He was a short, wiry man, not overly talkative but precise in his speech. He spent his long existence with his teenage girlfriend. Nothing in the way he looks or the way he narrates his work gives away that it was amazing, he smiles just enough and doesn’t show much of a sense of humor either. His father, a trumpeter, assured him in his childhood that this instrument fed the family and that he had a duty to follow this food tradition. This man, who cared so little about glamor, limited himself to creating extraordinary music without haste and without rest. For the cinema. Illustrate and enhance the images, powerfully accompany the stories, tell you what the characters felt, change the viewer’s sensitivity, embed these sounds in their memory, become a classic. His name was Ennio Morricone. The movies (whether they are masterpieces, good, mediocre, or bad) owe this man an unpayable debt. Morricone is rightly included in this list of unforgettable musicians who put their creativity, their inspiration, their heterodoxy at the service of the dream factory. The greatest, for my taste, were Bernard Herman, Miklos Rozsa, Henri Mancini, John Williams and Ennio Morricone.
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Giuseppe Tornatore may be an erratic director (he abuses sweets, the feigned lyricism sometimes turns into sentimentality), but there’s one film of his that moves me every time I visit it, and it’s The Best Offer, even though it is also deeply grateful is Mann and who has not lost the ability to admire the talent of others. He demonstrates it in his beautiful documentary Ennio: El Maestro. Tornatore has not forgotten that the emotions felt by a mass audience at the sight of his film, Cinema Paradiso, owed a transcendent share to the beautiful score Morricone composed for it. Tornatore gives him his sincere appreciation through the testimonies of many famous people who have worked with him or who have closely followed his work. Nobody complains. And his praise seems sincere. From famous musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Pat Metheny and Quincy Jones to filmmakers like Bertolucci, Eastwood, Tarantino and Leone. Everyone agrees that this music not only served the films, but also remained engraved in the feelings of the listeners. It was catchy in the best sense of the word, but never easy. It was also deep, changing, original, overflowing, intimate, choral and capable of touching the guts of the recipients.
Knowing his trumpet would never sound like Miles Davis or Chet Baker, the young Morricone passionately studied classical and contemporary music. His bright future, according to his teachers, was there. But the cinema and he fell in love. And it must have made him very rich and popular. There was a suspicion or certainty among purists that Morricone’s art would have been more transcendent and respectable had he followed the original path, that he could have become the new Stravinsky, but that he would have chosen something more comfortable and profitable. I don’t know if his classical music compositions would have lasted forever, but I’m sure I will listen to his soundtracks again and again with absolute delight. I don’t like Sergio Leone’s westerns, I think he revolutionized the genre for the worse. But I love the tragedy he tells in Once Upon a Time in America. I’m also moved by The Mission directed by Roland Joffe. And I can’t imagine them without the wonderful music that Ennio Morricone instilled in them.
Enny: the teacher
Direction: Giuseppe Tornatore.
Gender: Documentation. Italy, 2021.
Duration: 156 minutes.
Premiere: May 13.
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