Ennio Morricone埃尼奥·莫里康内

Obituary讣告

Ennio Morricone埃尼奥·莫里康内

Man on a mission肩负使命之人

Ennio Morricone, composer, died on July 6th, aged 91作曲家埃尼奥·莫里康于7月6日去世，享年91岁

The theme may have been written well over half a century ago, but in less than three minutes you hear everything that came to matter most to him in a lifetime of composing. There is the two-note howl at the Moon — once heard, never forgotten. Musically, it is that rare fusion of heart and mind and as recognisable, in its way, as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Then there are the classic musical motifs, like those Richard Wagner scattered through the “Ring” cycle, that mark out the good man, the bad and the ugly. And then there is the freewheeling range of sounds with which he chose to make that music: the whistling, the yodelling, the gunfire and the squeaky ocarina, an ancient Italian wind instrument that looks like a sweet potato and is better known to a younger generation as the soundtrack of a Nintendo video game. 

这段曲子可能在半个多世纪前就创作完成了，但三分钟内，你就听到了他一生创作中最重要的一切。《月亮》中有吼叫的两个音符——一听难忘。从音乐上讲，这是一种难得的心灵与思想的融合，就像贝多芬第五交响曲的开头音符一样清晰可辨。此外，还有经典的音乐主题，比如理查德·瓦格纳在《尼伯龙根的指环》系列中散布的那些主题，这些主题划分出了好人、坏人和丑陋的人。然后，莫里康内选择了一系列随心所欲的声音来创作音乐：哨声、约德尔调、枪声和吱吱的陶笛、一种看起来像红薯的古意大利管乐器，以及年轻一代更熟悉的任天堂电子游戏的配乐。

freewheeling   adj.随心所欲的；无拘无束的

freewheel   v.（通常指骑自行车或开车下坡时）靠惯性滑行，溜车

注：约德尔（Yodeling）是源自瑞士阿尔卑斯山区的一种特殊唱法、歌曲。在山里牧人们常常用号角和叫喊声来呼唤他们的羊群，牛群，也用歌声向对面山上或山谷中的朋友、情人来传达各种信息。久而久之，他们竟发展出一种十分有趣而又令人惊叹的约德尔唱法。这种唱法的特点是在演唱开始时在中、低音区用真声唱，然后突然用假声进入高音区，并且用这两种方法迅速地交替演唱，形成奇特的效果。

The range and audacity of his music surprised those who might have assumed that a working-class Catholic upbringing, not a mile from the Vatican, would have produced someone conventional rather than creative. But the Roman enclave of Trastevere, where he was born just after Benito Mussolini came to power, was an unusual place. A historical outsider-land on the far side of the Tiber, it has tall spindly houses that, for centuries, have been home to artisanal guilds, small businesses, ancient synagogues and enterprising Jewish and Catholic families. Above the winding cobbled streets, with their medieval shopfronts and wooden shutters, the Roman light shines through the pine trees in the hills with cinematic luminosity. His friend, Sergio Leone, who directed “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and many of the other films that made him famous, lived just a few minutes away. Both boys attended a private Catholic school nearby, and for a while were even in the same year.

莫里康内的音乐的范围和大胆让那些认为他是在离梵蒂冈不到一英里的一个天主教工人阶级家庭长大的人吃惊——他们认为这会造就一个墨守成规的人而不是有创造力的人。贝尼托·墨索里尼上台后，莫里康内出生在罗马飞地特拉斯特维莱区，这是一个不同寻常的地方。它是台伯河对岸的一个历史悠久的外域，这里有高大细长的房屋，几个世纪以来，这里有手工行会、小型企业、古老的犹太教堂以及有进取心的犹太教和天主教家庭。在蜿蜒曲折的鹅卵石街道上，有中世纪风格的店面和木制的百叶窗，罗马的灯光透过山上的松树，散发出电影般的光芒。他的朋友，执导了《黄金三镖客》以及其他许多让他成名的电影的塞尔吉奥·莱昂内，就住在离这里只有几分钟路程的地方。这两个男孩都就读于附近的一所私立天主教学校，有一段时间甚至还在同一年就读。

audacity   n.鲁莽，大胆无礼

enclave   n.（国家或城市中隶属另一民族或文化的）飞地，孤立地区

spindly   adj.长而纤弱的，细长而瘦弱的

synagogue   n.犹太会堂，犹太教堂

注：飞地，一种特殊的人文地理现象，指隶属于某一行政区管辖但不与本区毗连的土地。如果某一行政主体拥有一块飞地，那么它无法取道自己的行政区域到达该地，只能“飞”过其他行政主体的属地，才能到达自己的飞地。

飞地的概念产生于中世纪，术语第一次出现于1526年签定的马德里条约的文件上。飞地的历史成因相当复杂，具有边缘地带的某些特征：政府控制力相对薄弱，行政管理松弛且成本较高；社会经济相对落后，文化多样性色彩比较浓郁。

cobble=cobblestone鹅卵石

shopfront   n.商店门面，店面

luminosity   n.（恒星等的）光度，亮度

His father, a professional musician, and his mother, who ran a small textile business, brought up four siblings: Ennio, Franco, Adriana and Maria. A fifth child, Aldo, the youngest, died at three when he was fed cherries by a nanny who did not know he was allergic to them. For a while, understandably perhaps, the ten-year-old would-be composer thought he might become a doctor.

莫里康内的父亲是一名职业音乐家，母亲则经营着一家小型纺织企业。他们养育了四个兄弟姐妹：埃尼奥、弗兰科、阿德里安娜和玛丽亚。第五个孩子奥尔多是最小的，他在三岁时被保姆喂了樱桃后夭折了，保姆并不知道他对樱桃过敏。有一段时间，也许可以理解的是，这位10岁的准作曲家认为他可能会成为一名医生。

sibling   n.兄，弟，姐，妹

But two other passions also exerted their pull. He took up chess after finding a small chess manual in a secondhand shop, and for a while played it obsessively with three friends who lived in the same block of flats in Via delle Fratte. At the same time he was drawn to music and wrote his first composition at six, having watched his father practise the trumpet at home every day and heard him perform with his light-music orchestra on the radio.

但另外两种激情也发挥了作用。他在一家二手店找到了一本小象棋手册，从此开始学习下棋，有一段时间，莫里康内和三个住在弗拉兹街同一街区的朋友玩得如痴如醉。同时，他被音乐所吸引，并于6岁时写了他的第一部作品，他每天都在家里看他的父亲练习吹小号，在收音机里听他和他的轻音乐管弦乐队演奏。

Chess was silent music, he liked to say, and playing it was a bit like composing. But whereas he was a conventional chess player, leading always with a queen and pursuing the logic of calculation rather than playing by instinct, music set him free. He composed for the stage and the radio, but quit the national radio broadcaster, RAI, when they wouldn’t let him freelance on the side. 

他喜欢说，象棋是沉默的音乐，玩象棋有点像作曲。但他是一个传统的棋手，总是用一个王后来领导，追求计算的逻辑而不是本能的玩耍，唯有音乐使他获得了自由。莫里康内为戏剧和电台作曲，但在意大利国家电视台不允许他兼职时，他离开了那里。

trumpet   n.小号   v.宣扬，鼓吹，吹嘘；（尤指大象）吼叫

Their marriage was trumpeted as the society wedding of the year.他们的联姻被宣扬成当年的豪门良缘。

The elephants trumpeted and stamped their feet at their approach.当他们靠近时，大象又吼又跺脚。

Branching out on his own, he refused to let himself be distracted, one reason why he continued living in Trastevere, travelled little and never bothered to learn to speak English. Hollywood, when it decided it wanted him, had to come to Rome. When his music came to him, it was fully formed. He would rise before dawn to write, composing at his desk on 12-staff paper with a pencil rather than experimentally at the piano. His wife, Maria Travia, occasionally wrote the lyrics to his songs. He would play her his work, and only if she approved did he then show it to anyone else.

自立门户的他拒绝让自己分心，这也是他继续住在特拉斯提弗列、很少旅行以及从不用费心学英语的一个原因。即使是好莱坞，一旦决定要用他，也得躬身来到罗马。一旦他的音乐灵感出现，就已经是完整的篇章。他会在黎明前起床创作，坐在书桌旁用铅笔在12行五线谱纸上作曲，而不是在钢琴上试弹。他的妻子玛丽亚·特拉维亚偶尔会为他的歌曲填词。他会为她演奏自己的作品，只有得到她的认可，他才会给其他人听。

branch out on one's own自立门户

branch out into sth涉足（新工作）；拓展（新业务）

A daily routine allowed him to experiment, first with Il Gruppo, an avant-garde free-improvisation collective in Rome for which he played the trumpet and the flute. But it was the soaring landscape of the cinema that allowed his composing to take flight. He liked using all the orchestra’s resources in his arrangements; his musicians would often find themselves playing instruments that they had never played before — the military snare drum, the jaw harp and, increasingly, the Fender Rhodes electronic piano. He wasn’t showing off; every note had a job to do. Changing one thing changed everything.

例行的工作让他有了尝试的机会，首先是和Il Gruppo合作，这是一个在罗马的前卫的自由即兴创作团体，他为这个团体演奏小号和长笛。但让他的创作得以翱翔天际的是高远辽阔的电影场景。他喜欢在他的编曲中使用管弦乐队的所有乐器；演奏他曲子的乐师经常会演奏他们以前从未演奏过的乐器——军鼓、口簧琴，还有使用越来越多的芬达·罗兹电子钢琴。他并不是在炫耀；每个音符都有自己的任务。改变一处就改变了一切。

avant-garde   adj.前卫的；先锋派的

improvisation   n.（演员）即兴表演；（音乐家）即兴创作；临时凑合的事物

a blues/jazz improvisation即兴演奏的布鲁斯／爵士乐

There are classes in movement, dance, and improvisation.有音乐、舞蹈和即兴表演方面的课程。

I'm afraid we don't have all the necessary equipment, so a little improvisation might be required.恐怕我们的必需设备不全，所以我们可能需要把东西临时凑合一下。

flute   n.长笛

snare   n.（捕鸟、兽的）陷阱，罗网；陷阱，圈套，骗局；（绷在小鼓下鼓皮的）响弦

             v.设陷阱（或罗网、套子）捕捉

snare drum小鼓（一面绷有金属响弦）

harp   n.竖琴

In time he came to realise that his approach to composing was like his favourite grandmaster, Bobby Fischer’s approach to playing chess: a series of sudden and surprising moves. Cinema-goers sensed how he melded thinking and feeling, that he played with sounds that spoke to his romantic nature and was able to conjure up, in music, heroic figures who resonated with audiences around the world, however different they might be.

随着时间的推移，他意识到自己的作曲方式就像他最喜欢的国际象棋大师博比·菲舍尔下棋的方法：一系列突然而令人惊讶的招式。电影观众感受到了他是如何将思想和情感结合起来的，他演奏的曲调与他的浪漫天性息息相通，也感受到他能在音乐里营造出引发全世界观众共鸣的英雄人物，无论各地的观众有多么不同。

It was the music he wrote for “A Fistful of Dollars” that turned the unknown Clint Eastwood from a faux-western cowboy into a hero worthy of Homer— honourable, fearless and with a kind hidden heart — and the opening chords of Johann Sebastian Bach’s first song of St Matthew’s Passion, “Come, ye daughters, share my mourning” just before the rat-a-tat-tat drumbeat of French soldiers pouring out of their trucks, that helped transform Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Battle of Algiers” from a story about a nasty colonial spat into a tragic historical epic. As with the ghostly harmonica in “Once Upon a Time in the West” and the soaring theme the Jesuit Father Gabriel plays on the oboe as he tries to bring God to the Amazon in Roland Joffé’s “The Mission”, many of his compositions outlived the films they were written for.

正是他为《荒野大镖客》创作的音乐，让默默无闻的克林特·伊斯特伍德从一个冒牌西部牛仔变成了如《荷马史诗》里的人物般的英雄——光荣、无畏、内心善良——而约翰·塞巴斯蒂安·巴赫《马太受难曲》第一首歌的开场和弦，“来吧，女儿们，分享我的哀痛吧”，后面紧接的就是法国士兵从卡车里涌出时搭配的咚咚鼓声，这帮助吉洛·庞特科洛的《阿尔及尔之战》，从一个关于肮脏的殖民纷争故事，转变为一个悲剧性的历史史诗。就像《西部往事》中幽灵般的口琴，以及罗兰·约非执导的《教会》中耶稣会神父加百利试图将上帝带到亚马逊时用双簧管演奏的激荡人心的主题曲一样，他的许多配乐作品比电影本身更经久不衰。

fistful   n.一把（之量）；相当多的一批，很大的量

He held out a fistful of crumpled dollars.他拿出一把皱巴巴的钞票。

He has a fistful of acting awards.他获得了许多表演奖。

spat   n.小争吵，小别扭，口角

outlive    v.比…活得长，比…持久

Visiting journalists sometimes failed to realise he was having them on when he gently insisted that people go to the cinema to watch films, not to hear them. Deep down he knew that music could make a film unforgettable. That was why Sergio Leone so often had him compose the music before shooting started, rather than the reverse, which is the way films are usually made, or even insisted the actors listen to the soundtrack to get them into character. He had just one piece of advice when approached by John Zorn, then a budding cinema composer: “Forget the film. Think of the record.” Millions would agree.

来访的记者有时没有意识到，当他温柔地坚持人们去电影院是为了看电影，而不是听电影时，他是在捉弄他们。他内心深处知道，音乐可以使一部电影令人难忘。这就是为什么塞吉奥·里昂总是让他在开拍前作曲，甚至坚持让演员听电影原声，让他们进入角色。而通常情况都是先拍电影再配乐。当约翰·佐恩找到他时，他只给了这位初出茅庐的电影作曲家一条建议：“忘记这部电影。专注于乐曲。数百万人都会同意这一点。

have sb on哄骗（某人）

That's your new car? You're having me on!那是你的新汽车？你在骗我吧！

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