Luis Bacalov, Oscar-winning composer who scored Italian films, dies at 84

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This was published 6 years ago

Luis Bacalov, Oscar-winning composer who scored Italian films, dies at 84

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Luis Bacalov, an Argentine-born composer whose lilting score for the international hit romance Il Postino earned him an Oscar, and whose ominous guitar melodies for dozens of Italian crime movies and spaghetti westerns were used in films by Quentin Tarantino, has died in Rome. He was 84.

The Orchestra della Magna Grecia in Taranto, Italy, where Bacalov was principal conductor, said in a statement that Bacalov had suffered ischemia, a condition of restricted blood flow.

Luis Bacalov

Luis Bacalov

A wide-ranging composer and pianist, Bacalov's scores for blood-splattered B-movies were complemented by works for the leading Italian directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, orchestral compositions inspired by the Catholic Mass, Italian prog-rock records and a one-act opera, The Mother Was There, about women whose sons were killed in Argentina's "dirty war" during the 1970s and '80s.

Bacalov was born near Buenos Aires but spent nearly all his working life in Italy, where he incorporated a twist of tango into works such as his score for Il Postino, about a lonely postal worker (Massimo Troisi) who delivers mail to poet and political exile Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) on a tiny Italian island.

The film, which featured a gentle melody on the accordion-like bandoneon, premiered in Italy in 1994 and opened in the United States one year later as The Postman, introducing Bacalov to a mass audience that had eluded him for much of his career.

"Bacalov was a solid craftsman who could work in any genre," film-soundtrack historian Jon Burlingame said.

Bacalov's Oscar win, Burlingame said, "ushered in a new era of foreign-born composers winning Academy Awards," including Gabriel Yared (Lebanon), Tan Dun (China), Gustavo Santaolalla (Argentina) and Dario Marianelli (Italy).

Though he was often overshadowed by his friend Ennio Morricone, whose electric guitars and whip-crack percussion came to define the spaghetti western sound, Bacalov composed some of the most memorable tracks of Italy's 1960s and '70s western filmmaking boom.

His title song for Django (1966), a Franco Nero movie that was so bloody it was banned in England for nearly three decades, featured what director Tarantino later described as a "quasi-Elvis style" vocal part from Rocky Roberts: "(Django!) Django, have you always been alone? (Django!) Django, have you never loved again?"

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The song was one of three by Bacalov that Tarantino used for Django Unchained (2012), a revisionist western that starred Jamie Foxx as a revenge-seeking former slave loosely inspired by Nero's character of the same name.

Tarantino, fond of eclectic soundtracks, had previously used a pair of Bacalov's songs for his Kill Bill movies.

"I've always loved this song," Tarantino told the Los Angeles Times in 2012, describing his affection for Django. "I have to say, when I came up with the idea to do Django Unchained, I knew it was imperative that I open it with this song as a big opening credit sequence ... Any spaghetti western worth its salt has a big opening credit sequence. In fact, if it doesn't, I don't really want to see it."

The Washington Post

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