The Mission: “Gabriel’s Oboe” (arr. Redford)

Composer: MORRICONE, Ennio
  • The Mission (dir. Roland Joffé) came out in 1986. Morricone composed his score for the film the same year.1
  • Morricone’s score for The Mission displays his unique “modular” technique. In this style Morricone builds scores around short “modules” of a few bars, each featuring a different instrument and a unique melodic, harmonic or rhythmic makeup. Morricone juxtaposes these “modules” in various combinations to create musical effects throughout the score.2
  • Story: In The Mission, 18th C. Spanish Jesuit missionaries seek to protect a remote native South American tribe amid Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.3
  • “Gabriel’s Oboe” is the main theme from The Mission. It first appears in the film played on the oboe by the character Father Gabriel, a Jesuit priest, who is making contact with the Guarani tribe.4

“The oboe-playing of one of the protagonists, Father Gabriel, signified that he was the bearer of a specific instrumental post-Renaissance experience connected to its time. So I had to compose a theme for the oboe that sounded sort of constrained at the beginning, a theme based on the ‘supposed’ notes and embellishments that the apparently ‘untrained’ fingers that Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) employed in his oboe playing simulation.”

Ennio Morricone5
  • Critics have noticed that the “Gabriel’s Oboe” theme shows the influence of Baroque oboe solos, probably because that’s the right time period for the character in the film.6
  • At the end of the film, Father Gabriel has sided with the doomed Guarani tribe without the support of the church. In connection with this, Sergio Miceli says this of the “Gabriel’s Oboe” theme:

“Gabriel’s Oboe was no longer a generic message of Christian faith, but the musical materialization of a sentiment of love more than civilization.” 

Sergio Miceli7

Sources

  1.  Sergio Miceli, “Morricone, Ennio,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 19, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044104. 
  2. Ibid.
  3.  “The Mission (1986),” IMDB, accessed December 4, 2019, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091530/. 
  4.  Franco Sciannameo, “Ennio Morricone at 85: A Conversation about His ‘Mission,” The Musical Times 154 no. 1924 (Autumn 2013), 40, accessed November 19, 2019, www.jstor.org/stable/24615739. 
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Ibid.

Cut IDs

20470