The Oscar-winning prodigy film composer Ennio Morricone has passed away at the age of 91, according to his lawyer just hours ago.
He had recently broken his femur and had been hospitalized in a hospital in Rome, where his conditions apparently worsened, according to his lawyer Giorgio Assumma. According to Assumma, the Maestro wanted a quiet and private funeral for his last farewell from Earth.
Ennio Morricone was made famous internationally starting with him meeting Sergio Leone in 1964, who was a pioneer of the sub-genre “Spaghetti Western” that was a revival of the old American Western stories and recreated by Italian directors and their imaginations.
Most notable in his works with Leone was the usage of various Western sound effects, replacing the orchestra in a somewhat budget-wise limited environment for a full orchestral sound.point 266 |
This created the very air that Leone was looking for in his new endeavors in the film industry.point 78 | Morricone’s addition soon proved pivotal for the director, starting with the Dollars Trilogy, Morricone’s breakout scores were from Once Upon a Time in the West which garnered 10 million copies in total, with France consuming one tenth of that amount, making him famous within Europe.point 330 | 1
With his prime years with Italian cinematic directors such as Dario Argento fading, he looked for other venues as well, Polish and French directors mostly. When his works became known in Hollywood, directors starting with John Huston started to be fascinated and invited him to work on their scores.
This expanded to Roland Joffé in The Mission, with the famous piece Nella Fantasia. This particular score ranked number 1 in the list for the greatest film scores in the past century in Variety’s pol and 23rd in AFI’s list of 25 greatest film scores of all time. Also he collaborated with Brian De Palma in The Untouchables, Casualties of War and Mission to Mars.
The more modern compilation, and most familiar to those around the world now would be his work in tandem with the film noir director Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill: Volume 1, amongst many others.
One of the funny things is that he never left Rome to partake in production of his music scores, and that he never insisted on learning languages other than his own tongue.
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