The maestro

‘Had I not become a composer, I would have wanted to be a chess player, but a high-level one, someone competing for the world title.’ So said Ennio Morricone, who died earlier this month at the age of 91. Looking back on a lifetime of work, you don’t doubt that he could have done it. The Italian ‘maestro’ was best known for his transcendent film scores; the coyote howl theme from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, came to symbolise the Italian Western genre.

Less well-known is that Morricone composed ‘Inno degli scacchisti’ (‘Chess players’ anthem’) for the Turin Olympiad in 2006. He was, in fact, a keen chess player, who picked up the game as a boy, but dropped it when it began to interfere with his music studies. Returning to the game in adulthood, he studied with Stefano Tatai, who went on to become a 12-time Italian champion. Morricone recalled games against Kasparov, Karpov, Polgar and Leko, and he even managed to draw a game against Boris Spassky.

In 2016, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight. The music for the opening scene is laden with menace, played as the camera zooms out from a giant crucifix which stands alone in the snow. In an interview with the Paris Review last year, Morricone mused that ‘as I went through the script, I recognised the tension that silently grows among the characters, and I thought of that like the feelings one develops over the course of a chess game… this game is dominated by a spasmodic and silent tension.’ Like Minnie’s Haberdashery, the cabin in the Wyoming wilderness where the plot unfolds, the chessboard is a small but fateful place.