Johann Johannsson - The dark soul of modern classical

I've never been interested in music as pure sound or pure structure. I'm always looking for a narrative or a concept to wrap my music around

Introduction

Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of the most authoritative voices of the modern classical scene. Who passed away prematurely in 2018, he stands as a central figure of contemporary classical music as well as a true national hero, in a country that in recent decades has produced musicians of the highest caliber, such as Ólafur Arnalds and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, composer of the soundtracks for “Joker” and “Chernobyl”.

Often compared to Max Richter, Jóhannsson earned major international recognition, releasing music through Deutsche Grammophon and establishing himself as one of the most sought-after composers in contemporary cinema, with two Oscar nominations for the soundtracks to The Theory of Everything and Sicario.

Compared to Richter, however, his musical language is more complex and more firmly rooted in the post-minimalist tradition, particularly in the lessons of Philip Glass, while also revealing a clear debt to the cinematic symphonism of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone. The result is a style of writing that favours orchestral architecture over electronics, and that looks more to the great twentieth-century tradition than to the purely decorative drift of more recent modern classical. Jóhannsson sees music as a means of telling a story, often a tragic and moving one (his trilogy is emblematic of this). While Richter seeks peace through accessible, emotionally powerful melodies, Jóhannsson throws himself into vast sonic architectures that seem to lead to no happy ending, where the real subject is the failure of every human utopia.

The early works

His solo career begins with the music for the theatrical production Englabörn (2002), split into sixteen short pieces in which the fundamental coordinates of his style - post-minimalism and cinematic tension - are already in evidence. More ambitious is Virðulegu Forsetar (2004), structured in four long compositions for eleven brass instruments, keyboards and bells: here Jóhannsson weaves together religious overtones, minimalism and ambient, with echoes that even recall Strauss's "Zarathustra". It's a notable step forward towards what would become his defining mission.

Melancholy is a misunderstood emotion... it isn't simple sadness, but a more complex form that stems from a tragic view of the world

The trilogy on the relationship between man, machine and nature

The first turning point comes with Ibm 1401, A User's Manual (2006), the opening chapter of an organic reflection on the relationship between man and technology. Dedicated to the Ibm mainframe used by his father, the record is a grand symphony for strings and electronics that manages to be surprisingly moving despite having a machine as its subject. The computer's own voice, reworked and rendered almost human, emerges like a modern-day HAL 9000: an operation that combines symphonic monumentality with electronic manipulation, marking a point of no return in his artistic vision.

These insights come to fruition on Fordlandia (2008), the second chapter dedicated to the conflict between industrial progress and the human dimension. The album evokes the city founded in 1927 by Henry Ford in the heart of the Amazon for rubber production: a failed project, a symbol of capitalism's colonial violence and its modernising hybris. The story - which seems to come straight out of a Herzog film, somewhere between "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo" - becomes, in Jóhannsson's hands, the material for one of the high points of modern classical.

Split into two sections across a total of eleven tracks, Fordlandia alternates a symphonic framework charged with a strong sense of tragedy - almost a collective cry running through the strings - with a second, more fragmented and minimal part. The towering crescendo of "Melodia (Guidelines For A Space Propulsion Device Based On Heim's Quantum Theory)", the solemn theme of the title track, and the farewell of "How We Left Fordlândia" all fuse orchestral grandeur with melancholy, in a constant contrast between man's boundless ego and the majesty of a violated nature.

There is something maximalist, something majestic, in both the formidable title track and the fifteen minutes of "How We Left Fordlândia" that is hard to find elsewhere in the discographies of modern classical composers, usually more intimate and minimal. Even in the moments where Jóhannsson paints small electronic-ambient watercolours ("Melodia 2-3-4"), or uses almost religious choirs ("The Great God Pan Is Dead"), or in the brief organ piece "Chimaerica", one can sense the composer's mastery, by now equally at ease with classic minimal compositions and symphonic crescendos. In more than one passage - perhaps also thanks to a story set in a similar landscape - it's possible to detect some kinship with Ennio Morricone's score for "Mission", particularly where symphonic writing and ethnic music find common ground ("Melodia"), in the most solemnly cinematic moments (the title track), and in the tragic choirs of "The Great God Pan Is Dead". It's no coincidence that after this album Jóhannsson, like Richter, would become a point of reference in film scoring for countless directors.

In 2016 he released Orphée, the fitting conclusion to the trilogy on human ambition: a collection of miniatures for piano, bells, cellos and synthesizers, marked by intense lyrical concentration. Here the writing becomes more rarefied, almost elegiac, as if the journey that began with the machine and continued with industry found in myth a form of metaphysical suspension. With hindsight, the ideal trilogy made up of Ibm 1401, Fordlandia and Orphée can be read as a meditation on modern hybris: from fascination with the machine, to the industrial colonisation of nature, to the myth of Orpheus, the archetype of man attempting to overstep the limits imposed on the human condition. In Jóhannsson's work, technology is never neutral: it is always a mirror of contemporary man's fragility and his obsession with dominating nature - a modern-day Prometheus.

The soundtracks

After Fordlandia, Jóhannsson became an essential point of reference in film music. Between 2009 and 2018 he composed numerous soundtracks, including Prisoners, The Theory of Everything, Sicario, Arrival and Mary Magdalene, repeatedly coming close to an Oscar and giving us some of the finest soundtracks of the decade. The telluric, almost percussive pulsations of Sicario, the claustrophobic, subterranean tensions of Prisoners, the moving sci-fi climax of Arrival, deeply inspired by Philip Glass, as well as the work originally conceived for Blade Runner 2049, all show a composer willing to forgo melodic consolation in order to explore territories of pure sound, bordering on noise and dissonance. It is precisely in this ability to move between lyricism and brutality that his true stature can be measured.

The posthumous albums

His life was cut short in 2018, at just forty-eight years old. That same year saw the release of Englabörn & Variations, which revisits his debut alongside interpretations entrusted to musicians who had admired and loved him, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Francesco Donadello of Giardini di Mirò. It's a paradox that his very first work should become his requiem: a circle closing with painful coherence. In 2019, Deutsche Grammophon paid tribute to him with 12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann, a string quartet commissioned by the Richard Thomas Foundation and dedicated by Jóhannsson to his friend, the German painter Thilo Heinzmann. First performed in 2016 at London's Conway Hall, Deutsche Grammophon released the version recorded by the Belgian ensemble Echo Collective.

His most significant posthumous legacy, however, is Drone Mass, released thanks to the Theatre Of Voices ensemble and conductor Paul Hillier. Conceived as a contemporary oratorio on texts from the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, these pieces represent one of the most ambitious projects of his career. Here, Glass-inflected post-minimalism intertwines with the sacred minimalism of Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki, while the drone takes on an atmospheric dimension recalling certain intuitions of William Basinski, enriched however by choral writing of intense spirituality.

Tracks like "One Is True", "Two Is Apocryphal" or "Triptych In Mass" display a repetitive structure that might evoke "Einstein On The Beach" or "Koyaanisqatsi", yet the signature remains unmistakably his own. In "Divine Objects", a handful of violin notes generate a sonic fabric gradually amplified by the entrance of the choir, in an ongoing dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity. Elsewhere, electronics dominate with restless accents – "The Low Drone Of Circulating Blood, Diminishes With Time" – or take on dark-ambient shades in "To Fold & Remain Dormant". Moments of intense elevation emerge in the choruses of "Moral Vacuum" and in the monumental "The Mountain View, The Majesty Of The Snow-Clad Peaks, From A Place Of Contemplation And Reflection", a perfect synthesis of strings, electronics and sacred song.

Drone Mass is not merely an artistic testament: it's the definitive confirmation of Jóhann Jóhannsson's stature. At a time when modern classical risks sometimes being reduced to the aestheticized background music of bourgeois introspection, Jóhannsson restored to the genre a tragic, political and metaphysical dimension.

On February 9, 2018, in Berlin, Jóhann Jóhannsson died prematurely at the age of 48 from heart failure.

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