The Ecstasy of Gold

Few pieces of film music have entered the cultural bloodstream as completely as this one, and yet repeated exposure doesn't diminish it — it seems to mean slightly more each time, which is the mark of something genuinely great. The soprano voice begins in the upper register, soaring over tremolo strings and percussion, climbing phrases that feel physically urgent, as if ascending toward something just out of reach. The orchestra underneath is vast and restless, built in swells that crest and recede. Leone's film uses this piece at its most operatic climax — a man running through a vast cemetery, searching for a name on a headstone, with all the greed and desperation and absurdity of human wanting compressed into a single image — and Morricone's music is both comment and participant. The emotion it triggers is not quite triumph and not quite grief but something that exists between them: the feeling of wanting something so intensely that the wanting itself becomes a kind of ecstasy. The piece has been played at rock concerts and sporting events and memorial services, each context finding something different in it. At full volume, through speakers rather than headphones, it produces a physiological response in many listeners — a tightening in the throat, a pricking behind the eyes — that arrives before conscious thought can engage.