Don’t Want to Disturb

“I, Ennio Morricone, am dead. So I announce it to all the friends who have always been close to me and also to those who are a little far away and I greet them with great affection. There is only one reason that prompts me to greet everyone like this and to have a funeral in private form: I don’t want to disturb.”

These are the words of Ennio Morricone. Words that the great composer, who died last night at around 2.20, wanted to write in black and white. Ennio Morricone’s autograph obituary was enunciated by his lawyer, and family friend, Giorgio Assumma, to the reporters flocked to the entrance of the Biomedical Campus where the Maestro had been hospitalized following the fracture of a femur, and where he expired at the age of 91 due to post-operative complications.

The head of orthopedics at the Campus in Rome, Vincenzo Denaro, told the last days of the musician and composer: “He’s been lucid and present until the end. I spoke to him yesterday morning, he expected his death and planned his funeral in detail, he didn’t want any advertising.”

A final demonstration of how the Maestro approached life with lightness and delicacy, by describing and telling it with music, but without ever raising his voice.

Ennio Morricone’s scores go hand-in-hand with the idea of the Western film. Often considered the world’s greatest living film composer, and most widely known for his innovative scores to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — which is considered one of the most influential soundtracks in history and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame — and the other Sergio Leone’s movies — from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon a Time in America —, The Mission, Cinema Paradiso or Lolita by Adrian Lyne, Morricone has spent the past 60 years reinventing the sound of cinema through his 400 scores as well as over 100 classical works. His filmography includes over 70 award-winning films, and he personally received an Academy Honorary Award in 2007 and won an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2016, for The Hateful Eight by Quentin Tarantino.

Morricone never missed an opportunity to remember his friend Sergio Leone, but he rarely remembered their first meeting in the classroom, in Rome. Their friendship is much older than their film careers: they attended elementary schools together before taking different paths, to finally find themselves in 1964, on the occasion of A Fistful of Dollars, when one of the most profitable and important partnerships in the cinema history was born.