Ennio Morricone born 10 November 1928

Ennio Morricone OMRI ( 10 November 1928 – 6 July 2020) was an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and trumpeter who wrote music in a wide range of styles. With more than 400 scores for cinema and television, as well as more than 100 classical works, Morricone is widely considered one of the most prolific and greatest film composers of all time. 

Ennio Morricone was born in the Trastevere district of Rome, when Mussolini was at the height of his powers. His father, Mario, was a trumpeter, while his mother, Libera Ridolfi, ran a small textiles company. Ennio, who was a classmate of Sergio Leone at John the Baptist elementary school in Rome was composing his first music and learning the trumpet by the age of six. He never lost his passion for the instrument, which enjoyed a high profile in many of his scores. 

By the age of 12 he was enrolled at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, where he later studied with Umberto Semproni (trumpet) and Goffredo Petrassi (composition) by day, while secretly standing in for his father in clubs and music halls by night. Soon he was playing in recording sessions for the postwar Italian film industry. “Most of these scores were very ugly, and I believed I could do better,” he said, though elsewhere he insisted that he only prioritised his film music over more serious composition because it paid well and he had a family to support. 

In 1958 he took a job as music assistant with RAI, the Italian broadcaster, but left after one day; soon he was working for the record company RCA as a studio arranger. By the late 1950s he had orchestrated hundreds of songs for Italian singers such as Gianni Morandi and Gino Paoli. However, the big screen was calling. His first full-length score was for Luciano Salce’s The Fascist (1961); by the time he had completed the music for Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – when, unusually, Leone asked him to write the music before filming, which was then played to the actors on set – his reputation was firmly established. 

Typically Morricone would rise at 5am and, to avoid the hustle and bustle of his family, lock himself in his study, where he reputedly kept dozens of bars of stolen hotel soap in his desk. He lived in a 17th-century building bedecked with chandeliers in the centre of Rome overlooking the Forum. Between his big-screen works Morricone continued to write non-film music, including a ballet (Requiem for Destiny), and Riflessi (1990), three pieces for unaccompanied cello. Classical performers in turn paid their respects, with the cellist Yo Yo Ma recording an album of Morricone arrangements. There was also an array of jazz and easy listening music. 

Not every score was a success. His music for The Scarlet Letter (1995), for example, was rejected by the director Roland Joffé, with whom he had worked on The Mission – as was a score by Elmer Bernstein – and replaced with one by John Barry. Morricone was dismissive of questions about his prolific workload, comparing his impressive dozen or more film scores a year to the output of Bach, who “used to compose one cantata a week”; he told the interviewer John Doran that compared with the great Johann Sebastian “you will see that I’m practically unemployed.” 

His other film scores included Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), Joffé’s City of Joy (1992), and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) – although they fell out when Morricone objected to Tarantino’s use of one of his songs in Django Unchained, saying that the director “places music in his films without coherence” – although his objection was also in part due to “too much blood” in Django. His composition Chi Mai (“Whoever”) was used in the television series An Englishman’s Castle and The Life and Times of David Lloyd George; it went to No 2 in the UK in 1981, and was covered the same year by the Shadows on their album Hits Right Up Your Street. 

Morricone was nominated six times for Academy Awards (for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malèna, The Hateful Eight), but – save for the honorary Oscar, awarded “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music” – he won only once, for The Hateful Eight, late in his career. That the statuette otherwise evaded him was a rebuke, said some, for his refusal to move to Hollywood. Nevertheless, he picked up a slew of Grammy awards, Golden Globes and Baftas, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Liverpool. 

Despite the widespread acclaim, and his insistence on always being addressed as “Il Maestro”, Morricone remained in some ways a modest man at heart. In 2004 he told The Sunday Telegraph that he was “satisfied with what I’ve done. But I still think I can improve. You can always do better, you know.” In February 2015 he wowed audiences at the O2 arena with a sprightly run through his greatest film hits in a show entitled My Life in Music that left the critics marvelling at his “apparently endless flow of inventive melody”. 

On 6 July 2020, Morricone died at the Università Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, aged 91, as a result of injuries sustained to his femur during a fall. Following a private funeral in the hospital's chapel, he was entombed in Cimitero Laurentino. (Edited from The Telegraph & Wikipedia)