Ennio Morricone Passes Away
The legendary composer Ennio Morricone passed away on July 6 2020 in a hospital due to a serious illness. He left behind soundtracks to over four hundred works. He was 91 years old.
It's hard to define the concept of genius, especially since we happen to abuse it heavily these days. However, it fits Ennio Morricone to a T - the man whose music set the tone for the development of world cinema. The artist passed away this morning in the hospital where he was staying due to his serious illness.
He was active as a composer and conductor and worked extremely intensively. The fruit of his creativity encompasses more than 400 original soundtracks with a whole host of legendary musical themes. The artist has been appreciated by the film world since the very beginning of his career, but the most important prize in the form of an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement was awarded to him only in 2007.
At the beginning of his professional career, Morricone created mainly in Italy, where he was born. He always showed great talent and musical sense, but the world appreciated him for the first time only thanks to the Dollars trilogy (For a Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) directed by Sergio Leone. The experimental pieces perfectly fit the specific atmosphere of spaghetti westerns. The culmination of this collaboration was an iconic masterpiece - Once Upon a Time in the West.
The composer was constantly challenging himself and did not want to limit himself to creating in one genre. Morricone's adventure with John Carpenter's horror film, The Thing The main musical theme was dominated by horror and style of the eighties.
Gangster cinema also gave many opportunities for the Italian virtuoso to show off his talents. He returned to work with Sergio Leone on Once Upon a Time in America, and also helped Brian de Palma to create The Untouchables. In opposition to this dirty, street-like, yet sophisticated music, he created the sentimentalism and tenderness associated with one of the most important Italian films of the 20th century, titled Cinema Paradiso.
Morricone's last really great project was Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight - an anti-western with snow and blood in the lead role, a flagship example of the capabilities of contemporary cinema. The composer proved here that despite his age, he perfectly understands the nature of the 10th muse. It is for this film that he received his only Oscar in the category "best original music". Ennio Morricone lived for 91 years, but his artistic output has been written into people's hearts forever.
