Ennio Morricone Dies At 91

The world has lost one of the giants in movie music scoring.

Variety reported:

Oscar winner Ennio Morricone, composer of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “The Mission” and among the most prolific and admired composers in film history, has died. He was 91. 

Morricone died early Monday in a Rome clinic, where he was taken shortly after suffering a fall that caused a hip fracture, his lawyer Giorgio Asumma told Italian news agency ANSA. 

Shortly after Morricone’s death was confirmed, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tweeted: “We will always remember, with infinite gratitude, the artistic genius of the Maestro #EnnioMorricone. It made us dream, feel excited, reflect, writing memorable notes that will remain indelible in the history of music and cinema.” 

The Italian maestro’s estimated 500 scores for films and television, composed over more than 50 years, are believed to constitute a record in Western cinema for sheer quantity of music. 

At least a dozen of them became film-score classics, from the so-called spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” to the widely acclaimed “The Mission” and “Cinema Paradiso” of the 1980s.

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