Ennio Morricone

Music and cinema have formed, since the earliest days of silent film (what would Charlie Chaplin's masterpieces be without their soundtracks?), an indissoluble pairing, one in which it is hard to establish how much each component gives to the other, and vice versa. In the now century-old history of cinema, there have been various partnerships that created an artistic surplus, where the value of the finished work proved decidedly greater than the sum of its two parts. We might think of the collaborations between Werner Herzog and Popol Vuh, between Stanley Kubrick and Wendy Carlos, between Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, perhaps even the more recent pairing of Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer. But surely the most celebrated, or at least the most popular, artistic symbiosis - one that was born, of all places, at school desks - remains that between Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone.

Born in fascist Italy, Morricone and Leone saw their creativity explode during Italy's golden years, those of the economic boom. Both are the sons of artists, but Leone had the chance to enter the world of cinema through the front door thanks to his father, who allowed him to come into contact with the greatest directors of Italian neorealism. For Morricone, on the other hand, the path was decidedly steeper. He studied trumpet and composition at the Conservatory and, despite financial hardship, completed his studies in 1960.

It wouldn't be long before his career diverged sharply from academia: in 1962 he arranged enormously successful songs by Italian Sixties artists, including "Pinne fucile ed occhiali" and "Abbronzatissima" by Edoardo Vianello, "Sapore di sale" by Gino Paoli, and above all composed and arranged "Se telefonando", sung by Mina. While this choice may not have met with the approval of his composition teacher, Goffredo Petrassi, it simultaneously allowed Morricone to gain considerable popularity, which would open the doors to a career in film music.

The golden duo came together in 1964. Sergio Leone, who as already mentioned had trained in neorealist cinema, had a great passion for American cinema, particularly the westerns of John Ford, and for Japanese cinema, starting with the dramatic films of Akira Kurosawa, above all "Seven Samurai", a masterpiece that in various respects can be likened to a western set in 16th-century Japan.

The "Dollars Trilogy" - made up of "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), "For a Few Dollars More" (1965) and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966) - is nothing less than an attempt to bring together the vast American landscapes of John Ford with the epic tragedies of Akira Kurosawa. The result of the union between music and cinema forged by Morricone and Leone is something utterly new compared to the classic American films of the genre and the first Italian spaghetti westerns. We are faced with a new world, both visual and sonic, one that would be plundered by countless generations of musicians and directors to come.

While the earliest soundtracks are marked by a reduced orchestral presence, this would grow ever more prominent, first with "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" ("The Ecstasy of Gold"), and then precisely with "Once Upon a Time in the West", which can be seen as the artistic summa of an extraordinarily creative period for the Morricone/Leone duo.

Morricone, as always with Leone, composed the music before the film was shot. He knew the screenplay and followed the director's instructions: write simple music, obviously tonal, with few notes that the audience could easily remember, pushing the symphonic epic to its fullest, to accompany the now extremely dilated pacing of the new film.

The first twenty-five minutes of the film are legendary. In the first half there is no music, no dialogue (barring a handful of words). Only wind, the sound of footsteps, the cawing of crows, the creaking of a turning windmill, the buzzing of flies, drops of water falling into a hat, the cracking of knuckles, the ticking of a telegraph, the arrival of a train at the station. We are faced with a grand symphony of noise, a colossal work of musique concrète. Around the twelfth minute, the music tiptoes in with "L'uomo", a backdrop of alien strings immediately interrupted by a volley of gunshots.

The noises start up again and the scene shifts to the home of a family of Irish immigrants. The images are so powerful that the film feels, for a moment, as though it could do without music altogether. But that impression collapses the instant the electric guitar of "Man with a Harmonica" cuts in, entering at the very moment of the harrowing close-up on the Irish child (the next sacrificial lamb). The music accompanies the entrance of Henry Fonda, here cast against type as the absolute villain, making his appearance alongside four other outlaws as though they were the horsemen of the apocalypse. Leone manages to shoot the most violent scene the western genre could ever have imagined, but it's thanks to the union with Morricone's orchestration that the images become extraordinarily evocative and powerful, elevating Leone's tragic epic of the West to something sublime.

But Leone and Morricone know that behind the violence of a nation's birth also lies its romantic side, magnificently underscored in the theme "Jill's America," an epiphany of a city, a metaphor for the dawning of a new world and a mournful swan song for the old West. Jill is the unforgettable female lead, played by Claudia Cardinale at the very height of her radiance.

Harmonica, trumpet, guitar and female voices, long the trademark of early Morricone, elevate legendary pieces, chiseled with meticulous care and ingeniously disorienting effects. As in "Harmonica," where the four notes written by Morricone are performed by Franco De Gemini on a chromatic harmonica in B-flat, run through a slight reverb to give it a faintly ghostly quality. In "Man with a Harmonica," by contrast, the distorted, abrasive bursts of the wind instrument played by the mysterious gunslinger are joined by the unsettling, menacing riffs of an electric guitar, along with a solemn choir in the distance.

While it's above all "Farewell to Cheyenne" that preserves the link to the eccentric melodies of the Dollars Trilogy, with a playfully whistled tune combined with the mechanical, obsessive cadence of a horse's hooves, in "Cheyenne" it's the notes of a banjo that introduce the character of the same name, a kind of romantic wandering knight.

Even the taste for grotesque distortion — typical of other Morricone scores — is kept to a minimum here, resurfacing only occasionally, for instance in the lopsided theme of "La Posada No. 1," in the obligatory saloon episode ("L'orchestraccia"), or in the guitar distortions of "Man with a Harmonica."

But towering above everything is the colossal title track, perhaps the finest melody of Morricone's entire career, which also recurs at other points in the film, for instance in "A Bed Too Big." Built on a deceptively simple opening melody, in just three minutes it ranges from the bare simplicity of a music-box tune to an anguished lyrical song: it's the elegance of a handful of harpsichord notes that ushers in the wordless vocalizing of the extraordinary soprano Edda Dell'Orso, sensuous, melancholy phrases that, in the film, accompany the on-screen appearance of Jill/Claudia Cardinale, instilling a poignant sense of epic grandeur, as deep and boundless as the stretches of the American Frontier. Then, the entrance of a few trumpet notes heralds a symphonic finale that has become one of the soundtracks of a century, the quintessential film score in the history of cinema.

In a handful of notes and flashes of genius, Ennio Morricone captures the eternity of the Far West, revealing to the world a poetic sensibility that transfigures the violence of reality and landscape into a sublime, richly imaginative sonic fabric. His partnership with Sergio Leone, arguably at its peak here, would return to serve the western genre three years later in "Duck, You Sucker" (with its own epic title theme), before finally sealing the Roman director's memorable farewell in 1984 with "Once Upon a Time in America." But it would take until 2016 for one of his scores to be honored with an Oscar, for the music composed for Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight."

(Contributions by Claudio Fabretti)

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08/12/2024