Ennio Morricone

An Italian conductor and composer, Morricone is perhaps best known for the scores he has composed for movie soundtracks with a friend of his, the great “spaghetti western” director Sergio Leone (1929-1989). Morricone scored each of Leone’s best-known films, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). As Christopher Frayling, a scholarly student of pop culture has written: these scores are not on one level especially original, “one can often recognize phrases from other Western themes, or from popular tunes of the moment,” but Morricone turned them into an “extraordinarily appropriate” whole. His work for the 1986 movie, The Mission, (1986) includes the haunting instrumental composition “Gabriel’s Oboe.” Classically trained vocalist Sarah Brightman in 1999 put words to “Gabriel’s Oboe” and released it as “Nella Fantasia.” Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, and one Academy Award (Oscar). That latter came in 2007, as recognition of lifetime achievement.