Some artists write history, define styles. True King Midas, they transform into gold everything they touch. They do leave a mark in life. Ennio Morricone only needed seven notes. Notes that, on the pentagram, would become poetry, vibration of the soul because able to give a face to a dream, because they would touch humanity in all its multifaceted variety. Composer, conductor and arranger: knowledge and wisdom were there, in his work, in knowing how to put together delicate violins and intense drums, celestial oboes and whistling flutes.
Everything turns into music, when you know how to handle harmony, if, when listening to the sounds around —police sirens, the wind, a music box— you can transform them into that tune you have in mind. Catchy tormentoni everyone knows. That’s where greatness lies, in making everyone sing along with your melodies.
Morricone himself thought so: “My greatest achievement? Having written the soundtrack of people’s lives.” Indeed, his songs tell us about whole decades, they are pieces of Italian music history (Se Telefonando, interpreted by Mina, C’era un Ragazzo che come me Amava i Beatles ei Rolling Stones by Gianni Morandi, Sapore di Sale by Gino Paoli and Abbronzatissima by Edoardo Vianello). His songs embody the sentiment of an era; his music sketches Italian summers in all their lightheartedness, his soundtracks are part of us more than the movies they were written for, they paint the intensity of a gaze, the emotions within silence.
And then, if we close our eyes and listen, we also find the dusty duels and solitary horse rides of American western movies and, with them, a sense of nostalgia for the past and a sense of hope in the New World, in the American myth; we find the complexity of humanity, lost loves and even pulp movies’ gun fights.
Morricone moved us and surprised us, made us dream and made us laugh, he built an important part of our musical memory. He experimented, he dared, he changed; he tried new avenues and ended up becoming a national icon, an excellence of his country.
“The death of Ennio Morricone leaves us without a distinguished, genial artist. A musician who was refined and popular at once, and left a profound mark on the musical history of the late twentieth century. Through his soundtracks, he contributed greatly to spreading and strengthening Italy’s prestige in the world,” President Sergio Mattarella said. The president applauded and affectionately greeted Morricone (who was also Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana) during the artist’s concert to celebrate his own 90th birthday last year. in 2019, he had also traveled around the globe with his 60 Years of Music world tour — the official farewell of the composer to his public, which sold out virtually everywhere.
After having spent the morning listening to his masterpieces, Sophia Loren expressed her thoughts on a golden season of the seventh art, which is inexorably about to end: “Unfortunately — she declared to the Corriere della Sera — we’re more and more alone. The greatest ones are leaving us, little by little, one by one.”
Giuseppe Tornatore, with whom Morricone developed a great artistic partnership (after the one he had with Sergio Leone), inaugurated by Cinema Paradiso in 1988 and that lasted for 13 movies, was the only celebrity at his funerals, celebrated privately “because — il maestro wrote in his last wishes — I don’t want to bother anyone.” After Ennio – The Maestro, the book-interview published by HarperCollins in 2018, Tornatore is working on a documentary about Morricone’s life and carrier. It should be ready by the end of the year, and feature a mix of personal material and the contributions of great names like Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen and Quentin Tarantino. The latter said about il maestro — an artist able to move easily from commedia all’Italiana to thrillers: “Morricone is my favorite composer and I’m not talking about soundtracks only, I’m talking about Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.”
Robert De Niro, who played in four movies scored by Morricone, declared to La Repubblica that “every work of his was a surprise.” Roberto Benigni underlined a most peculiar artistic trait of his: “He made Italy resound in the world with his music, he was genius and moderation at the same time.”
Indeed, his work was characterized by composure and creativity, innovation and moderation. But especially, by coherence: in 2016, while standing in front of his own star — no. 2574 — on the Walk of Fame, he said, “I always aim at creating a soundtrack that both the public and the director enjoy, but also that I enjoy. I’m not happy otherwise. I have to be happy with my work more than the director is. I cannot betray my music.”
Morricone sold 70 million records. Since 1946, he composed more than 100 classical pieces and the soundtracks of more than 500 movies and TV series, along with works of contemporary music. He only received two Oscars, one in 2007 “for his magnificent contributions to the art of motion picture music” and in 2016 for the soundtrack of The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino. But the Academy unjustly denied him many more: from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), to Once Upon a Time in America (1984); from Mission (1986) and Cinema Paradiso (1988) to The Legend of 1900 (1998). It wasn’t a case that, during the standing ovation at the Oscars in 2007, when he received from the hands of Clint Eastwood — iconic actor of Sergio Leone’s westerns — a lifetime achievements Academy Award he said: “My thoughts go to all those artists who deserved this award and never got it. May they receive it soon.”
With his soundtracks, he won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, six Baftas, ten David di Donatello, eleven Nastri d’Argento, two European Film Awards, a Golden Lion for his career and a Polar Music Prize. He received five Oscar nominations: in 1979 for Days of Heaven, in 1987 for Mission, in 1988 for The Untouchable, in 1992 for Bugsy, in 2001 for Malèna. He received other five nominations to the Golden Globes: in 1985 for Once Upon a Time in America, in 1990 for The Untouchable, and then for Casualties of War, for Bugsy, for Malèna. Of the over 100 awards he received throughout his extraordinary career, he used to say: “They are created to advertise cinema, not to award a person. I accept the awards, but I don’t think they are what really counts.”
Definitely more important to him was his ambitious personal aesthetics of applied music. A graduate, then academic, at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, his native city which he always loved deeply — and for which he renounced to a Beverly Hills mansion De Laurentiis wanted to give him — he wrote for western movies directed by Sergio Leone, Duccio Tessari and Sergio Corbucci, as well as for masterpieces by Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Barry Levinson. He collaborated with John Carpenter, Mike Nichols, Terrence Malick. He left a sign in Italian cinema by working with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuliano Montaldo, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Elio Petri, Ettore Scola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Carlo Verdone, Giuseppe Tornatore and many other world known directors.
He, quite simply, became what we common people define a cinema “super star,” and not only for his seminal collaboration in the 1960s with Sergio Leone — an old primary school classmate of his — and the incredibly famous For a Fistful of Dollars, thanks to which he officially became part of the history of cinema and of world music. But because he created a piece of Beauty. Because this is what music — art — does when it steps above all the rest: it builds humanity’s intangible patrimony. This, too, belongs to his works: “We can’t forget to feed our soul with beauty, especially that of music, the art expression that brings Man close to God the most,” he said at the 2016 Jubilee of Mercy concert, wanted by Pope Francis who, three years later, was to award him with the Medaglia d’Oro del Pontificato “for his extraordinary artistic commitment, which also touched upon religion.”
Indeed, his interview with Avvenire hinted at this characteristic of his music, spirituality: “Luciano Salce, with whom I worked with for The Fascist, noticed it” Morricone said . “When the movie was over he told me ‘there is something sacred in your music, it can’t work for my comedies.’ ”
As the Los Angeles Times wrote, Morricone “didn’t offer subtle emotional guidance or heartstring-pulling obviousness. Rather, his scores added entire new layers and tones to movies. Serving as sort of whimsical, opinionated Greek chorus — one that could turn dark and sinister in a flash — his work played a co-starring role. “
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