Ennio Morricone, il maestro
He's not just a musician, he's a legend. His more than 500 compositions have made him known around the world to young and old. Dozens of his pieces are among the classics of cinema music. The Festival pays tribute to him through its screening of Sergio Leone's films.
Morricone (born in Rome in 1928) was classically trained a a musician and played the trumpet. His first compositions were in the 1950s, first for the state broadcasting body RAI and then for various record companies. He went on to compose for TV as "Dan Savio" before becoming a variety arranger and working with artists such as Gino Paoli, Gianni Morandi, Dalida and Charles Aznavour.
He began writing music for films in 1961 but it wasn't until he met Leone (who he had known at school as a child) that his full talent as a film musician took flight. Their first collaboration was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), where he was credited as "Léo Nichols" and which was also a first big success for both him and Leone. Leonard Bernstein and Dimitri Tiomkin had hitherto dominated music for Westerns and Morricone introduced many new elements. His boldness paid off, including use of electric guitars and a whistler in the film.
All the big names in Italian cinema have since wanted to work with him. His music has featured in Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) and 1900 (1976), the increasingly controversial films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom he composed increasingly simple music, as in The Hawks and the Sparrows) (1966), Theorem (1968) and Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
He also worked with Mauro Bolognini (Drama of the Rich) (1974), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), The Taviani brothers (Allonsanfan) (1974), Luigi Comencini (The Sunday Woman) (1975), Mario Monicelli (A Trip with Anita) (1979) and Gillo Pontecorvo (Queimada) (1969).
His name appeared on the film posters along with the director's but it wasn't until Leone that he was really given equal billing. Leone, father of the "spaghetti Western," was the first to understand Morricone's musical universe. Despite their differences (one was talkative and the other rather quiet) they shared the same language of music. Leone saw music as having a language of its own, something very rare for a visual artist, and was very much in tune with Morricone's innovative composing.
"Morricone is my best dialogue man," Leone liked to say. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), he illustrated the famous hunt for gold in the West in an original way, with sounds,, whistling, a few piano staccatos and a recurrent coyote-like howl. It was a big success and everyone sought to work with him.
More about Morricone
See IMDb entry
Ennio Morricone
© DR / Coll. Institut Lumière
Morricone with Sergio Leone in 1985 and with Clint Eastwood in 2007
© DR / Coll. Institut Lumière
