Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone stands out as arguably the preeminent composer for cinema throughout the twentieth century, while simultaneously ranking among the most productive creators across every musical domain. Precise totals remain elusive, yet he furnished music for more than five hundred motion pictures spanning multiple decades, in addition to dozens upon dozens of concert-hall pieces. Although his cinematic output encompassed nearly every conceivable idiom and genre, he became most closely linked with the distinctive sonic approach of the spaghetti Western, a mode he helped originate through his scores for director Sergio Leone. His sonic resources proved remarkably eclectic, incorporating elements of classical music, jazz, pop, rock, electronics, avant-garde experimentation, and Italian folk traditions. Figures such as John Zorn, along with filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, held him in high regard, often ranking him not only among the greatest soundtrack artists but among the foremost composers of his era in any category.

He first entered formal training at Rome’s Conservatory of Santa Cecilia when he reached the age of twelve. Encouraged by his teachers to focus on composition, he earned a living as a jazz trumpeter and, after completing his studies, joined Italy’s state broadcasting organization. Film scoring did not begin for him until the early 1960s, and broader international attention arrived only after he teamed with Leone on A Fistful of Dollars in the mid-1960s, though he had already contributed to other Italian Westerns for different directors. While the spaghetti Western represented merely one chapter of his output, many listeners continue to regard this body of work as his most inventive and enduring. Morricone heightened narrative tension and dramatic impact through imaginative combinations of instruments and textures; Jew’s harps, dissonant harmonicas, buoyant piccolos, majestic church organs, haunting whistles, powerful brass fanfares, strangely intoned gunfighter laments, and spectral vocal ensembles emerged as signatures first of the Morricone-Leone films and later of the entire subgenre. Traces of rock and roll surfaced in the brooding, twanging electric guitars, which evoked—whether deliberately or not—the style of recordings by the Ventures, Duane Eddy, the Shadows, and John Barry. His most celebrated piece, the main theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, reached number two on the U.S. charts in a version recorded by Hugo Montenegro.

Even amid his Leone projects, Morricone accepted additional assignments such as the politically charged Battle of Algiers and Burn!. By the 1970s he had largely stepped away from both Leone and the Western cycle, instead collaborating with directors across the globe. Sweeping orchestrations and instantly memorable thematic ideas characterized much of his writing; Warren Beatty, for example, once remarked to the Los Angeles Times that “there’s nobody better than Ennio to create a haunting theme.” Electronic textures also appeared more frequently in his scores during this period, yielding results that varied in effectiveness.

Advancing age brought no diminishment of activity; on the contrary, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s marked the height of his popular acclaim and critical recognition. Academy Award nominations arrived for The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, and Malèna, while directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Brian DePalma, Roman Polanski, Mike Nichols, Oliver Stone, and Barry Levinson sought his services. Cinema Paradiso remains perhaps the best-known score from these years. In his late eighties he attracted fresh attention for his contribution to Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 Western The Hateful Eight, which earned him a Golden Globe and his first Academy Award for Best Original Score. He continued supplying music for films until the final months of his life; on July 6, 2020, at the age of 91, he died in a Rome hospital while recuperating from a fractured femur.

Given the sheer volume of recordings, assembling a comprehensive collection of Morricone’s work presents a formidable challenge, since even the composer himself could not recall the exact number of films he scored. Useful anthologies include RCA’s The Legendary Italian Westerns, Virgin’s two Film Music volumes, and Rhino’s Anthology, while the DRG label has reissued several other notable compilations.