Biography ennio morricone music film

As Bernard Herrmann is to Hitchcock, Nino Rota to Fellini, John Barry to James Bond and John Williams to Spielberg, Ennio Morricone is to Sergio Leone. It is impossible to recall Leone’s films in the mind’s eye or ear – from A Fistful of Dollars (1964) via The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) to the very different Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – without Morricone’s music.

So close was the creative partnership of composer and director that Leone once described it as “a marriage like Catholics used to be married before the divorce laws”.

Morricone returned the complement by saying, “Leone wanted more from music than other directors – he always gave it more space”. The resulting films were mythical melodramas, with Morricone supplying the melo.

From the early whipcracks, bells, whistles, Italian folk instruments, incomprehensible lyrics and Fender Stratocaster riffs – which may have been distant spin-offs from Morricone’s research