"Ennio Morricone is immortal!"

Benjamin Sire is a composer and journalist. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Printemps Républicain.

Asking a composer to give his impressions of Ennio Morricone after his death is a bit like asking a man of the Church to comment on the death of God. There is something sacrilegious in the process. Because Morricone is immortal, because until the end of time its notes will resonate in each of us, because cinema never dies when it touches the sublime, the divine. And if some take the priestly route after a revelation, many also are those who will have married the musical career for the audiovisual to walk awkwardly in the footsteps of the Italian master. This is the case with your servant.

In the collective imagination, when we talk about Morricone, it is not a question of talking about a single man, but also of the legendary couple he formed with Sergio Leone. Yet Morricone was much more than the melodic double of the director of Once Upon a Time in the West. We owe him so many unforgettable scores for the greatest: De Palma, Malick, Pasolini, Bertolucci and many others. But Sergio Leone, all the same.

Sergio Morricone, Ennio Leone, we no longer really know, as the two names marry or combine endlessly in the realm of film-coated emotion. And once again, as atheistic as we are, here we are, summoning the sacred more than chance by thinking that these two were put on the same road from adolescence to draw together a furrow of eternity. The same essential youthful encounter marked the careers of two other Argentinian giants of the same generation, Astor Piazzola and Lalo Schiffrin, at the time when the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau was playing genius incubators under the leadership of Nadia Boulanger. But as much as friends, these were competitors. Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone is something else, it's a fusion that produces sound images.

And each time we close our eyes in a cinematic incantation about them, the notes never come alone, as they are associated with precise sequences, so much they testify to the possible fusion of a scriptural gesture and a musical theme . Leone died 31 years ago and Morricone could be unfaithful to him for the best, but he never deceived this essential correlation between the meaning of a scene and the theme which illustrates it, which is so much lacking today, the hour when Marvel crushes mainstream cinema as much as it decreed the death of inevitable melodies. Because this is what separates the composer, contenting himself with highlighting what already appears on the screen, from the legend. The theme, the melody, that which remains engraved in the memory and associated with a film, without any form of dissociation being possible. Of course, a theme can be torn from its origin to be considered on other images. This was the case for the unforgettable “Chi Mai” who magnified the film Le Professionnel , with Jean-Paul Belmondo, later used by a famous brand of dog food. The publicity stunt paid off, but precisely because it was always considered that this was the music for the film by George Lautner.

So there are few composers who, more than producers of notes, assert themselves as part of the production of a work, when they are not the saviors. They all belong more or less to the same generation, those who saw them being born at the same time as talking cinema, which probably owes nothing to chance. We think of John Williams, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schiffrin (again), or their elder Bernard Herrmann. But also in France, to Georges Delerue, Vladimir Cosma or Maurice Jarre. This does not mean that subsequent generations would be devoid of this talent for embodiment which transforms music into an essential actor in a work, but simply that producers and directors no longer plan to ask them. The fear of risk, the search for unanimity, that of being robbed of the scope of their work, now encourages them to move the scores from the rank of heroine to that of secondary role, when it is not a question of figuration. In contrast, like the last resistant, John Williams, Ennio Morricone had this ability to violate the consent of the director and the studios to imprint his will on the narration. Better, he was called on the sets, mainly by Leone, to invest in the direction of actor through his notes to illuminate the emotions asked of the stars, proving once again, not without taking risks, the deep interweaving between his music and cinematic narration.

Read also: Ennio Morricone, "il Maestro"

But the risk was intrinsic to Morricone's approach. Whether it is a question of approaching music as a material inseparable from the image, even if it means encroaching on the sacrosanct work of the director, of marrying classical and contemporary approaches to composition to draw a unique material, integrate new instruments into its desks to produce singular timbres, all while weaving a special bond between the three biggest nations of cinema, Italy, America and France.

Because Ennio Morricone, although having delivered many autonomous orchestral scores, was not a composer, he was a little bit of cinema, one of those rare figures to get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame without being neither screen star, nor Tycoon, nor rock giant.