Nella Fantasia

Nella Fantasia is a vocal setting of Gabriel's Oboe, the melody Morricone wrote for The Mission in 1986, with an Italian text by Chiara Ferraù. He refused permission for words for more than a decade and relented only in the 1990s, after which the song circulated far more widely than the film cue it came from. The melody itself is a slow arch of a single phrase, written for solo oboe over strings, and its transfer to the voice requires almost no adjustment — one reason the composer had resisted it for so long.