Ennio Morricone
Composer
ITALIAN COMPOSER Ennio Morricone, who has died at 91, created The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’s main theme.
Fellow composer Hans Zimmer spoke of the influence. of the Oscar-winning composer, who was known as the Maestro.
He said: “Ennio was an icon and icons just don’t go away, icons are forever.
“He was a major influence on me. The first movie I ever saw was Once Upon A Time In The West. I heard the music and saw those images and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do’.”
Zimmer said Morricone’s music was “always outstanding, and done with great emotional fortitude and great intellectual thought”.
During a career that spanned decades and earned him a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of the most renowned directors in the world.
He took the best original score Oscar for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016.
But it is perhaps his work with Italian film-maker Sergio Leone – who was a school-mate of Morricone’s – that is the most instantly recognisable.
The Dollars trilogy of so-called spaghetti westerns from the 1960s were massively influential and made Clint Eastwood an international film star.
In total, Morricone produced more than 400 original scores for feature films. He once said: “I am disturbed when people think about me as a specialist for Westerns. They are only a relatively small percentage of the music I’ve written.”
Morricone was born in Rome on November 10, 1928, the son of a jazz trumpeter. He, too, took up the instrument and was writing short compositions by the age of six.
Although writing classical music scores was said to be his first love, in order to make a living, he began composing music for radio drama.
Later he began writing music for film scores, but none of his work made much of an impact until his former school friend, Leone, asked him to write the soundtrack for Per Un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars). The result created a new sound world for Westerns using electric guitars and a variety of sound effects instead of conventional instruments.
A subsequent soundtrack – for Once Upon a Time in the West – became one of the best-selling original scores ever, with up to 10 million copies sold.
But it was when Morricone wrote the haunting theme to 1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the third in the Dollars trilogy, that he created one of the most memorable film soundtracks. Imitating the sounds of coyotes and using the electric guitar, the track became a worldwide hit.
Morricone went on to become one of the most prolific composers of his era, with hundreds of film scores in his repertoire. He was nominated for an Oscar six times between 1979 and 2016. They were for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena and The Hateful Eight. He finally won for the latter.
In 2007 he was awarded an honorary Academy Award, only the second film score composer to receive such an accolade.
He performed regularly throughout Europe, and in January 2016 he launched a tour, 60 Years of Music, which visited more than 40 European cities. He played his final concert in Rome in January. He is survived by his wife, Maria, and their three sons, Marco, Andrea and Giovanni, and daughter, Alessandra.