Ennio Morricone was so prolific that nobody can say for certain how many film scores he actually wrote, with the figure landing somewhere between 450 and 500. Now, prolific does not always go hand in hand with quality when it comes to the arts, but in Morricone’s case, his output was so sui generis, diverse and ultimately brilliant that his prolificacy indicates absolute mastery as opposed to a faeces-flinger hoping something would stick. In fact, he is quite possibly the greatest cinematic composer of all time.

Despite the fact that he scored around half a thousand films, he is nevertheless often pigeonholed, and this was a point of great chagrin for the late Italian maestro. “I get really annoyed because even though only 8% of my film scores were for westerns, most people only remember me for those films,” he told Channel 4 News.