The Mattei Affair, composed by Piero Piccioni in 1972, is a pioneering record that anticipates the developments of electronic music to come and reveals an unknown side of the Turin-born composer. On the occasion of the first-ever digital release of the score, born from the collaboration between CAM Sugar and the Piero Piccioni Estate, we look into it.

Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair is no ordinary film. It was released in cinemas in 1972, the same year as The Working Class Goes to Heaven. The two films are closely linked, not just by virtue of sharing the same lead actor: Gian Maria Volonté, but also because they were jointly awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

Their success on the Croisette captures a moment in time when Italian cinema, often with Volonté in the spotlight, was unafraid to take a political stance.

Tackling the Mattei case, shrouded in mystery even decades later, was no easy feat. Just a few years on, Pier Paolo Pasolini would fail to complete Petrolio, the book which was meant to be his definitive work: an explosive exposé of the tangled web surrounding the disappearance of Enrico Mattei, ENI, CIA and the Italian government.

Straddling the line between film and documentary, The Mattei Affair remains difficult to find even today, never having been released on DVD. It was never going to have an ordinary soundtrack.

“This film doesn’t need the usual kind of music, but something else,” Piero Piccioni told Rosi, taking the director by surprise.

For the soundtrack of The Mattei Affair, the Turin-born composer broke new ground, pioneering a fresh path for electronic music in cinema and beyond. The score explores the sonic possibilities of the organ. Phrases played on the Hammond organ, recorded at the Ortophonic Studios (now Forums Studios) in Rome, were transformed into hypnotic loops using tape. Synthesisers were employed too. With The Mattei Affair, Piccioni went beyond the realm of musique concrète, layering a compositional tension with beats that, conceptually, anticipate what we now call techno. The music’s identity stems from its role in underpinning Rosi’s investigative tension, walking the tightrope between certainty and ambiguity. Piccioni’s proto-techno is both analogue and organic, making – true to the spirit of Italian cinema of the time – a virtue out of necessity. And what a virtue it is.

Piero Piccioni, courtesy of the Piero Piccioni Estate.

In that golden age of cinema and film scores, populated by studio engineers in white coats and composers dressed like Christian Democrat ministers, the taste for experimentation, sonic exploration, and even the esoteric, was not uncommon.

Jason Piccioni, Piero’s son, and composer Nicola Vicidomini recall how the maestro admired John Cage, Pierre Henry, and Pierre Schaeffer; he was deeply interested in musique concrète and the direction it was taking in Italy through Ennio Morricone, Egisto Macchi and Franco Evangelisti’s Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. The score for The Mattei Affair was, in fact, shaped by Piccioni’s time at IRCAM in Paris and the RAI Institute of Musical Phonology in Milan – the Italian counterpart to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – founded by Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio.

But there were also classical influences, such as Ravel, Stravinsky, and Debussy, whose works had shaped his musical outlook since childhood. Unlike many of the more popular film composers of the 1960s and ’70s, Piccioni was self-taught. He began by improvising on his uncle’s piano records from the age of three, in his home in Turin. His love for jazz followed, as did his work popularising the genre on RAI Radio, and the founding of Orchestra 013: the first jazz band to perform in Rome after the Liberation.

“Dad had Kraftwerk records at home, but later ones. In ’72, they were developing similar ideas at the same time,” Jason Piccioni recalls.

Indeed, The Mattei Affair soundtrack was released in the same year as Kraftwerk 2, the album where the German band cut their hair and left rock behind. A record still cited as a cornerstone in the development of electronic music.

Promotional poster for the British release of The Mattei Affair, 1972.

Much less is said, however, about Piccioni’s work, which is finally being rediscovered thanks to original master tapes from the composer’s archive. These tapes have been remastered to form the first official digital release of the soundtrack. This edition also includes the individual tracks, each bearing the original titles Piccioni had intended, offering a rare insight into the creative process behind one of the most sought-after, complex, and intriguing soundtracks in Italian cinema.

It’s no coincidence that this fascination endures. Both Rosi’s film and Piccioni’s music have inspired The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson’s new feature film, in cinemas from 29 March.

The Mattei Affair definitely was an inspiration, a North Star as far as getting a sense of what the score should be like,” told CAM Sugar Journal Randall Poster, music supervisor of The Phoenician Scheme and Wes Anderson’s close collaborator since Rushmore.

On the tapes from the Piccioni archive, the music for The Mattei Affair sits alongside the score for Alberto Sordi’s Il Prof. Dott. Guido Tersilli, primario della clinica Villa Celeste, convenzionata con le mutue, as if to implicitly suggest that beyond samba and comedies, there was much more to the composer’s career.

With The Mattei Affair, at the dawn of the 1970s, a visionary side of Piccioni emerges: something he had already hinted at in the previous decade through his exploration of psychedelic soundscapes, notably in the masterpiece Camille 2000, a work later recognised as foundational for trip-hop.

In a similar vein to The Mattei Affair, two other – seemingly minor – examples are worth recalling, in which Piccioni engages with absolute and concrète music. One is his score for the documentary L’alba dell’uomo (1975) by Folco Quilici; the other is the music for Inan, a mythological-esoteric stage ballet performed in Palermo, which recounts the journey of the Assyrian goddess Inanna/Ishtar into the Kur, the underworld, in search of her sister Ereshkigal. But that, in every sense, is another story.

The Mattei Affair by Piero Piccioni is available in a remastered edition from the original tapes on all digital platforms from 28 May.

Opening image: promotional poster for the British release of The Mattei Affair, 1972.