The Maestro, Ennio Morricone, interviewed: ‘I am a real composer’

Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian film composer, has died at the age of 91. Here, Richard Bratby spoke to the ‘Maestro’.

Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks”’, explain the printed interview guidelines. ‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Composers do not use the piano to compose music with, they write their music down directly in musical notes without the interference of any musical instrument.’ Well, that’s Beethoven told. In the classical music world, you hear tales about ‘riders’, the Spinal Tap-like lists of minimum requirements that pop stars issue before consenting to walk among mortal men. You don’t tend to encounter them, though. In the UK, eminent conductors are addressed as ‘Simon’ or ‘Andris’. Morricone? ‘Maestro will do,’ writes his management.

But why pretend otherwise? At 89, Morricone is a pop-cultural phenomenon, whose music for more than 500 films including The Mission, A Fistful of Dollars and Cinema Paradiso props up every movie compilation CD you’ve ever seen discounted at Tesco, and whose 1960s scores for Sergio Leone’s psychological westerns (‘Try to avoid the term “Spaghetti Westerns”,’ caution the guidelines. ‘Italians consider it an insulting description’) remain so influential that merely humming two bars of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is enough to bring an entire genre to dusty, sweaty imaginative life. If his staff treat him like a pop star, it’s because for media purposes he is one.

He didn’t start that way, though. It’s relatively rare now to hear him talk about his studies in the 1940s under the Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi — a serious figure of neoclassical leanings, who taught a flotilla of postwar modernists.