Ennio Morricone, the The Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for spaghetti westerns and some 500 Who’s Who movies by international directors made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential music creators for modern cinema, died Monday in Rome. He was 91 years old.
His death was confirmed by his lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, who said that Mr. Morricone had been admitted to the hospital last week after falling and fracturing his femur.
For many filmmakers, Maestro Morricone (pronounced mas-ah-CONE-ay) was a unique talent, creating melodic accompaniments for comedies, thrillers, and historical dramas by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma , Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.
Mr. Morricone made many popular films from the last 40 years: “La Cage aux Folles” by Édouard Molinaro (1978), “The Thing” (1982) by Mr. Carpenter, “The Untouchables” by Mr. De Palma (1987 ), Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (1988), “Cinema Paradiso” by Giuseppe Tornatore (1988), “In the Line of Fire” by Wolfgang Petersen (1993) and “The Hateful Eight” by Mr. Tarantino (2015).
In 2016, Mr. Morricone won his first competitive Academy Award for his score for “The Hateful Eight,” a western American mystery thriller for which he also won a Golden Globe. In a career full of honors, he previously had won an Oscar for lifetime achievement (2007) and was nominated for five other Academy Awards, and won two Golden Globes, four Grammys, and dozens of international awards.
But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his mix of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns: a pocket watch, a poster that creaked in the wind, buzzing flies, a vibrant harp Jew, haunting whistles, booming whips, gunshots, and a strange, howling “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called ocarina.
Imitated, despised, deceived, what became known as “The trilogy of dollars” – “A handful of dollars” (1964), “For a few dollars more” (1965) and “The good, the bad and the ugly “(1966), all released in the United States in 1967, starred Clint Eastwood as” The Nameless Man “and were huge successes, with a combined budget of $ 2 million and gross worldwide income of $ 280 million.
The Italian dialogue of the trilogy was dubbed, and the action was melancholic and slow, with cliched close-ups of the gunmen’s eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule of never overshadowing actors with music, infused it all with a strange rarity of sound and melodramatic tensions that many admirers embraced with devotion and learned criticism that called the Old Man’s early vision viscerally true. West of Mr. Leone.
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the spaghetti westerns series he set for Leone, Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” wrote New York Times critic Jon Pareles in 2007. ” Sometimes he’s a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with melodies that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces. “
Lord morricone He also rated Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely regarded masterpieces. But it got closer identified with “The Dollars Trilogy”, and eventually became tired of responding for its low sensitivity.
When asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had had such an impact, he said, “I don’t know. It’s the worst movie Leone ever did and the worst score I ever did.”
“The Ecstasy of Gold”, the title track of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, was one of Mr. Morricone’s greatest hits. It was recorded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a composition album by Mr. Morricone and used in concert by two rock bands: as closing music for the Ramones and the introductory theme for Metallica.
Mr. Morricone looked professional in ties and glasses, with strands of loose white hair. Sometimes he hid in his palace in Rome and wrote music for weeks, composing not on a piano but on a desk. He listened to the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on sheet music paper for all parts of the orchestra.
Sometimes he scored 20 or more movies a year, often working on just one script before projecting the reeds. The directors marveled at his range: tarantella, psychedelic squeals, mounting love themes, tense high-drama passages, majestic evocations of the 18th century or mysterious twentieth-century dissonances, and the ingenuity of his music: he was suspicious of too much music, of overloading to an audience with emotions.
He composed for television movies and series like “The Sopranos”, wrote about 100 concert pieces and orchestrated music for singers like Joan Baez, Paul Anka and Anna Maria Quaini, the Italian pop star known as Mina.
Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew around the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he didn’t visit the United States until 2007, when, at age 78, he toured for a month, marked by film festivals.
He gave concerts in New York at Radio City Music Hall and the United Nations, and concluded the tour in Los Angeles, where he received an honorary Academy Award for his lifetime achievements. The presenter, Clint Eastwood, roughly translated his acceptance speech from Italian when the composer expressed “deep gratitude to all the directors who trusted me.”
Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on November 10, 1928, one of the five children of Mario Morricone and the former Libera Ridolfi. His father, a trumpeter, taught him to read music and play various instruments. Ennio wrote his first compositions at six. In 1940 he entered the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, where he studied trumpet, composition and conducting.
His experiences of World War II, famine, and the dangers of Rome as an “open city” under the German and American armies, were reflected in some of his later work. After the war, she wrote music for the radio; for the Italian broadcasting service, RAI; and for singers under contract with RCA.
In 1956, he married Maria Travia. They had four children: Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni.
His first film credit was for “The Fascist” (1961) by Luciano Salce. His collaboration with Mr. Leone, a former schoolmate, soon began. But he also marked political films: “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo, “The hawks and the sparrows” by Pasolini (1966), “Sacco and Vanzetti” by Giuliano Montaldo (1971) and “1900” by Bertolucci. (1976)
Five Oscar-nominated Morricone scores showed their virtuosity. In Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), he captured a love triangle in the Texas Panhandle, around 1916. For “The Mission” (1986), about an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) under the Brazilian rain. In the forest, he wove the flute music of indigenous peoples with that of the European instruments of a missionary party, representing cultural conflicts.
In “The Untouchables”, his music hit the fight between Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Chicago in the Prohibition era. In Mr. Levinson’s “Bugsy” (1991), about the mobster Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty), he was a medley for a starred sociopath in Hollywood. And in Mr. Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000), he orchestrated evidence of a wartime Sicilian city as seen through the eyes of a boy obsessed with a beautiful lady.
Speaking to Mr. Pareles, Mr. Morricone placed his acclaimed work in a modest perspective. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one side and not the other,” he said. “Perhaps my time is better organized than that of many other people. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed. “
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
