"He [Benedict] should correct it with much more firmness."

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Mary C. Weaver

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Sep 12, 2009, 11:14:19 PM9/12/09

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"He [Benedict] should correct it with much more firmness."

Ennio Morricone: Faith Always Present In My Music

Composer Talks About the Spirituality Behind His Work

By Edward Pentin

ROME, SEPT. 10, 2009 (Zenit.org).- You may not recognize his name, but you will almost certainly be familiar with his music.

Maestro Ennio Morricone is widely regarded as one of Hollywood's finest film score composers. Best known for the memorable and moody soundtracks to the "Spaghetti Westerns" of the 1960s, such as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "A Fistful of Dollars," and "Once Upon a Time in the West," to many Catholics he is perhaps best loved for his moving score in "The Mission," a 1986 film about Jesuit missionaries in 18th-century South America.

But his contribution to the movie industry extends far beyond his most famous works, having scored around 450 films and worked with Hollywood’s leading directors, from Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci to Brian De Palma and Roman Polanski.

And at 80, he’s still going strong. The legendary composer has just completed the soundtrack to Giuseppe Tornatore’s "Baaria," an Italian picture which opened this year’s Venice Film Festival, while Quentin Tarantino invited him to write the score for his latest film, "Inglourious Basterds" (scheduling difficulties prevented Morricone from doing so, but he allowed Tarantino to use clips of his previous work in the film instead).

The renowned Italian composer also continues to pick up highly prestigious awards: earlier this year, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, appointed him to the rank of Knight in the Order of the Legion of Honor -- the country’s highest honour. That’s in addition to a lengthy list of other major awards including an Honorary Academy Award, five Oscar Nominations, five Baftas, and a Grammy.

Yet Maestro Morricone, who was born in Rome, prefers to keep out of the limelight and rarely gives interviews. So it came as a surprise when he kindly agreed to make an exception one August morning, and invited me to his central Rome apartment to talk principally about his faith and his music.

His home is much as you would expect: An immaculate black grand piano sits beside the window of a grand and tastefully decorated sitting room, artistically lined with murals, classical paintings and mahogany panels. But Morricone, who has a wife and four grown up children, is a humble man without airs, and he responds to questions in typically Roman fashion: directly and to the point.

Inspiration

I begin by asking him if his music, which many consider very spiritual, is inspired by his faith. Although he describes himself as a "man of faith," he takes a very professional yet simple view of his work and says his faith doesn't inspire him in most of his writing. If the movie is not about religion, he won’t think about God and the Church, he says. "I think of th...