text, there would be no reason for me to have Shakespeare recited in that way. (Pasolini, 1966)

Pasolini and music

The attraction to music plays a fundamental role in Pier Paolo Pasolini's life and works. It is no coincidence that he traces his initial attraction towards poetry to 1941 when, during a stay in Casarsa della Delizia, his mother's town, he heard the sound of a word, rosada (dew), which he decided to put in writing, de facto beginning his activity as a poet (Pasolini, 1972: 62–63). In his early career, Pasolini's musical skills were quite limited, as recalled by Pina Kalč, a Slovenian exile based in Casarsa, who gave Pasolini violin lessons as a child: “[Pier Paolo] did not have extensive musical knowledge […] but he possessed uncommon sensitivity and taste. With the violin he quickly got bored. He preferred to listen to me for long hours” (Kalč, 1996: 66). Over the years, Pasolini would write the lyrics to a number of songs (Pasolini, 1965) and a turning point was his discovery of Bach, a composer for whom he developed such a passion that he devoted an essay to his music (Pasolini, 1999: 77–90). Pasolini was especially struck by the Siciliana from the Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001, a piece that unfolds on two melodic levels—a low voice and a series of answering higher notes. He described this interplay as “suspended between flesh and heaven,” interpreting it as a symbolic dialogue between man and the sky, possibly echoing the Taoist concept of the Great Triad: Heaven, Earth, and Man.

In Pasolini's films, music often transcends the narrative, not simply following a diegetic line, but instead reflecting the emotions evoked by a given image. Pasolini argued that music was precisely the element that could “pierce” the screen to reach out and strike an emotional chord with the viewer, giving a sort of third dimension to the image. The musical contribution is used not in a descriptive sense but rather in a poetic fashion (Cappuccio, 2010: 189–198) like Pasolini expressed in a 1972 essay entitled La musica nel film:

The main function is generally to make explicit, clear, physically present a theme or common thread of the movie. This theme or thread of the movie can be conceptual or sentimental. But for the music this is irrelevant: a musical motif has the same emotional force applied to a conceptual theme or to a sentimental one. Indeed, its true function is perhaps to conceptualize the sentiments (by synthesizing them in a motif) and to sentimentalize the concepts. (Pasolini, 2001: 2795)

While it is possible that Pasolini may have deepened his knowledge through the years, his rather limited collection of LPs seems to show that he was not particularly keen on listening to music. ³ In his works we do not notice, for example, too much interest in opera, an art form he considered obsolete, bourgeois, or probably not corresponding to his tastes (at least until his meeting with Maria Callas, who would help change his opinion) ⁴ : the few examples that we find in his films are a fanfare on Violetta's aria from La Traviata used in La ricotta to accompany in a caricatured way (both the speed of the images and the soundtrack are exaggeratedly accelerated) the visit of the producers to the set; a hint of the aria Una furtiva lagrima from L'elisir d'amore in Mamma Roma (1962), the quotations from The Magic Flute of Papageno's and Sarastro's arias in Uccellacci e uccellini (1966); Va, pensiero from Nabucco can be heard during the marriage between Assurdina and Ciancicato Miao in La terra vista dalla luna (1966–1967), and few fragments from Don Giovanni and I vespri siciliani in Comizi d'amore (1964).

To orient himself in the choice of music, Pasolini initially sought the support of Elsa Morante, partly because he was convinced that the repertoire of past great composers was preferable to contemporary music of questionable quality. His meeting with Ennio Morricone represented a shift in this approach. For Uccellacci e uccellini, Pasolini had an original idea that Morricone would set to music: it was perhaps the first and only time in the history of cinema that we can hear sung opening credits, with the voice of Domenico Modugno. ⁵

Che cosa sono le nuvole?, an episode of Capriccio all’italiana (1968), features Modugno, in the role of the garbage man, singing a song to a text by Pasolini at the beginning of the episode. The song reappears towards the end of the film when the puppets of Othello and Iago (portrayed by Ninetto Davoli and Totò) are discarded at the garbage dump. In order to caricature the audience's revolt—who storm the stage to stop Othello from strangling Desdemona—Pasolini uses a Cancan from the ballet Gaîté parisienne on music by Offenbach.

Through his relationship with Ennio Morricone, Pasolini also changed the setting of music in his films. In his earlier works, he had imagined music as a starting point, using it with an evocative function: the contrast between the tender and delicate melodies of Bach and Vivaldi operated as a kind of sacralization of the underclass—such as the brawl scene in Accattone—or of deep compassion with respect to the character's destitution—Carmine's invective against Mamma Roma at the moment when he holds it against her for saving her from misery, actually landing her on the sidewalk to profit from her earnings. In the same film, popular and “ditty” music begin to find their space in the scenes where the generation gap between mother and son is emphasized (the attempt to teach the tango to the tune of Violino Tzigano and the scene where Ettore tries to learn the steps of the hully gully). Instead, the delightful squabble between Mamma Roma and Carmine on her wedding day is expressed through a stornello contest, where the bride attests to her acquired supremacy over the newly conquered man. At the end of the movie, a “death song” was originally planned to accompany Ettore's agony but was later replaced by the reminiscence of Violino Tzigano as a final reminder of the relationship with his mother.

Oedipus Rex is developed on two parallel planes of narration: one set in the Italian Risorgimento era and the other projected backwards into an archaic and mysterious time. The first moments of the opening credits are dominated by a deafening chorus of cicadas that flows into Antonio Fuselli's Marcia Fulgida, a military march that serves as the father's theme, evoking Pasolini’s own father, a former soldier. In one of the following scenes, where the first intense exchange of glances takes place between mother and child lying on the lawn, we can hear Mozart's notes from quartet no. 19, known as La dissonanza: unusual musical lines that are seemingly distant and enigmatic ultimately coalesce into a tonal discourse. The quartet theme will return in the second half of the film as the theme of fate, played by the flute of the blind prophet Tiresias, foreshadowing Oedipus’ meeting with Jocasta. In an attempt to recreate an archaic and undefined atmosphere, in the part set in Thebes, Pasolini decides to use Romanian folk songs and dances, Japanese melodies from the 8th century, and Russian revolutionary choruses.

In subsequent films, Pasolini's relationship with Morricone would greatly influence his expertise in selecting music, most notably in Teorema (1968), where he juxtaposes twelve-tone compositions, jazz (including Morricone's L'ultima corrida), and Mozart's Requiem, which recurs throughout the film and culminates in the final scene. ⁶ This musical approach continues in Medea (1969), starring by Maria Callas, where “barbarian” music (Iranian and Tibetan folk songs) is used in contrast to Jason's “civilized” music (referring to Japanese music of the first centuries CE).

In another film released the same year, Porcile (1969), Pasolini makes use of the compositions of renowned soundtrack composer Benedetto Ghiglia. The score is characterized by long moments of silence that accurately capture the solitude of the characters. However, one can notice the musical differences belonging to two worlds, the peasant one emphasized by old-fashioned tunes played on the recorder, and the bourgeois world characterized by the presence of a string quartet playing cultured music. The theme of cannibalism is dealt with on two opposing levels set in different eras: the present and the 16th century. Played by Alberto Lionello, the character of Klotz sits at the harp—traditionally reserved for women and a symbol of delicacy—recounting the scabrous details concerning his son's sex life. Under Pasolini's advice, Ghiglia entrusts to the harp the arrangement of the Horst Wessel Lied, the official anthem of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which is used in the early scenes of the movie (Calabretto, 1999: 328).

The Trilogy of Life consists of three films shot almost in sequence: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and The Flower of a Thousand and One Nights (1974). Drawing inspiration from the playful stories of Boccaccio and Chaucer, as well as the oriental tales of Scheherazade, Pasolini's intention is to focus on carnal love and sexuality. As in The Gospel According to Matthew, in the Decameron the use of dialect reappears. Folk music accompanies different moments of the film, where we find Fenesta ca lucive—a song with mournful tones attributed to Vincenzo Bellini, whose lyrics date back to the 17th century and which had already been used in Accattone. The same melody, centered on the theme of the death of the beloved, also appears later in The Canterbury Tales, in a more bizarre version with the strong English accent of a seller of indulgences. Another love song from the even older Neapolitan repertoire (dating to the twelfth through to the fourteenth centuries under Aragonese rule) is the Canto delle lavandaie del Vomero, a work song featuring a handkerchief as a pledge of love, which we find in the episode of Andreuccio.

In The Canterbury Tales, Morricone's philological expertise is evident in his selection of popular songs, including The Old Piper, a Celtic song played by Ninetto in the episode of the jester Perkin. Other popular tunes such as The Jug of Punch, Going up, The Gower wassail, and Camborne Hill are used in other scenes of the film. Pasolini discussed his choice in an interview for the Revue du cinéma:

While making the film I also chose the music, which was, of course, popular. I bought a lot of records of English and Scottish folk songs, and Morricone made a technical transcription of them with folk instruments. Only in certain cases did he compose directly, but always from popular themes. It was the same principle used for Decameron, where all the music came from Neapolitan folklore. (Calabretto, 1999: 527)

The music for The Flower of a Thousand and One Nights, on the other hand, was completely entrusted to the care, imagination, and creative flair of Ennio Morricone. He alternates a few folk songs taken from the Eastern repertoire with large fragments of music especially composed for the occasion. The score sometimes shifts from an essentially classical style—the music for string quartet is a clear reference to earlier choices of Mozart's music—to symphonic moments that wink at Arab and Persian harmonies with a descriptive function.

Even in the short documentary The Walls of Sana'a (1971), which appeals to UNESCO to recognize Sana’a as a world heritage site, Pasolini uses street vocals and live folk songs recorded in the markets of Yemen's beautiful capital city as sound commentary. In the documentary Appunti per un'orestiade africana (1975) ⁷ , on the other hand, the musical contribution accompanies Pasolini’s research for the setting of an unrealized project based on Aeschylus's trilogy.

Music plays a big role even in Pasolini's last film, Salò (1975), where we can find three different levels of musical accompaniment. The first is linked to the historical period of the events and begins with the opening credits: a dance music (Son tanto triste by Ansaldo and Bracchi) which is used to emphasize the superficiality of consumer music. There are also other successful songs of the time like Torna piccina mia and Quel motivetto che mi piace tanto, but in the scenes of the obscene tales told in the presence of the “guests” of the villa, romantic music appears for the first (and last) time in Pasolini's films. The indecent tales of the elegant Megere are accompanied by preludes, waltzes, and Chopin improvisations, until the final tale, where the music shifts to a twelve-tone impromptu. This change mirrors the emotional torment of the pianist, who, at the end of the performance, will ascend to the upper floor of the villa to commit suicide. In the last scenes of the film that belong to the “Girone del sangue,” the musical commentary makes use of Carmina Burana, a reworking of medieval songs by Carl Orff written in 1937. Pasolini, who regarded Carmina Burana as “fascist music,” likely selected it to allude to the atrocities carried out by the National Socialist regime. The piece Primo vere: Veris leta facies (The Merry Face of Spring) accompanies with intensity the ill-treatment and abuse perpetrated by the hierarchs, creating a stark contrast with their lighthearted dancing after the misdeeds. Finally, the film concludes with the return of Son tanto triste, this time serving a diegetic function: the song is in fact broadcast by the radio, a vehicle of mass-produced music that succeeds in dulling consciences. The tortures that take place in the courtyard of the villa no longer exist for the two toy soldiers, who return to dancing and their superficial conversations.

Bene and music

After dropping out of the Accademia d'Arte Drammatica Silvio d'Amico after just one year, Carmelo Bene made his stage debut in Albert Camus’ Caligola in 1959, and soon began performing in various theaters across Rome. Although his works are often associated with scandals and provocations, attracting a large number of critics, his early admirers include prominent writers and intellectuals such as Alberto Arbasino, Oreste del Buono, Ennio Flaiano, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Angelo Maria Ripellino, and Pasolini himself.

If, for Pasolini, the musical element served for the most part to “sentimentalize concepts and conceptualize feelings (Pasolini, 2001)” Bene's approach to music seems more complex. Music is in fact a constant in both his cinematic and theatrical works, and to some extent even in his novels. His first novel Nostra Signora dei Turchi (1966) opens with a reference to Amado mio. ⁸ Only one year after his debut, Bene staged a reading of poems by Vladimir Majakovsky with original music by Sylvano Bussotti, and in his career he eventually collaborated with composers such as Gaetano Giani Luporini and Salvatore Sciarrino, who created original music for some of his works.

Bene's approach to music selection is not conceived as a mere accompaniment of the images, rather, both musical and visual elements seem to acquire meaning when they complete each other at a level that is otherwise invisible and inaccessible to the viewer. The first scenes of Capricci (1969), showing a painting burning in a chimney, can hardly be understood without referring to Puccini's La bohème—whose music can be heard in this scene—where the quarrel between the painter Marcello and the poet Rodolfo is transfigured, in Bene's creation, into a fight with hammer and sickle.

In 1977, at the invitation of Francesco Siciliani—one of the great theater impresarios of the 20th century—Bene began to realize a new form of expression where his reciting voice was associated with symphonic music. The debut work in this new creative phase is Manfred (1978) (with text by Byron and music by Schumann), which inaugurated the so-called “concerts season.” Giani Luporini discusses Bene's deep interests in music:

I would like to begin talking about the extraordinary musical sensitivity of Carmelo Bene, that I would define a musician of the word. He was particularly passionate about melodrama, and he could spend entire nights by listening to and comparing the voices of great opera singers, studying their technical-vocal emission.

The choice of musical contributions to the film Salome (1972) constitutes no exception to such a distinctive approach. The only excerpt from the music of Richard Strauss that seems to have been partially included in the movie is the Dance of the Seven Veils. In Bene's transposition, the moment that is supposed to gather in itself all the eroticism with which the opera is permeated, begins with Salome already naked who, instead of dancing to enchant and seduce Herod, carefully folds colored veils, as if to signal that, in fact, the dance has already ended. ¹² Moreover, only a hint of the opening notes remains of the music of the Dance, and this reduction of a moment that was central both in Wilde's work and in the later version by Strauss and Hofmannsthal occurs not only musically but also visually, denying the representation of the actual dance. Bene's musical choices clarify his intentions. The scene that is supposed to correspond to the “Dance of Salome” is indeed introduced by Strauss’ music—which nevertheless ends with the attempted self-crucifixion—and ends on the notes of Abat jour sung by Henry Wright, which appears to be a clear reference to Vittorio de Sica's Ieri, oggi e domani (1963). In a famous sequence of the film, Sofia Loren is intent on undressing while dancing provocatively to the notes of the song. ¹³ Bene's use of the same song during the moment that is supposed to represent the peak of emotional tension of the work aims to deny any value to the event by reducing it to a mere striptease—one that is ultimately denied at the very moment when the actual dance is literally absent in the film. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, quite surprisingly, Abat jour is a partial remake of a previous musical piece by Robert Stolz, titled Salome. In the movie, Iokanaan makes his entrance in comical fashion: dressed in the uniform of the Italian national soccer team (blue t-shirt and white shorts) ¹⁵ , his arrival is accompanied by Alfredo Bracchi's Valzer spensierato [Carefree Waltz] (“Se vuoi vivere senza pensieri, dalle donne ti devi guardar. Sono vipere dagli occhi neri, con uno sguardo ti sanno ingannar” (Bracchi, 1939) [If you want to live carefree, you must beware of women. They are black-eyed vipers, with one glance they know how to deceive you]), hinting at Salome’s subsequent attentions, which will ultimately cause his death and are entirely caricatured and stripped of any gravitas. The musical piece also appears to connect to an earlier moment in the film in which a vampire lights candles while humming Vipera, a classic Italian song of the 1920s (“Vipera sul braccio di colei che oggi distrugge tutti i sogni miei. Sembravi un simbolo, l’atroce simbolo della sua malvagitrdquo; (Mario, 1919)). Both songs portray the female gender negatively and share the metaphor of women as vipers.

In a theatre edition of Hamlet, Hommelette for Hamlet (1987), Bene reads the Chanson du petit hypertrofique by Jules Laforgue:

J’ suis jaune et triste, hélas!

Elle est ros’, gaie et belle!

J'entends mon coeur qui bat,

C'est maman qui m'appelle!

Non, tout le monde est méchant,

Hors le coeur des couchants,

Tir-lan-laire!

Et ma mère,

Et j’ veux aller là-bas

Fair’ dodo z'avec elle…

Mon coeur bat, bat, bat….

Dis, Maman, tu m'appelles? (Laforgue, 1986: 632) ¹⁶

In a previous television edition of the play, Bene sublimates the idea of revenge codified in the 19th century, once again turning to the music of Verdi's Trovatore, which he uses not as a mere decoration but with specific dramaturgical function. ¹⁸ This begins on the notes that introduce the aria “Di quella pira” from Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi. Here Manrico, the son of the gypsy Azucena, has just been informed of her capture and impending execution by fire, and vows to save his mother or die trying (“Madre infelice corro a salvarti o teco almeno corro a morir” (Verdi, 1853) ). The reference creates an implicit expectation that is nevertheless betrayed as Hamlet shows his lack of commitment to avenging his father and becoming king by singing the Neapolitan song Ninuccia - La rosa di Toledo (“I seek no great thing, I want no kingdom but would only smell that rose”). Such distinctive use of music can also be found in a sequence from Glauber Rocha’s Claro (1975) featuring Bene. Here, over the notes of Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma, Bene hums the duet between Ezio and Attila from Verdi's opera of the same name. (“Avrai tu l'universo / resti l'Italia a me (Verdi, 1846)nbsp;). ¹⁹

Even the short movie Ventriloquio [Ventriloquism] presents a similar approach to music. ²⁰ Despite having gone missing in the 1970s, a long-lost interview with Noël Simsolo, partially recorded in the room where Bene was working on the editing of the short movie, captured some excerpts of dialogues and music, revealing that parts of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto had been used for the movie (Petruzzi, 2024: 205–223). The film's title derives from the ninth chapter of Against Nature by K. J. Huysmans, in particular from the description of one of the lovers of Des Esseintes, a ventriloquist. Thanks to a particular ability, the woman succeeds in bringing to life inanimate items during her intercourse with Des Esseintes, which utterly excites him. To further arouse him, she goes as far as to pretend that her husband is outside the room, insulting her and knocking on the door in an attempt to force his way in. Although it is hard to understand why Bene decided to use music from Rigoletto for the movie, it can be argued that it was chosen for the parallel between the scene at the end of the opera when Gilda knocks at Sparafucile's house, and the scene in Against Nature where the ventriloquist pretends that someone is knocking at the door.

In conclusion, both Pasolini and Bene reject the idea of the soundtrack as a descriptive, didactic, or diegetic element. In his movies, Pasolini makes large use of silences, which are full of meaning and tension and often seeks to use dialect in order to bring dialogue back to its pure essence, stripped of proper syntax and reduced to the core. Opera is also almost completely absent from Pasolini's films, a choice that might respond to ideological reasons identifying it as a bourgeois art form (as La ricotta would seem to suggest), even though he shows no interest in more modern composers such as Benjamin Britten, Francis Poulenc, or Nino Rota. ²¹ In this sense, even the choice to cast Maria Callas—an absolute icon of melodrama—and present her deprived of voice in Medea, removing her from her role as a singer (she does not make a single sung sound in the entire film), could belong to this process of reduction to the essentials. Conversely, Bene greatly resorts to operatic repertoire in his works. Music is never intended to arouse feelings in the viewer and—through the superposition of different references (literary, artistic or musical)—seems to add an additional layer of complexity to the visual element. The sequence of the running man on the seafront in Nostra Signora dei Turchi shows how Bene conceived the sound of his movies almost as a musical score: the sound of the footsteps of the running man creates a regular rhythm, which punctuates the voice of Ruggero Ruggeri reading the Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna by Lorenzo il Magnifico over the music of the Four Seasons from Giuseppe Verdi's I vespri siciliani. ²² The differing approaches to music in the works of Pasolini and Bene provide valuable insight into the distinct poetics of two of the most representative figures in 20th-century Italian art.