Ennio: The Maestro ★★★★
(M) 156 minutes
At one point in Giuseppe Tornatore’s biographical documentary about him, Ennio Morricone raises his head and gives forth with his version of a coyote call.
This primitive howl sounds particularly odd coming from the mild, scholarly man on the screen, seated at an antique desk in his penthouse apartment in a Roman palazzo. Yet it eloquently points up the contrasting colours of Morricone’s extraordinary career.
Composer Ennio Morricone.
He was a classically trained composer with plans to become a conductor when the film director, Sergio Leone, a former schoolmate, asked him to write the music for a Western he was making. To illustrate the mood he had in mind, Leone took Morricone to see Akira Kurosawa’s highly operatic samurai film, Yojimbo, and his resulting score was such a spectacular success that he went on to write for all Leone’s films.
For Morricone, this was a mixed blessing. In the years to come, his reputation was to become so firmly attached to the label, “spaghetti Western” that many of his fans didn’t know that he could do anything else. Worse, some of his closest contemporaries decided that he had squandered his talent by devoting it to an inferior art form.
This put-down was to go on bothering Morricone for years, yet film music gave him such satisfaction that he couldn’t give it up. In the wide-ranging interview he did with Tornatore before his death two years ago, he says: “When I started in 1961, I said I’ll quit in 1970. In 1970, I said I’ll quit in 1980 … Now I don’t say anything.”
He wrote more than a hundred classical compositions, but most of his musical experiments were on film. The coyote call went into the score for Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He explored the use of dissonance in writing for Marco Bellocchio’s 1964 film debut, Fists in the Pocket, quoted Bach in his score for For a Few Dollars More and used pan pipes and percussion for Roland Joffe’s The Mission.
One thing remained the same, however. He always aimed to write in counterpoint to what was happening on the screen.
When he first saw Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, he says he thought it so beautiful that it didn’t need his music.
Ennio Morricone was a classically trained composer.
Then he had an idea for the score and changed his mind, a decision which led to a long and fruitful collaboration between him and the director.
Tornatore’s film is too long and the hyperbole can be overwhelming. Quentin Tarantino goes way over the top by putting Morricone alongside Mozart and Beethoven and his fellow film composers, Hans Zimmer and Mychael Danna and John Williams seem to be competing one another with the warmth of their accolades. But the film does take you deep into the mind and imagination of an astonishingly audacious music-maker.
Ennio: The Maestro is in cinemas on December 8
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