Press Release from Quartet:
Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and Universal Music Publishing Italia, presents a remastered reissue of the ultimate edition of Ennio Morricone’s score for Elio Petri’s 1973 social drama-comedy LA PROPRIETÀ NON E’PIÙ UN FURTO (aka PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT), a grotesque satire about a neurotic Marxist bank teller who quits his job and sets his sights on stealing everything—from tools to a mistress—from one of his former clients, a successful butcher. Starring Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci and Daria Nicolodi, this film is the last chapter in Petri’s famous trilogy of the Neurosis, after INDAGINE SU UN CITTADINO AL DI SOPRA DI OGNI SOSPETTO and LA CLASSE OPERIA VA IN PARADISO.
Ennio Morricone returns to the timbral and electronic exploration carried out in the two previous films, replicating the noises of the modern, oppressive and futuristic city. He also employs a grotesque march to accompany the actions that the institutions of the law pursue: theft, kidnapping, fraud. However, the music departs from those earlier scores not only because of the formal language employed, dominated by the use of voices and avant-garde compositional techniques, but also because of an openly painful tone, of the slowed-down disbelief in decadence.
In 1973, RCA released the score on LP in Italy; they reissued it on CD in the 1990s. In 2009, GDM released an expanded edition containing virtually the entire score recorded by Morricone but that has long been out of print. This is a reissue of that release, freshly remastered by Chris Malone from the original master tapes and supervised by Claudio Fuiano. The package includes an essay by Miguel Ángel Ordóñez discussing the film and the score.
