There are some people we’ve never had a chance to meet, and we feel like we’ve known them our whole lives. People without whom our lives would be empty and poorer, without us probably being aware of it. One of them for me is Ennio Morricone, an Italian film composer, a composer who has composed music for more than 400 films, hundreds of works of classical and experimental music, arranged countless hits of the Italian pop scene of the fifties and sixties. I heard Morricone’s music even before I even knew who he was and that he composed it, ever since I first saw “Good, Bad, Evil” and other legendary Sergio Leone western spaghetti as a child.
Kudos to Hans Zimmer, John Williams and all the other composers of film music, but the Italian maestro is still a world unto himself and I don’t think any of his colleagues can match Morricone despite winning just one Oscar. There is something revolutionary and unique in Morricone’s music that even from the first bars one can easily recognize that he is the author. Many have tried to copy his style and capture his sound, but it is simply absolutely impossible and that is why, among other things, Maestro Ennio is the greatest of all time and a composer whose name, I am sure, will be next to Mozart, Bach in fifty or a hundred years. , Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Verdi.
And the perfect homage to this great composer and man was shot by the famous Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore in whose many films Morricone also composed music. Just remember a classic like “Cinema Paradiso” after which Morricone composed music for 12 more of his films. Tornatore began making a film about Morricone while Maestro was still alive (he died in July 2020 at the age of 92, and practically until the last moments of his life he did not stop composing. Morricone himself talks perhaps not so much about his life but about his vision music, ideas, the ways he composed certain compositions and how the scores for various films came about.
It’s absolutely amazing for which all of Morricone’s outstanding films he composed music and it would be pointless to list who he worked with. All of these films today would be completely unthinkable without Morricone’s music and the question is whether we would have considered these films to be so good without that perfect musical backdrop. Tornatore arranged this biographical documentary in a standard, narratively linear way, so we follow Morricone’s life story from childhood, early youth and growing up with his trumpet father and going to a music academy and composing beginnings. We see here that he was actually a modest and simple man, a genius who had a sense of guilt and inferiority practically all his life because the opinion was imposed that he “sold” himself by making commercial music and that he betrayed the ideals of classical music.
This film is unique and we learn from it how his composing process worked and how he constantly struggled with the contempt of his former fellow composers, classic purists who later paid tribute to him for everything he did. He managed to bring together the Tornators indeed all the then still living filmmakers Morricone worked with (some like Bernardo Bertolucci and Line Wertmüller died in the meantime) and who remember what it was like to work with the Maestro. Says one of them – working with Morricone was like winning a medal, and his greatness was that in addition to established authors, he often worked with young, then unknown filmmakers such as Bertolucci in the early 1960s. The fact that, for example, in 1969 he composed music for 21 films sounds completely incredible, and his whole life was amazing, filled with notes and music that he gave to all of humanity.
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