Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on November 10, 1928, the son of Mario Morricone, a professional trumpet player who worked in the city's dance halls and light music orchestras, and Libera Ridolfi ^[1]. Music entered his life early and practically. His father taught him to read notes and play the trumpet, and by his own account he was writing small compositions as a child of six ^[2].

He entered the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, one of the oldest music schools in Europe, where he studied trumpet before moving into composition. The wartime years were hard on the family, and the teenage Morricone sometimes substituted for his father in nightclub bands to bring in money, an experience that gave him a working musician's fluency long before he had a diploma ^[1].

At the conservatory his most important teacher was Goffredo Petrassi, a leading figure in twentieth century Italian concert music. Under Petrassi, Morricone completed a diploma in composition in 1954, adding to earlier qualifications in trumpet and instrumentation ^[2]. The training was rigorously classical, and Morricone would insist throughout his life that he was a composer of concert music who also happened to write for the screen.

Anyone asking who was Ennio Morricone before the westerns finds an answer in the Roman music industry of the 1950s. He earned his living as an arranger, first for radio, then for the state broadcaster RAI, and above all for the record label RCA Italiana, where he shaped hit songs for popular singers such as Gianni Morandi and Mina ^[3]. Arranging taught him economy: how to make a three minute song memorable with a single unusual instrument or a striking rhythmic idea.

His first full film credit came with Luciano Salce's comedy Il Federale in 1961 ^[2]. Steady work in Italian comedies and dramas followed, but the turning point arrived in 1964, when a former elementary school classmate, the director Sergio Leone, hired him for a low budget western called A Fistful of Dollars. Facing a small orchestra budget, Morricone built the score from whistling, cracking whips, bells, an electric guitar and a soprano voice used like an instrument ^[4]. The film became an international success and the sound became a genre signature.

During the same period Morricone kept one foot in the avant garde. In 1964 he joined Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, a Rome based collective of composers who performed free improvisation, and he played trumpet with the group for years ^[3]. The experimental techniques he tested there, unconventional timbres, noise as music, extreme registers, fed directly back into his film writing.

Any list of Ennio Morricone achievements begins with the Leone collaborations. For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) contain some of the most recognized music ever written for cinema ^[4]. The main theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with its yodeling two note call answered by voices and ocarina, and the ecstatic trumpet piece known as The Ecstasy of Gold, have circulated far beyond the films, covered by orchestras and rock bands alike, including Metallica, which has long used The Ecstasy of Gold to open its concerts ^[5].

Morricone's range extended far past the western. He scored Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988) ^[2]. His oboe melody for The Mission, called Gabriel's Oboe, became a concert standard in its own right.

Recognition came in waves. He received six Academy Award nominations for original score over the decades, beginning with Days of Heaven, without winning, and the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in 2007 for his career, presented by Clint Eastwood ^[6]. In 2016, at the age of 87, he finally won the competitive award for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, his first western score in decades, which also brought him a Golden Globe ^[6]. Across his career he collected multiple BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Grammy honors, and in 2020 he shared Spain's Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts with fellow film composer John Williams ^[7]. Estimates of his output commonly exceed 400 film and television scores, alongside roughly 100 concert works ^[1].

Morricone married Maria Travia in 1956, and the marriage lasted until his death, a span of nearly 64 years ^[1]. Travia was more than a spouse in the background of the work: she wrote texts for some of his pieces, including Latin lyrics used in The Mission, and Morricone dedicated his 2016 Oscar to her from the stage ^[6]. The couple had four children, among them Andrea Morricone, who became a composer and conductor and co-wrote the love theme for Cinema Paradiso with his father ^[2].

Despite decades of offers from Hollywood, Morricone never moved from Rome and famously never learned English, working with American directors through interpreters ^[5]. He kept a disciplined routine, rising before dawn to exercise and compose, and he wrote music by hand at a desk rather than at a piano, hearing the orchestra in his head ^[3]. He was also a lifelong supporter of the football club AS Roma and once composed a piece connected to the club's supporters.

Colleagues described a man who was exacting about his craft and blunt in interviews, quick to correct the idea that film music was a lesser art. He often said that his concert music, which he called absolute music, mattered to him as much as anything he wrote for the movies ^[3].

Old age barely slowed him. In his seventies and eighties Morricone took up large scale touring as a conductor, leading orchestras and choirs through his film music in arenas across Europe and beyond. His farewell tour, billed as The Final Concerts, ran through 2018 and 2019 and included a 90th birthday series ^[7].

The late collaboration with Quentin Tarantino brought his music to a new generation. Tarantino had already borrowed existing Morricone cues for the Kill Bill films, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained before commissioning the original score for The Hateful Eight in 2015 ^[6]. The resulting Oscar, won at 87, made Morricone the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award at that time in his category, and it capped a run of honors that included a second Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony and a Polar Music Prize shared in 2010.

Morricone died in Rome on July 6, 2020, at the age of 91, from complications following a fall in which he broke a femur ^[7]. In keeping with his instructions, the funeral was private. He left behind a short farewell letter, released by his family, in which he said goodbye to friends by name and to his wife Maria, calling their bond the most painful to leave ^[7].

Basic Ennio Morricone facts only begin to explain his influence. He demonstrated that a film score could be built from any sound at all: a whistle, a coyote howl imitated by voice, a jaw harp, a ticking watch, an electric guitar. Composers as different as Hans Zimmer, John Zorn and Danny Elfman have cited him, and his cues are sampled and quoted constantly in popular music ^[5].

His melodies achieved a rare double life, functioning inside films and thriving away from them. Gabriel's Oboe, the theme from Cinema Paradiso, Chi Mai and The Ecstasy of Gold appear regularly in concert programs, figure skating routines, advertising and sports arenas. Record sales of his soundtracks are estimated in the tens of millions worldwide ^[2].

In 2021 Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso, released the documentary Ennio, a feature length portrait built on a long interview with the composer and tributes from filmmakers and musicians; it won the David di Donatello award for best documentary in Italy ^[8]. Rome renamed a large auditorium space in his honor, and studies of his working methods continue to appear. Any serious Ennio Morricone biography ends where his own summary of the work began: with the conviction that music written for images could be composed with the same seriousness as a symphony, and could outlast the films it served.