Ennio Morricone: The Lyrical Assassin at 5 a.m.

It is not so much that Ennio Morricone has lost count. He just never kept one. By rough reckoning, he has upwards of 130 original scores for film and television to his credit. This total does not include his various chamber and orchestral compositions, nor does it tally all the musical arranging he did for records, radio and the theater. But whatever the vagaries of the composer's archival arithmetic, there is no doubt that he has written scores for many films that count heavily in contemporary history.

In all these collaborations, in which Morricone reflects and expands on each director's distinctive style, music and image are indivisibly wedded. Remember a movie, and you can hear its music too. There have been five for Bernardo Bertolucci, including the ravishing 1900. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Burn!, brimming with political conscience and passion. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, a witchy reverie of evil and redemption. Terrence Malick's edgy elegy to heartsick heartland America, Days of Heaven, took on the resonance of some dark folk ballad. And all Sergio Leone's pop-folk epics, from A Fistful of Dollars to Once upon a Time in America, have had their mythic dimensions deepened by Morricone themes. The music and the filmmaking are reciprocal: each makes the other indelible.

Now, at 58, Morricone has been nominated a second time for an Oscar (the first was for Days of Heaven). His score for The Mission, a large-scale parable of clericalism and colonialism in 18th century South America, is one of the loveliest he has ever done. The composer concedes, "This music represents me nearly completely." Says Leone: "It's practically like a sung mass." Morricone's mother, who is 83, has a slightly different perspective. "These Americans!" she said when Morricone's wife Maria called with the nomination news. "It is four or five years that they should have given him the Oscar! Let's hope that this is the right time, the real time."

Morricone nearly did not make the time for The Mission at all. After Director Roland Joffe screened the film for him, the composer announced that he would not do the music. "It was so beautiful without it," he explains. "But everyone insisted and begged me to write." Now, whenever Morricone suffers an occasional twinge of conscience about forsaking the concert hall for the soundstage, he overcomes it "with great ease by thinking of movies like The Mission."

Morricone's father was a trumpet player who performed jazz and opera and worked on movie scores. His son started to write music ("dreadful") at the age of six. When he was twelve, his parents enrolled him in the Rome music conservatory, where he finished a four-year harmony course in six months. Morricone remembers that his professor, wary of wasting such a potential talent, told him sternly that "if I did not enroll in the composition course, I was an assassin." He also taught his student that "one of the values of a music script is the pain that produces it."