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World Premiere of Ennio Morricone's Musica per una fine Featured at La Biennale di Venezia 2026

Oct. 30, 2026

La Biennale di Venezia 2026 featured the world premiere of a previously unreleased work by Ennio Moricone, Musica per una fine. The work, scored for choir, orchestra, and electronics, was composed in the 1990s and was never previously performed in public. Last year, SZ Sugar published this recently-discovered piece. The first movement features the recorded voice of Pier Paolo Pasolini declaiming his powerful poem, Gli italiani. Pasolini was tragically murdered 51 years ago (on November 2, 1975), and his writing challenges us to confront the apathy that we as humans can have, even towards the most brutal events. Sadly, the poem is as relevant today as it was during the poet's lifetime:

Intelligence will never hold weight, never, in the judgement of this public opinion.
 
Not even on the blood of the concentration camps will you obtain from one of the millions of souls in our nation, a clear, wholly indignant judgement.
 
Unreal is every idea, unreal every passion, of this people now dissociated for centuries, whose gentle wisdom helps them live, but has never set them free.
 
To show my face, my thinness, to raise my solitary childish voice, no longer makes sense.
 
Cowardice, accustomed to seeing others die in the most atrocious ways, with the strangest indifference.
 
I die, and even this harms me.

For Pasolini, Bach’s music represented the highest expression of human creativity, uniting formal perfection with a profound sense of human suffering. It is fitting, then that the premiere of Morricone's work was paired with the arias Erbarme dich, mein Gott and Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from Bach’s St Matthew Passion as well as Anton Webern's orchesration of Bach's Ricercare a 6 from The Musical Offering, where Bach's contrapuntal writing is combined with Webern’s serial distribution of melodic lines across the orchestra. 

Performers included the Academia Alma Vox, conducted by Alberto De Sanctis and PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble, conducted by Tonino Battista.

This posthumous premiere is reminiscent of another Morricone work that debuted decades after its composition. In December 2025, the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples presented the world premiere of Ennio Morricone's only opera, Partenope (Music for the Siren of Naples). Published by SZ Sugar, Partenope was never staged during Maestro Morricone's lifetime, much to the composer’s regret, and the long-awaited premiere – thirty years in the making – was part of the celebrations for the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of Neapolis.

Ennio Morricone
Musica per una fine
text (It.) by Pier Paolo Pasolini
for mixed choir, orchestra, and electronics
4.3.0.2-0.1.2.0-hp-str-8.8.7.6.4; Choir SATB
10'

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