Tag Archives: opera

An Electronic Murmuration: Brian Eno’s Music for Land of the Minotaur

Land of the Minotaur1
Land of the Minotaur

As the priest and the private detective approach the window, a familiar motif strikes up on the soundtrack. Deep in the bass, a succession of notes alternate by a semi-tone to anxiety-inducing effect. It’s not an entirely original idea: it’s essentially a sped-up and harmonically simplified version of the leitmotif Richard Wagner uses to introduce the dragon, Fafner, in the opera Seigfried. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Wagner’s wurm-motiv became something of a Hollywood staple, used to signify the monstrous and the numinous in films from King Kong (1933) to The Thing from Another World (1951). But at this tempo it can’t help but recall to modern ears one of the most recognisable bits of film music of all time: the shark’s theme from Jaws, made in 1975, the very same year as this low-rent schlock-fest from Greek director, Kostas Karagiannis.

In the context of Land of the Minotaur (aka The Devil’s Men), however, this is by far the most conservative bit of the whole score, notable as one of the very few moments on the soundtrack to employ actual recognisable musical notes. For the most part, the music by Brian Eno avoids the question of tonality altogether in favour of a shimmering cascade of electronic murmuration. As strange things go on in a small Greek town, with cultists sacrificing licentious teens to a fire-breathing minotaur statue, Eno produces an eerie susurrus of humming and heavy breathing, echoplexed into a dense fog of sound.

Produced in the same year that the ex-Roxy Music synth player would record his second collaboration with Robert Fripp and earn a credit for ‘direct injection anti-jazz ray gun’ on Robert Wyatt’s second solo album, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, it’s a reasonable assumption that he employed the same system of daisy-chained delay units. It’s a modus operandi Eno would accuse Terry Riley of copying from him – an accusation that would be a lot more plausible if only history travelled backwards – and is an early example of his now all-consuming passion for generative composition, inspired by the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, the process-based minimalism of Riley and Steve Reich, and the generative grammars of Noam Chomsky. But what sounds contemplative and quietly zen on its near contemporaries is here unearthly, unsettling, goose-pimpling stuff. One of the real highlights of Eno’s soundtrack career – and an unfortunate omission from his two Music for Films compilations.

Robert Barry

Dario Argento’s Operatic Terror

Opera

Dario Argento must be one of horror’s most operatic auteurs. Few directors can lay claim to such a consistency in the blending of image and music with the Grand Guignol theatrics of his most celebrated murders. He is also a great director of women and writer of female characters – this was, after all, one of the reasons he was brought on as a writer for Sergio Leone’s epic Once upon a Time in the West – in a grand Italian tradition that stretches back, at least, to the prima donnas of Puccini and Verdi. But it was only after he stopped working with his regular musical foils, Ennio Morricone and then the various members of Goblin, that the occasional oblique references to opera composers in his films (the great dorm house in Phenomena, we are told, once belonged to Richard Wagner) evolved into the full-scale quotation of actual operatic arias.

His most recent work, Giallo, opens in the lush surroundings of Turin’s legendary Teatro Regio with a burst of recitative from Mozart’s late opera seria, La clemenza di Tito; his Phantom of the Opera re-tread features the overture from Gounod’s Faust as well as the famous habanera from Bizet’s Carmen; even The Stendhal Syndrome manages to squeeze an aria, played on a little boom-box, into one of its murder scenes.

In 1987’s Opera, however, Argento came to believe his choice of quotation had rather got the better of him. Against the advice of many, Argento insisted that the opera being rehearsed in the film’s story should be Verdi’s Macbeth, and during filming, Argento suffered a number of misfortunes that led him to believe he may have become the victim of the famous curse of ‘The Scottish Play’. Major actors pulled out of the film at the last minute, minor actors were accidentally killed on set (crushed by a car), Argento’s proposed marriage to Daria Nicolodi was called off, and his father died suddenly during production. ‘But I felt,’ says an ever sanguine Argento, ‘that I had started with Macbeth, so I had to finish. And anyway, there could be no ravens in Cosi Fan Tutte.’

Apparently, the part of Marco in the film (played by Ian Charleson in his last screen role), the horror film director turned opera director, was based on Argento himself. A hint perhaps, now that film directors from Patrice Chereau to Werner Herzog have taken the helm at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, that Argento is waiting for the call from La Scala.

Opera is available on DVD in the UK as Terror at the Opera from Arrow Video.

Robert Barry