Ennio Morricone
1928 – 2020 · Italy
Known for: Italian composer of more than 400 film scores, from Sergio Leone's westerns to The Mission
“The music stayed long after the pictures had gone.”
Biography
Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on 10 November 1928, the son of Mario Morricone, a professional trumpeter, and Libera Ridolfi, who ran a small textile business, and he grew up in Trastevere. His father taught him to read music and to play several instruments, and among his schoolfellows was Sergio Leone, with whom he would work three decades later. He entered the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in 1940, at twelve, and completed a four year harmony course in six months. He took his trumpet diploma in 1946 and studied composition under Goffredo Petrassi, finishing with a composition diploma in 1954. In those years he played trumpet in jazz bands and arranged popular songs to help support the family.
Morricone began as an arranger, worked for RCA Victor and from 1955 wrote uncredited music for film and theatre; he was engaged by the broadcaster RAI in 1958 and left on his first day, having learned that the company forbade the broadcasting of music written by its own employees. From the early 1960s he scored every film Sergio Leone made from A Fistful of Dollars onward, and the music he wrote for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966, with its whistles, voices, electric guitar and the surge of The Ecstasy of Gold, changed what a film score was allowed to sound like; it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. The score for Once Upon a Time in the West sold an estimated ten million copies. He belonged to the experimental collective Il Gruppo from 1966 to 1980, co-founded the Roman studio Forum Music Village in 1969 and never stopped writing concert music, more than a hundred works in all, alongside more than four hundred scores for cinema and television, among them The Battle of Algiers, Days of Heaven, The Thing, The Mission and every film by Giuseppe Tornatore from Cinema Paradiso on.
He worked from Rome rather than move to Hollywood, and Hollywood came to him: Brian De Palma, John Carpenter, Warren Beatty and Quentin Tarantino were among the directors he served. Nominated for the Academy Award for best original score for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy and Malèna without winning, he received the Academy Honorary Award in 2007 and a competitive Oscar at last in 2016, for The Hateful Eight. Morricone died in Rome on 6 July 2020, at the age of ninety-one, after a fall in which he broke his femur. Partenope, the opera commissioned from him in 1995, was first staged in December 2025.