It's May 15, and Italy's new president, 80-year-old Giorgio Napolitano, is being sworn in. A procession of liveried soldiers march outside Quirinale Palace and 21 cannons are shot from Gianicolo Hill to herald the president's arrival. A few hundred meters away at the chic Piazza Venezia, a ceremony of a different kind is taking place involving another, equally decorated 80-year-old: Ennio Morricone, the godfather of film music, is preparing to be interviewed.
"He can be quite grumpy," says the genial translator a little nervously as we wait in the cobbled courtyard of Morricone's building to be summoned by the maestro. "Once I translated for an American journalist who kept asking him about the Sergio Leone films.
"Morricone told me that if she asked him about Leone one more time, he was leaving."
This is not the first time I've been warned about the "Leone question." Morricone has written scores for more than 400 films since receiving his first commission in 1962, but his name will forever be linked with the haunting whistles, ticking pocket-watches and gloriously foreboding orchestral sweeps that give 1960s westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly their mood and tension. Apparently he's not too happy about this. And he finds the common term for Leone's Italian-made recreations of the American west deeply offensive. I've been told that should I in any way connect the word "spaghetti" with "western," I might find a plate of the stuff tipped over my head.
Finally, we are summoned to Morricone's apartment. Huge double doors open on to a gilded palace of a flat. The flat is so immaculate -- even the stack of art books on the coffee table is in perfect geometric alignment -- it is hard to tell if it is actually inhabited or merely a showpiece for Roman living. But sitting in one of the sofas, looking like a modern-day emperor, is Morricone. He doesn't exactly smile, but he does not look hostile either. I try to butter him up by mentioning an obscure film called Stark System that he scored. He groans.
"I can't remember anything about it," he says, "except that the director was a woman." Further questions about little-known movies bring recollections of "a beautiful woman" whose "private parts" were featured in close-up, and "a stunning woman who was at least 1.80m tall." If nothing else, Morricone's career has brought him into contact with a lot of women.
Morricone's stubborn clarity of vision, combined with a rigorous training and an open mind, has put him in a class of his own among soundtrack composers. Born into a musical family in 1926 and educated at the Conservatory of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, Morricone began working in film music by chance. "Once I finished my studies, I played trumpet with a small band just when the war had finished, a very bad time in our history," he says. "We used to play for American and British armies and I didn't like that -- I didn't enjoy playing other people's music, and if I hadn't worked in film I would have been a composer of free music. But a director called me, so I started writing scores. I have never once gone to a director and offered him ideas; they have always come to me."
Sergio Leone, a former school friend, came to Morricone when he needed music for his first film in 1964. Reasoning that not asking Morricone about A Fistful of Dollars would be like not asking Frank Sinatra about My Way, I promise to keep my questions about his Leone scores to a minimum, and ask how he came up with the brooding score.
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