Eternal Music by Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone's legacy is much more than the well-known music for films. For many, his works are on a par with the works of Bach and Mozart due to their ability to reach out to the minds and hearts. The first five notes of the famous "howling coyote" from the movie "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly" can be compared in recognition to the first chords of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This music can be called eternal.Morricone, whose atmospheric tunes for spaghetti westerns and over 500 films from eminent directors have made him one of the most influential music writers in modern cinema, died in Rome on July 6, 2020. The composer was 91 years old. Morricone spent the last week in the hospital with a fractured femur. When it became known about his death, the family's lawyer published an obituary, written by the maestro's own hand, which begins with the words: “I, Ennio Morricone, is dead.”  For connoisseurs of cinema, Morricone is known as the only one who has composed music for comedies, thrillers and historical dramas directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malik, Roland Joffe, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, Quentin Carpenter, and others. The composer has created soundtracks for many popular films of the past 40 years: "Cage for Eccentrics" by Edouard Molinaro, "Something" by Carpenter, "The Untouchables" by de Palma, "On the Verge of Madness" by Roman Polanski, "New Cinema" Paradiso " Giuseppe Tornatore, In the Line of Fire by Wolfgang Petersen, and Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. The latter picture earned Morricone his first Academy Award for Best Music for a Film, as well as a Golden Globe. The musician received another Oscar for outstanding achievements in cinema a little earlier, in 2007, not counting five nominations in different years. In addition, the composer has two Golden Globes, four Grammys and almost a hundred other awards on his shelf. The Hateful Eight Soundtrack Creation However, Morricone's work on films by Sergio Leone, the so-called "spaghetti westerns", brought world popularity and recognition among moviegoers. The soundtrack of these films is a mixture of music and sound effects: a ticking pocket watch, a pointer creaking in the wind, the buzzing of flies, the strum of a jew's harp, a frightening whistle, whip clapping, gunshots and ocarina lingering. Films that were imitated, despised, or forged - they later became known as The Dollar Trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name: For a Fistful of Dollars (1964), A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, the Ugly (1966). The paintings, simultaneously released in the US in 1967, became real hits. With a total budget of $ 2 million, the trilogy grossed approximately $ 280 million worldwide. These westerns had their own characteristics: the original dialogues in Italian had to be duplicated for the English-speaking market; the plot is drawn out and slow; often used cliches with close-ups of the hero's gaze However, Morricone, violating the unwritten rule not to distract the viewer from the actors with music, brought amazing sounds and melodramatic nuances to the trilogy, which fans extolled, and critics called them fully consistent with the vision of the Old West through the eyes of Leone. Ennio Morricone Concert Soundtrack for the film "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly" “In the films that built Morricone's reputation in the 1960s, music is not just a background, wrote a critic for The New York Times in 2007 of the composer. -Sometimes the music is a conspirator, sometimes it is a spotlight, and the melodies appear as brightly in the foreground as the faces of the actors. " Morricone later wrote the music for two more Leone films - Once Upon a Time in the Wild West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984) - both of which have become acclaimed masterpieces. However, the most recognizable are the tunes from the "Dollar Trilogy". Over time, the maestro got tired of discussing the simplicity of these compositions. When Morricone was asked by The Guardian in 2006 why the film “For a Fistful of Dollars” had such an effect, he replied: “I don't know. This is the worst film Leone has made and the worst soundtrack I've ever written. " In a bow tie, glasses, and a halo of white hair, Morricone always looked like a professor. Sometimes he locked himself in a mansion in Rome and worked for weeks, writing not at the piano, but at the writing table. According to the maestro, he heard the music in his head and could write the melody in pencil on music paper for any part of the orchestra. Sometimes a musician managed to create a soundtrack for 20 films in a year, often even before filming began, starting only from the script. Filmmakers admired his imagination - tarantellas, psychedelic screams, thrilling love themes, intense passages of serious drama, majestic references to the 18th century and eerie dissonances of the 20th century - and, at the same time, inventive silence: Morricone feared too much music, feared overload the audience with emotions.  The composer never studied English, never composed outside Rome and for years refused to fly anywhere, although he periodically traveled around the world as the conductor of the orchestra, sometimes performing his own works. Despite his constant work in Hollywood, Morricone did not come to the United States for concerts until 2007, when, at the age of 78, he arranged a month-long tour, accompanied by film festivals with his music. The trip ended with an Oscar from Clint Eastwood, who roughly translated the composer's speech, who expressed “deep gratitude to all the directors who believed in me. Ennio Morricone Concert Once Upon a Time in America Soundtrack Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on November 10, 1928, the eldest of five children in the family. His father, a trumpeter, taught his son to sight-read and play different instruments. Ennio wrote his first composition at the age of 6. In 1940 he entered the National Academy of Santa Sicily, where he studied trumpet, composition and conducting. The ensuing famine and hardships of the Second World War were reflected in some of his works. After the war, the composer wrote music for radio, television and stage. The first film for which Morricone composed a soundtrack was the comedy "The Fascist Leader" by Luciano Salce. In addition to the aforementioned films, Morricone had a hand in the creation of political films: "The Battle for Algeria" by Gillo Pontecorvo, "Birds Big and Small" by Paolo Pasolini, "Sacco and Vanzetti" by Giuliano Montaldo and "The Twentieth Century" by Bernardo Bertolucci.  In addition to the Oscar for the music to The Hateful Eight, five more soundtracks by Morricone have been nominated for the award and fully demonstrate his multifaceted talent. In Terrence Malick's Days of the Harvest, the composer used music to depict the theme of a love triangle somewhere in Texas on the eve of World War I. For "Mission" about a Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) carrying a cross through the jungle, the composer mixed the sounds of the flute of native Indians with a part of European instruments, thereby exacerbating the cultural conflict. In The Untouchables, his music heats up the tension between Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) during Prohibition. For Bugsy, a movie about gangster Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty), Morricone created a medley about an impressionable sociopath in Hollywood.  In a 2007 interview with The New York Times, Morricone was modest about his popularity. “The assertion that I am a composer who writes a lot of music is, on the one hand, true, and on the other not,, he said. -Perhaps I am better at organizing my time than other people. But in comparison with classical composers, Bach and Mozart, I would call myself a bum”. In memory of the maestro, Time turned to several of his colleagues for comment. “His genius created his own language of film music, Alexander Desplat replied. -While the directors did not even listen to eminent composers, Morricone wrote music similar to symphonies and operas, with passion, scope, bravado and intelligence. " “The 20th century was the era of film music, and the world had just lost one of the giants of the era,” wrote Danny Elfman. -Ask a few film composers to name their idols and you'll get tons of options. But I bet there will be one name on each list. The name of the true, undisputed musical genius is Ennio Morricone”. The Topic of Article: Eternal Music by Ennio Morricone. |
