A Fistful of Movie Scores

Ennio Morricone, the Film Composer, Celebrated

By ROBERT ITO

The film composer Ennio Morricone.

Much has been made of the prodigious musical output of Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer whose scores have accompanied six decades’ worth of films, from spaghetti westerns like “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to several pictures starring Robert De Niro, like “The Untouchables” and “The Mission.” When asked to pick a favorite among the bunch, he refused, falling back on that old chestnut about them all being his children, so how could he pick just one?

It’s a compelling image. As the self-described sire of more than 450 film scores, Mr. Morricone is not only one of the most fertile of composers, the musical equivalent of an Old Testament patriarch. He’s also among the most polygamous, working with a Who’s Who of directors that includes Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Terrence Malick and Brian De Palma.

On Thursday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents The Music of Morricone, a celebration of his work. The three-day program will include screenings of the 1986 film “The Mission,” for which Mr. Morricone received an Academy Award nomination for original score, and “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), which was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2009.

The festival was intended to run in conjunction with a concert conducted by Mr. Morricone at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, one leg of a world tour celebrating his 85th birthday in November. But that performance was delayed last week because he injured his back; a trip to the podium at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, which was to be his first in that city, also had to be postponed. (The performances are now scheduled for June.)

It’s one of those weird twists of fate that Mr. Morricone, who has supplied the music for dozens of Hollywood movies, has never actually performed in Hollywood, the town that has awarded him two Golden Globes, five Oscar nominations and an honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.”

Sometime in the early 1960s, Mr. Morricone gave up the trumpet of his youth to focus solely on writing music. His oeuvre covers soaring, string-filled compositions (“Cinema Paradiso,” “Days of Heaven”) as well as the instantly identifiable pieces he created for Leone films, now classics. Those genre-bending scores included sounds like train whistles and church bells, electric guitars and jew’s-harps. After so long in the business, is all of this still fun? “Composing music is the one job I chose to do, and it’s what I love the most,” he said. “So I have fun, yes. But I also suffer.”

“The Untouchables,” with Sean Connery, left, and Kevin Costner.

Called the “conjurer of the beautiful” by the film critic Anthony Lane, Mr. Morricone spoke about his favorite performances and scenes and his accompaniments for them by telephone from his palazzo in Rome. At times, he exhibited humility bordering on the absurd, brushing off questions about his contributions to the world of film music and claiming that a score’s worth as a piece of art is really up to the director, not him. At other moments there were the flashes of hubris one might expect from a man who’s written some of the most memorable scores in film history.

“I think I would have been a fantastic director,” he said, although he claimed that the idea of doing so never occurred to him. “I’m good at everything I do.”

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, directed by Sergio Leone (1966). Its plaintive “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah” is one of cinema’s most recognized five-note patterns, while “The Ecstasy of Gold,” which plays during the climactic graveyard scene, has been repurposed by musicians from Metallica to the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Mr. Morricone, however, won’t speculate on the reasons for the soundtrack’s longevity. “You should ask other people this,” he said, “not me.” Prodded, he’ll point to its use of decidedly nonorchestral “instruments” (coyote howls, whip cracks) as one possibility, a practice that began with “A Fistful of Dollars” and helped revolutionize the western soundtrack. “When you’re working, you don’t think that you’re doing a revolution; you’re just thinking that you have to complete the task. You’re just trying to do your best. If we managed to do this, then I’m very happy.” 

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, directed by Sergio Leone (1968). The soundtrack features the harmonica stylings of Charles Bronson and a haunting main theme, but the first 11 minutes are devoid of music, at least of the conventional sort. Birds chirp. A windmill creaks. A fly buzzes. For 11 minutes. “I had a concert in Florence in which the sounds of reality, let’s call them, were applied onto a different context and acquired a totally different meaning,” Mr. Morricone recalled. “I told this to Leone, and he actually used the idea.” The film includes fine performances by Henry Fonda (Mr. Morricone said he enjoyed Fonda’s against-type casting as the tobacco-chewing, child-murdering Frank) and Jason Robards, but his favorite scene was an almost wordless performance, near the beginning, by the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale. “She gets off the train, and she has to go to her wedding, but it’s a wedding which is never going to be. It’s a very important scene, and a homage to the scenery and to the valley itself.”

“Once Upon a Time in America,” with Elizabeth McGovern and Robert De Niro.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, directed by Sergio Leone (1984). Despite the film’s strong cast (Robert De Niro, James Woods), Mr. Morricone was most impressed by the child actors who played the lead characters when they were kids. He also admired Elizabeth McGovern’s performance (“a wonderful actress”) and the film’s central theme of all-consuming guilt. “Without that, there would have been no movie,” he said.

The film was in production for so long that Mr. Morricone ended up writing most of the music before a single scene was shot. In some cases, Leone played the music for the actors on the set to help them get into character. By the time the film made it to American screens (about 2 hours 10 minutes shorter than the original, uncut version), Leone had been plotting and preparing the film for nearly two decades.
“I didn’t mind the wait,” Mr. Morricone said. “I compose music for a film, and that’s the important thing. When I’m finished writing it, whatever happens, happens. I don’t even think about it.”

THE UNTOUCHABLES, directed by Brian De Palma (1987). The composer said he enjoyed Mr. De Niro’s “dramatically comic” take on Al Capone in this factually squishy retelling of that mobster’s takedown by Eliot Ness. In the film, Capone takes a baseball bat to the noggin of an employee who doesn’t put team first, and scenes like that didn’t put off Mr. Morricone. “He killed people in a very spectacular way,” he said.

Mr. De Palma had already finished the film when he showed a cut to Mr. Morricone, asking him specifically to come up with something for the “triumph of the police” at the end. The two got on well, but the director originally wasn’t keen on the music Mr. Morricone created for one of the film’s best-known scenes, a two-minute sequence in which a baby carriage, complete with a sweet-faced child, rolls down the steps of Union Station in Chicago in the middle of a heated gun battle.

“He didn’t want that music,” Mr. Morricone recalled. “Later he gave an interview and said that he thought that the music for that scene was perfect, so he must have rethought the whole idea.”

Philippe Noiret, top, and Salvatore Cascio in “Cinema Paradiso,” with a Morricone score.

CINEMA PARADISO, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (1988). Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, “Cinema Paradiso” was the first collaboration between Mr. Morricone and Mr. Tornatore, who would go on to work together on “Malèna” and several other films. “At the very beginning, we just had the normal relationship between a composer and a director,” Mr. Morricone said. “But then the mutual esteem we had toward each other just grew, and we became friends.” The composer’s favorite scene is the montage of famous film kisses (from “His Girl Friday” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” among others) culled by the town’s overzealous priest cum film censor and reassembled by Alfredo, the Paradiso’s projectionist. “The music that you hear in that scene is used earlier in the film, when the young man falls in love with the girl,” Mr. Morricone said. “It’s my favorite scene and the climax of the film. It’s very beautiful and a pure homage to cinema itself.”