Lalo Schifrin obituary: composer of the Mission Impossible theme

Times

2 days ago

He may not have been a secret government agent like the heroes of the Mission: Impossible TV series or Tom Cruise movies which featured his thrilling theme music, but Lalo Schifrin was an expert at covert operations thanks to his passion for a banned art form.
As a jazz-mad teenager growing up in Buenos Aires in the late 1940s, he had to be sneaky in order to feed his voracious appetite for bebop. The Argentinian leader, the dictator Juan Perón, had issued a blanket ban on jazz, so there was none to be heard on the radio or in nightclubs.
'Peron had made a law that Argentinian popular music had to be promoted. And in every theatre, between movies, they had some kind of folk music act with singers doing so-called national music, which was horrible. Or, if the music was good, the singers were bad. So the people would go to the lobby, waiting for them to finish, and then they would go back to see the movie.'
The young Schifrin bought his records from an American merchant marine skipper sailing from New Orleans. He would pay for the records in advance, then wait 40 days for their arrival. When he went down to the docks to collect his stash, he wore a long raincoat under which he could hide his latest acquisitions. 'In a way, I was smuggling records, but not for sale,' Schifrin said in 1996. 'They were for my own private collection.'
Schifrin was born Boris Claudio Schifrin in Buenos Aires in 1932. His father, Luis, was the concertmaster for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra, and the young Schifrin was exposed to the great classical composers from birth and classically trained on piano from a young age. Hearing Duke Ellington's music for the first time as a teen was, he said, 'like a religious conversion, and that conversion became more refined, focused and passionate when I discovered Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell'.
He briefly studied law before going to France to study music at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included the composer Olivier Messiaen, and he fell in love with the edgy sounds of the modern composers. Ironically, it was there that his love for Latin American music was kindled after he attended a lecture and workshop given by the Cuban composer and author Julio Gutiérrez, who had written a book entitled Mambology. It was also in Paris that he began playing jazz professionally. He said: 'I led a double life. I was a classical pianist during the day, and a jazz musician at night.'
Returning to a post-Peron Argentina in 1956, he started a big band. Later that year, Gillespie's big band toured Argentina, and Schifrin's outfit was booked to play at a reception in his honour. Gillespie liked what he heard, asked the young Argentinian if he had written the arrangements for the band and suggested he work for him in the States. Schifrin and his first wife, Silvia, moved to New York in 1958. They divorced in 1970, and Schifrin is survived by his second wife Donna (née Cockrell) and his three children — William and Frances, from his first marriage, and Ryan, all of whom work in film and TV production.
Aged 26, he composed Gillespiana — a five-movement suite based in part on baroque music forms and scored for a traditional big band minus saxophones, but augmented by four French horns, two percussionists and a tuba. With Schifrin on piano, Gillespie's band performed the piece throughout Europe and the United States. It established him as a composer who could elegantly blend classical music with jazz, and it was a logical step for him to head next to Hollywood, where Elmer Bernstein and Johnny Mandel were taking the same approach to movie scores.
Among the early films he scored were Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Bullitt (1968), Kelly's Heroes (1970) and Enter the Dragon (1973), along with Dirty Harry (1971) and several of its sequels. But it was the suitably 'groovy' and exciting music he wrote for the TV series Mission: Impossible in 1966 which put him on the map. It was composed before the title credits were created, and the only inspiration the producers could offer was a cryptic instruction about a 'lit fuse'. Written with an unconventional 5/4 time signature it injected, he explained: 'A little humour and lightness that didn't take itself too seriously.'
Thirty years later, when the show was turned into a blockbuster action film starring Tom Cruise, the star told him that retaining the original pulsating and suspenseful theme music had been a deal-breaker when he took on the project. Since that first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996, there have been a further seven films in the series — all with that 'earworm' Schifrin theme. The most recent was released this year and made almost £400 million worldwide.
Alongside his film and TV work, he was kept busy with commissions, including the grand finale music for the 1990 World Cup Championship in Italy, when The Three Tenors — Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras — sang together for the first time. He worked with Carreras and the London Symphony Orchestra on the album Friends for Life in 1992, and again with the LSO on Symphonic Impressions of Oman, a piece commissioned by the Sultan of Oman and released on CD in 2003.
He was in demand as a conductor with orchestras across the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — which recorded his Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, featuring the soloist Angel Romero, in 1984. In the late 1980s, he was musical director of the new Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, formed with the express purpose of recording music for films, performing concerts and participating in TV shows, and he operated as both pianist and conductor for the successful series of Jazz Meets the Symphony recordings, with the LPO, through the 1990s and early 2000s. Along the way, he also wrote compositions which added Latin American influences into the mix.
'People ask me how it is that I'm so 'versatile,'' he said in 1996. 'But I say, 'I'm not versatile. I just don't see limits. To me, all music is one music.'
Lalo Schifrin, pianist, composer and conductor, was born on June 21, 1932. He died on June 26, 2025, aged 93