Maestro rides into the sunset Ennio Morricone 1928-2020
Italian composer created the sound of the US Western
Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who created the coyote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and often haunting soundtracks for such classic Hollywood gangster movies as The Untouchables and the epic Once Upon A Time In America, has died at 91.
The Maestro, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following a recent fall in which he broke a leg.
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 on The Untouchables by Brian de Palma, The Hateful Eight by Quentin Tarantino and The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo.
The Tarantino film would win him the Oscar for best original score in 2016.
He produced more than 400 original scores for feature films. His iconic “Spaghetti Western” movies saw him work closely with the late Italian film director Sergio Leone.
Morricone was credited reinventing music for Western movies through his partnership with Leone, a former classmate. Their partnership included the trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as a quick-shooting, lonesome gunman: A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, For a Few Dollars More in 1965 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, which would instantly become the film’s motif.
That movie is a saga of Jewish gangsters in New York starring Robert De Niro and James Wood. It is considered by some to be Leone’s masterpiece, thanks in part to Morricone’s evocative score, including a lush section played on string instruments.
“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 a later interview, with Italian state TV, he cited “study, discipline and curiosity” as the keys to his creative genius.
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.
In accepting Morricone’s Golden Globe for the music in his place, Tarantino called him his favourite composer.
“When I say ‘favourite composer,’ I don’t mean movie composer. . . . I’m talking about Mozart, I’m talking about Beethoven, I’m talking about Schubert,” Tarantino said.
Italy’s head of state, President Sergio Mattarella, wrote: “Both a refined and popular musician, he left a deep footprint on the musical history of the second half of the 1900s.”
Morricone’s soundtracks, Mattarella said, “contributed greatly to spreading and reinforcing the prestige of Italy in the world”.
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?”
Born in Rome in 1928, Morricone was the oldest of the five children. His father was a trumpet player.
After studying at the Conservatory of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the Italian capital, he started working as a trumpeter and then as an arranger for record companies.
In 1961 he wrote his first score for a movie, a bittersweet comedy set in the final days of Fascism called Il Federale ( The Fascist).
Morricone is survived by his wife Maria Travia, whom he cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar. Married in 1956, the couple had four children.