Vale Maestro Morricone

The last decade has witnessed the perhaps to-be-expected but nevertheless rueful disappearance of many of the great names of the Italian cinema which flourished so spectacularly in the 1960s and 1970s. One by one such major veteran filmmakers as Mario Monicelli, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Rosi, Ettore Scola, Vittorio Taviani, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ermanno Olmi and Franco Zeffirelli have all taken their leave. The era of the coronavirus has now delivered the unkindest cut of all with the death, at the age of 91, of the rightfully-legendary musician and film composer, the maestro, Ennio Morricone.



Arguably the greatest, certainly the most prolific screen composer in the history of the cinema, Morricone scored over 500 films and television series, as well as more than 100 other musical compositions, including cantatas, symphonies, chamber pieces, ballet music, an opera, a Mass, music for theatrical productions and radio plays, and arrangements of popular songs.



Born in the working-class quarter of Trastevere in Rome in 1928 into a family of modest means, the young Morricone appeared determined from his earliest days to follow in the footsteps of his father, a trumpet player who earned his living playing in Roman dance clubs and entertainment venues. By his own account, he had already begun to master the trumpet and to compose rudimentary hunting themes in the style of Weber by the age of six. In more recent times he willingly admitted that this early musical vocation was almost displaced at the age of 11 by a new-found passion for the game of chess (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/15/ennio-morricone-plays-chess/), provoking a severe reprimand from his father who brought him back to the straight and narrow path of a career in music. A year later he began his formal musical training at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia where he studied trumpet, orchestration, choral music, and composition under the renowned composer, Goffredo Petrassi. While studying at the Academy during the day, he also moonlighted at night, playing second trumpet in the musical ensemble of Alberto Flamini. Having earned his diploma in trumpet in 1946 and while continuing his studies in composition with Petrassi, he began to experiment with compositions for piano and voice while also writing music for theatrical productions. In the early 1950s he expanded his activities to include music for radio plays while continuing to experiment with compositions of avant-garde music. By the late 1950s he was also working as a musical arranger for the RAI and then more regularly at the RCA studios in Rome, arranging popular songs for performers such as Gianni Morandi, Charles Aznavour, Mina, and Mario Lanza.



Impelled more by the financial need to provide for a growing family than by artistic considerations, he began working in the cinema in the early 1960s, with scores for Luciano Salce’s Il federale (The Fascist , 1961) and La voglia matta (Crazy Desire , 1962). His first resounding success, however, only came after work on a dozen more unremarkable films, with his stunningly innovative soundtrack for Sergio Leone’s groundbreaking Spaghetti Western, Per un pugno di dollari (For a Fistful of Dollars , 1964), written under the cover of the pseudonym Dan Savio but bringing him the recognition of the award of his first Nastro d’argento . He subsequently scored all of Leone’s films, including the gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) while also collaborating with all the major Italian directors from Gillo Pontecorvo and Mauro Bolognini to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. Indeed, as Bertolucci himself once remarked in an interview, there came to be a period when practically no Italian film, of whatever style or genre, and with the possible exception of films by Federico Fellini, would appear without the name of Morricone in the credits. From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s he was regularly scoring the extraordinary average of a dozen films a year, in 1972 actually reaching the vertiginous heights of just under 30. At the same time, throughout this period, as a leading and active member of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, he was also composing, performing and recording original experimental music.



The characteristic professionalism and the always creative approach which he brought to each project, whether genre or art-cinema, soon gained him an international reputation and he worked with a host of French, British and American directors on films as different as John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), the film whose delicate romantic soundtrack earned him his first Oscar nomination. Eight years later, his haunting and moving score for Roland Joffè’s The Mission (1986), a commission which he had originally refused but into which, having eventually accepted, he had poured his heart and soul, brought him his second Oscar nomination for Best Musical score. To his great chagrin and enduring disappointment, the award itself was given to Herbie Hancock for his musical compilation for Bernard Tavernier’s Round Midnight . Two years later his compelling score for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) was again nominated but failed to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Turning his back on Hollywood for a period, he made an invaluable contribution to the nascent so-called New Italian Cinema with his unforgettable music for Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso (1988), and subsequently providing the music for all of Tornatore’s films from Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine , 1990) to La corrispondenza (Correspondence , 2016).



After having been nominated unsuccessfully five times, he was finally recognized in 2007 with an Honorary Oscar, awarded “For his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” By this time he had greatly reduced his involvement with feature films and was scoring mostly for television and touring the concert halls. Ironically, although this was finally the opportunity to perform the “serious” music that he had continued to write but not been able to showcase in all the years that he had worked in the cinema, his most successful and acclaimed concerts turned out to be those where he conducted the music of his most popular film scores.



In 2015, bowing to the apparently gracious entreaties of an insistent Quentin Tarantino, he scored his last Western, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight , which finally brought him the Oscar for Best Original Score. Perhaps musically not quite at the level of his greatest work, it nevertheless crowned an extraordinary career. A year later, now a certified Oscar winner, he was also given his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.



He had always steadfastly refused to name his favourite film score, a proposal he judged as inappropriate as a father being asked to name his favourite child. However, in accordance with his own stated wishes, at the small private funeral which he had requested “in order not to bother anyone”, and attended only by his close family and by Giuseppe Tornatore, the music heard as the casket was being blessed was the unmistakable music he had composed for The Mission . 



Vale Maestro