When he wasn’t busy scoring for the likes of Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Brian De Palma and Terrence Malick, Ennio Morricone could be found hunched over a chessboard. He was a good enough player to hold former world champion Boris Spassky—who famously lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972—to a draw (an achievement Morricone modestly attributed to Spassky not trying too hard). Chess was Morricone’s lifelong passion, rivaling music, the family trade he entered as a matter of course. In a Paris Review interview in 2019, he waxed philosophical on the links between music and chess: notation, themes, patterns, counterpoint—which, taken to its logical extreme, functions exponentially—concluding that music, chess and mathematics were creative endeavors, relying “on graphical and logical procedures that also involve probability and the unexpected.”
Or, in a word, “chance.” Curiously, he leaves beauty out of the equation; and yet it was the sublime, meaningless beauty of the game that captivated me in my youth. My idol was not my hero, Bobby Fischer, but José Raúl Capablanca, whose games are revered for their clarity and elegance—Sergei Prokofiev compared “Capablanchik” to Mozart.
A list of musicians partial to the royal game includes Jean-Philippe Rameau, Fryderyk Chopin (who made his own pieces), Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann (who taught Brahms the moves), Antonín Dvorák, Modest Mussorgsky, Enrico Caruso (who counted Yugoslavian master, Boris Kostić, in his entourage), Pablo Casals (friend of Capablanca’s), Fritz Kreisler, Moriz Rosenthal, Mischa Elman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Erik Satie, Sir Thomas Beecham, Prokofiev, Feodor Chaliapin (yet another friend of Capablanchik’s), Artur Rubenstein, Gregor Piatigorsky, Paul Robeson, Dmitry Shostakovich, Vladimir Horowitz, (who used to play Isaac Stern), Yehudi Menuhin, John Cage, Matthew Bengtson and Maxim Vengerov.
The list of chess worthies who excelled at music is shorter but no less impressive: the greatest player of the 18th century, François-André Danican Philidor, composed operas when he wasn’t playing for stakes or giving blindfold exhibitions.
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