Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone was born in the Italian capital on November 10, 1928. During his childhood he lived in the bohemian Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, with his four brothers, and his parents, Libera –a housewife who set up a small sewing workshop– and Mario , professional trumpeter. Little Ennio immediately learned to play the instrument from his father, and they say that at the age of 6 he was already playing his own compositions, making it clear that he had a natural talent for inventing new melodies. At 9 he entered the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world.

At that time he became very friendly at school with another boy, a certain Sergio Leone , who was going to have a lot to do with his professional future. Both had been born a few days apart, were destined to follow the profession of their respective fathers (Leone was the son of silent film director Vincenzo Leone, who signed as Roberto Roberti) and often played in the street. Cowboys and Indians? Who knows.

At 12, Morricone entered the conservatory. The hard years of World War II run through and he goes hungry, like most of his fellow citizens in Rome, although the musician has always declared that the hardships of this time have been his greatest source of inspiration when it comes to composing his best scores. . After the war was over, in 1946, he received a trumpet diploma, and later another in orchestral instrumentation.

He began his professional career composing music for theater shows and radio programs. In the cinema, he started out as a ‘black’ in titles like Death of a Friend , which was officially signed by Mario Nascimbene . He appears for the first time in the credits in El federale , a light-hearted comedy starring Ugo Tognazzi and directed by Luciano Salce, with whom he would collaborate at this time on several similar works. “My first films were light comedies that required very simple scores, a genre that I never abandoned when I started working on bigger titles with great directors,” recalls the musician.

He began to stand out when he composed music for the dramas The Success , by Mauro Morassi , with Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant , and especially Before the Revolution , by Bernardo Bertolucci , an elegant composition apparently simple, but so intense that it presaged that Ennio Morricone It was going to give a lot to talk about. Around this time, the Italian triumphed with his musical arrangements signed with a pseudonym, such as that of “Pastures of Plenty”, for the American folk singer Peter Tevis. He also composes for pop singers, as in the case of “Ogni volta”, a song popularized by Paul Ankaafter participating with him in the Sanremo Festival, and “Se telefoneando”, sung by Mina, which was a hit.

In the world of record companies, he amassed enormous prestige. So much so that the producers of A Fistful of Dollars were very interested in having him, so they forced the director, Sergio Leone, to meet with his old childhood friend, even though he wanted to work with Angelo Francesco . Lavagnino , who had written the soundtrack for The Colossus of Rhodes , his first film as a solo director. “At the Jolly Films production company they made me watch Gringo , but the music seemed horrible to me, like a Dimitri Tiomkinmiserable”, confessed a sincere Leone. Even so they insisted so much that he went to Morricone’s house. “He made me listen to a cut that the producers had discarded and that I loved. But what really excited me was a song that he had done for an American baritone and that immediately caught my attention.” It was “Pasture of Plenty”, where he had arranged it. “I asked him to get the base back and from there The theme song came out, after I asked him to use a human whistle.”

Neither one nor the other was too confident that the product (with a tiny budget even in comparison with other B-movies) would have a lot of impact. Hence, the director signed as Bob Robertson, while Morricone appears as Dan Savio. But this anonymity means that both work with absolute freedom, giving rise to a truly memorable film and music. For a handful of dollars, he earns more than a handful of tickets, to the point that in the reruns they both decide to incorporate their real names, and launch two sequels, each one with a bigger budget than the previous one and one more American actor to match. head of the cast ( Clint Eastwood is gradually joined by Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach ).

The music from A Fistful of Dollars became so popular that Morricone became known as “the whistling man.” On the next two tapes, he continued to take advantage of the natural sounds added to the orchestra. In Death Had a Price he cuts a chunk out of a pocket watch, and includes howling, a turtle dove, and more whistling in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Morricone surpasses himself in each title thanks to the absolute autonomy that Leone gives him. “Sergio gave me free rein because not only was he out of tune, but he wasn’t even capable of singing a melody even out of tune,” Morricone recalled. “For this very reason, the musical inspiration of his films and the intensity of our creative relationship seem extraordinary to me, and it also produces a certain tenderness in me: when he wanted to indicate a subject of mine, he would limit himself to telling me: that one that makes ‘titití’, humming very vaguely. All my music could be resolved for him in a ‘marmoset’, and it was always a tiring undertaking for me to identify exactly what theme he was referring to.”

Since then, Morricone has become the official composer of the spaghetti western, with titles such as A Gun for Ringo , I am the Revolution , My Name Is None , and Seven Guns for the MacGregors . In this genre, his work stands out for Cara a cara (1967) , by Sergio Sollima , where he applies a formula that gives him excellent results, starting with basic and natural sounds in solo, incorporating percussion, and finally playing the entire orchestra in full.

At the same time that he triumphed with westerns, he also composed melodies for other titles with social and political content such as The Battle of Algiers , by Gillo Pontecorvo , Investigation on a citizen free from all suspicion and The working class goes to paradise , by Elio Petri , and above all Sacco and Vanzetti , for which he developed the famous musical theme “Here’s to You”, which, performed by the lyricist, Joan Baez, became a worldwide success.

Married in 1958 to Maria Travia, the maestro has four children, Marco, Alessandra, Giovanni Morricone (who would dedicate himself to filmmaking) and Andrea Morricone , the only one who has followed in his footsteps as a conductor and composer for films like Capturing the Friedmans and Liberty Heights . His wife has collaborated on some compositions as a lyricist, for example she was in charge of the Latin texts of The Mission , one of his best works.

Morricone has been so in demand that in his most dedicated time he has come to compose for 20 different films in the same year, so sometimes the results have been rather discreet. But he took special care in his collaborations with Leone, as he achieves some magical violins in Hasta que llego su hora , in which he has the voice of Edda dell’Orso, a soprano with a sensual voice that he has repeated over and over again in the composer’s work. Besides, he includes new whistles, which are very important to the plot in Duck, Damn , and does some of his best work in Once Upon a Time in America , where Robert De NiroHe asked that the soundtrack be played live before performing each scene. “Actors like him ask that the music be played on the set because it makes them get into the situation. Then the dialogue is recorded,” recalls Morricone. Leone’s death in 1989 prevented the two from returning to work on new projects they had planned, such as a film about the Battle of Leningrad. “My biggest regret is that he is no longer alive,” said the musician. “I don’t know how far it would have gone. It was a great loss, not only for Italian cinema, but for world cinema.”

Until the 1970s, Ennio Morricone refused to leave Italy, where he worked with the best filmmakers, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini ( The Thousand and One Nights , Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom ), Bernardo Bertolucci ( Novecento , another of his great scores, The Moon ) or Mauro Bolognini ( The Ferramonti Inheritance ). At the end of the decade, he began to participate in international productions, after composing a chapter of Espacio: 1999 . He is followed by Exorcist II: The Heretic , Orca the Killer Whale and Days of Heaven , by Terrence Malick .. In the 1980s, he lavished himself on international productions such as The Red Warrior , Frantic , Hearts of Iron , Shadow Creators and especially Eliot’s Untouchables and The Mission , where he surpassed himself. In 1988 his music was one of the key factors in Giuseppe Tornatore ‘s Cinema Paradiso becoming one of the biggest hits in Italian cinema, and winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

In the last decades, Morricone has been at the service of many films, such as those of his friend Tornatore ( They’re all fine , Pure formality , The man from the stars , Baarìa ) and Hollywood productions such as Bugsy , In the line of fire , Turn to Hell , Lolita (1997) and Mission to Mars . He did a great job for the Hungarian Lajos Koltai , in Sin destino and has also worked for the Spanish filmmakers Miguel Hermoso ( La luz prodigiosa ) and Pedro Almodóvar (tie me up ).

Five times nominated for an Oscar without fortune smiling on him, the Academy wanted to compensate for this injustice. That is why in 2007 he awarded him the honorary award for the whole of his career “for his magnificent and multifaceted contribution to the art of film music.”

A man of strong character, he broke up with  Quentin Tarantino  because he “placed the music without coherence”. The American director, who had made a lot of money out of his old compositions in the two  Kill Bill installments , signed him to write the original music for  Inglourious Basterds , but Morricone finally had to resign from the job because he did not give him enough time. Finally, the filmmaker made do with old pieces of music. Tarantino followed up by paying tribute to him using cuts of his music in  Django Unchained . “I didn’t like it, too much blood,” said the Italian after seeing it. They reconciled in 2015, when the American got him back to write the score for The Hateful Eight, for which he won another Oscar, this time competitive, in the category of best original music.

In 2020, shortly before her death, it was announced that she had won the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain, alongside John Williams .