A portrait of composer Nino Rota

The pace of contemporary life, and the speed with which we consume popular culture, has had a ruinous effect on our regard for modern music history. If we remember Nino Rota at all, it’s probably because we have fond memories of Romeo and Juliet and The Godfather at the movies.

But the Milan-born composer deserves better. He not only scored more than 150 films, including some of cinema’s greatest works, he also wrote four symphonies, 10 operas, five ballet scores, five oratorios, 14 concertos and a good deal of chamber music, much of which has been recorded and awaits rediscovery.

Rota (1911–1979) wasn’t just prolific. He was a musical prodigy whose entire life, from the time he began piano at age 4, was consumed with creating music and teaching younger generations about it. As his longtime collaborator, filmmaker Federico Fellini once said: “Nino is an angelic friend made of music, always with an angel of music by his side, with its huge wings about him.”

He wrote an oratorio at 12, was declared the 20th century’s “new Mozart” in the Italian press, and earned a degree in composition from Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory in 1930. He spent two years at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he befriended Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Gian-Carlo Menotti, then returned to Italy where he earned a Ph.D. at Milan University. He began teaching at the Bari Conservatory in 1939 and became director there in 1950.

Rota was, above all, a melodist. His music, British film historian Richard Dyer wrote, “readily embraces the softer, dreamier, more sentimental or open-hearted strains of musical romanticism.” This made him an ideal film composer, particularly for Italian films of the 1940s, but it was ironically his music for an English film, The Glass Mountain (1949), the story of a composer, that first brought him to prominence in world cinema.

It was the long association with Fellini, however, that brought out the lively, boisterous side of Rota, beginning with Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik) in 1952. They did sixteen films together, including such classics as La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Amarcord (1973). Many of his scores incorporate jazz and pop sounds of the era, and a circus march or two were never far behind, adding a sense of joy and fun to these quintessential examples of Italian cinema.

Rota worked for other major Italian directors: five films with Luchino Visconti, including Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963); two with Franco Zeffirelli, the Shakespeare adaptations The Taming of the Shrew (1967, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) and Romeo and Juliet (1968); and two with Lina Wertmuller including Love and Anarchy (1973).

The Leopard is a notable example of Rota’s not-infrequent use of earlier works in new film scores (Wertmuller called him “an adorable, absent-minded and free-spirited musician who recycled everything possible”). Visconti, who preferred using classical excerpts in films (notably his use of Mahler in Death in Venice), sought a “romantic symphony” for his ambitious epic about a 19th-century Sicilian prince (Burt Lancaster) during turbulent times.

Rota first indulged the director with discussions of Massenet, Wagner and Gounod. But when he innocently segued into the andante from his 1947 Sinfonia sopra una canzone d’amore (Symphony on a Love Song), Visconti knew he had found the right music: a grand, rich and undeniably dramatic orchestral backdrop for a masterful depiction of the final days of the Italian aristocracy.

His two Zeffirelli films are marvelous period inventions, suggesting Shakespeare’s settings (16th-century Padua for Shrew, 14th-century Verona for Romeo and Juliet) but also playing the underlying emotional undercurrents. In the case of Taming of the Shrew, Zeffirelli said, Rota’s score was, “tinged with a certain pre-Baroque sadness and solemnity that explodes into a total Italian joy.”

The music of Romeo and Juliet was something else entirely. The movie was among the highest-grossing films of 1968, the soundtrack album went platinum, and Rota was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe; when Henry Mancini’s cover version hit no. 1 in 1969, Rota even earned a Song of the Year nomination at the Grammys. As Zeffirelli said, “He envisioned it as a tribute to timeless love, a nostalgic reclaiming of that almost medieval world. He invented Renaissance music, but it was fitting and happy enough that it became the music of the generation that loved that film so much.”

Directors from around the world sought out this humble, sweet, middle-aged composer for films of every genre: American King Vidor for War and Peace (1957), Frenchman René Clément for Purple Noon (1960), Russian Sergei Bondarchuk for Waterloo (1970), Englishman John Guillerman for the Agatha Christie thriller Death on the Nile (1978) and Swedish director Jan Troell for Hurricane (1979).

The most unexpected triumph was a pair of films for Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974). Rota wasn’t even interested, but Coppola flew to Rome to convince him. The director didn’t want gangster music, despite the often grim and violent story told in Mario Puzo’s novel (Italian immigrants rise from poverty to become powerful organized-crime family in America). Rather, he sought music that would remind the characters of their Sicilian heritage, a nostalgia for the old country and the values learned there.

Rota was Oscar-nominated for the colossally successful Godfather, at least for a few days; the nomination was withdrawn when word leaked that his love theme had been borrowed from a forgotten Italian film, violating Academy Award rules for originality. The Academy “apologized” two years later, giving him the Oscar for Godfather II, recognizing the composer’s accomplishment for both.

Rota’s original Godfather music included a waltz for the Corleone family, one which opens with a lonely solo trumpet and serves as a melancholy reminder of the family’s past; and a heartfelt, mandolin-and-accordion flavored romantic piece for Michael (Al Pacino) and his young Italian wife. For Godfather II, he augmented these themes with an expansive, hope-filled theme for the immigrants entering New York in the early 20th century, a playful tune of mischief for young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), and new music for Kay (Diane Keaton).

As Rota would arrive near the end of each project, Fellini mused, “stress vanished and everything became a party. The film entered a light, serene, fantastical phase, an atmosphere from which it gained a kind of new life.” Nino Rota was a significant contributor to the canon of great 20th-century film music, and his work deserves a place on the concert music programs of our time.