Oscar winner reinvented scores for westerns
‘The Maestro,’ known for haunting soundtracks, wrote music for 400 films
ROME— Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian composer who created the coyote-howl theme for the iconic spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and other often haunting soundtracks, died Monday. He was 91.
Morricone’s longtime lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, said “the Maestro,” as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following surgery after suffering a broken leg in a recent fall.
Outside the hospital, Assumma read a farewell message from Morricone.
“I am Ennio Morricone and I am dead,” it began. It went on to explain that the reason he was saying goodbye this way and had requested a private funeral was: “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
During a career that spanned decades and earned him an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of Hollywood’s and Italy’s top directors, including Brian De Palma on “The Untouchables,” Quentin Tarantino on “The Hateful Eight,” Gillo Pontecorvo on “The Battle of Algiers” and Giuseppe Tornatore on “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso.”
The Tarantino film won him the Oscar for Best Original Score in 2016.
In total, he produced more than 400 original scores for feature films.
Morricone practically reinvented music for western genre movies through his partnership with late Italian director Sergio Leone. Their partnership included the “Dollars” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood: “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, “For aFew Dollars More” in1965 and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” a year later.
Morricone was celebrated for crafting just a few notes — like those played on a harmonica in Leone’s 1984 movie, “Once Upon a Time in America” — that would instantly become a film’s highly memorable motif.
“Inspiration does not exist,” Morricone said in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. “What exists is an idea, a minimal idea that the composer develops at the desk, and that small idea becomes something important.”
In his late 80s, Morricone provided the score for “The Hateful Eight,” Tarantino’s 2015 70mm epic and the first time in decades that he had composed new music for a western. It was also the first time Tarantino had used an original score.
Minutes before handing Morricone the Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007, Eastwood recalled hearing for the first time the score of “A Fistful of Dollars” and thinking: “What actor wouldn’t want to ride into town with that kind of music playing behind him?”
It was a night to remember for Morricone, who had been nominated for Oscars five times (“The Hateful Eight” was his sixth), but until then had never won.
Morricone received his first Oscar nomination for “Days Of Heaven,” a 1978 movie by U.S. director Terence Malick. Besides “The Hateful Eight,” the others were for “The Mission” (1986), “The Untouchables” (1987), “Bugsy” (1991) and “Malena” (2000).
Highly versatile, Morricone also orchestrated Italian pop tunes that include enduring classics, like an eternal summer hit, “Sapore di Sale” (“Taste of Salt”), written by famed Gino Paoli.
Asked by Italian state TV a few years ago if there was one director he would have liked to have worked with but didn’t, Morricone said Stanley Kubrick had asked him to work on “Clockwork Orange.” But that collaboration didn’t happen because of a commitment to Leone.