Nino Rota

Italian classical and film-score composer

• Born: December 3, 1911
• Birthplace: Milan, Italy
• Died: April 10, 1979
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Rota was revered in Italy and the rest of the world for his compositions for film. In addition, he composed numerous works for theater, orchestra, and chamber ensemble in a style strikingly similar to the one he adopted for film music. An incredibly talented melodist, Rota remained faithful to his neoclassical tonal style.

The Life

Nino Rota (NEE-noh ROH-tuh) was born into a family of musicians: His grandfather, Giovanni Rinaldi, was a composer, and his mother, Ernesta Rinaldi, was a pianist. Rota played the piano by the age of four, and he composed by the age of eight. His oratorio L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista was successfully performed under his direction when he was twelve. Despite being a child prodigy—or perhaps because of it—he had difficulty finding a suitable teacher. During his brief time at the Milan Conservatory he studied with Giacomo Orefice and Ildebrando Pizzetti, who hindered the production of Rota’s first opera, Il principe porcaro. In 1926 Rota moved to Rome to study with Alessandro Casella. After receiving a diploma in composizione from Rome Conservatory in 1929, with barely passing grades, he studied for three years, from 1930 to 1932, at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Rosario Scalero (composition) and Fritz Reiner (conducting). While in the United States he befriended Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, and he became acquainted with the music of Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin, as well as with American films, musicals, and popular songs.

Returning to Italy, Rota earned a degree in Italian literature from Milan University in 1938. He began his teaching career at Taranto Conservatory before transferring to Bari Conservatory in 1939. Rota found a stimulating and friendly environment in Bari, where his talents and gregarious personality were fully appreciated. He composed much of his instrumental music for his friends, who were musicians in Puglia, the region where Bari is located. He served as the director of Bari Conservatory for nearly three decades, from 1950 to 1979, declining the position of director of the more prestigious Rome Conservatory.

Rota’s career as film music composer began early with Raffaello Matarazzo’s Treno popolare, but it was after World War II that his fame grew. After 1942 he worked frequently for the Lux Film Company in Rome and acquired international renown with Henry Cass’s The Glass Mountain. Rota’s body of work includes 150 film scores for directors such as Renato Castellani, Mario Soldati, Alberto Lattuada, Eduardo De Filippo, Luchino Visconti, René Clement, King Vidor, Sergei Bondarchuk, and Francis Ford Coppola. However, his name is particularly associated with Federico Fellini, with whom he collaborated on sixteen films from Lo sceicco bianco to Prova d’orchestra. Fellini described Rota as a funny, naive, gentle little man, perhaps underestimating the composer’s remarkable inventiveness, flexibility, and problem-solving ability. Throughout his career, he composed symphonic, chamber, and theater music. However, while his fame as film composer increased, his serious music was prejudicially deemed mediocre and popular.

The Music

Both the film scores and the concert music by Rota demonstrate his ability to parody different styles as well as his predilection for rhythms, textures, and orchestrations that enhance lyricism and intelligibility. Though fundamentally an eclectic composer, Rota selectively absorbed only those elements that he found germane to his inspiration and taste. At the beginning of his career Rota was influenced by the generation of Italian composers born in the 1870’s and 1880’s (Ottorino Respighi, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Alfredo Casella); then, in America, he learned (from Copland and Gershwin) to exploit popular idioms and (from Antonín Dvořák, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Modest Mussorgsky) East European symphonic styles that appealed to him. Finally, like many composers of his time, he was fascinated by the phenomenon of Igor Stravinsky; Rota’s oratorio Mysterium catholicum resembles Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930). When the jagged melodic leaps and spare orchestration typical of Anton von Webern became predominant, Rota’s tuneful tonal music was the object of harsh criticism. However, the composer avoided ideological debates and never took up serial techniques. Significantly, in Rota’s Fantasia sopra dodici note del di W. A. Mozart for piano and orchestra, the twelve-tone theme is presented as parody of Webern’s pointillist orchestration (each note has a different timbre), but the theme is treated tonally.

Il cappello di paglia di Firenze. Rota and his mother derived the libretto of this farsa musicale from Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel’s vaudeville play Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851). The protagonist of this farce, Ferdinand, must find a straw hat during his wedding in Paris to replace one accidentally eaten by his horse. If he fails, the woman who owned the rare hat risks the retaliation of her violent and jealous husband. Ferdinand and his wedding guests pass through an endless sequence of ridiculous situations before discovering that, fortunately, an identical hat has been delivered as a wedding gift. Without any commission, Rota composed Il cappello di paglia di Firenze during the summers of 1945 and 1946. Sometimes he set new words to melodies he had previously composed for films. Il cappello di paglia di Firenze was performed for the first time at Palermo Teatro Massimo in 1955 and repeated with similar success for two years at Milan Theater Piccola Scala under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. In time it became the most performed Italian twentieth century opera after Giacomo Puccini’s works. This comic opera has many characteristics of vaudeville, including bright orchestration, fast pace, snapshot puns, and brilliant portrayals of people, places, and situations. Moreover, there are frequent references to opera buffa and operetta. Rota wittily mocked a variety of musical styles ranging from that of Gioacchino Rossini to that of Jacques Offenbach.

La strada. The Fellini-Rota relationship is a favorite subject of film scholars. In Fellini’s films Rota’s music sometimes seems disconnected from the visual content, adding a supplementary layer of meaning. Perhaps this disconnection exists because Fellini often added Rota’s music only at a late stage of the editing and because Rota frequently adapted music from other compositions. The result of this accidental combination was an enchanting marriage of music and images that became part of the so-called collective imagination. In the case of La strada, the most vivid sound-image association is Gelsomina’s solo trumpet theme, with her image as a bittersweet clown. Gelsomina is a poor, ugly girl sold by her mother to a homeless circus artist, Zampanò. Though she finds a true vocation in entertaining people and taking care of her brutal mate, tragedy seems to be their destiny. Besides the trumpet theme that she keeps playing, a kindred gloomy sentimentality broods in the entire sound track: in Zampanò’s wandering theme for strings as well as in the procession music for marching band that accompanies the scenes of the little town festival.

In 1966 La strada became a ballet for Milan La Scala (choreography by Mario Pistoni). Carla Fracci performed it to great popular and critical acclaim. Though the ballet, which uses pantomime extensively, closely follows the story line of the film, Rota rearranged the film score, borrowing more than forty minutes of music from his other works. The twenty-minute suite from the ballet La strada is one of Rota’s symphonic works that is often performed and recorded.

The Godfather. When Coppola asked him to write the sound track for his Mafia film The Godfather, Rota was already a world-famous film composer. Coppola showed Rota an early version of the film and suggested music not strictly bound to the ethnicity of the characters. Also, Coppola wanted a recurring dancelike motif to be played in association with the chain of murders. Rota provided three main themes, which were freely edited without his supervision: the godfather theme (a waltz introduced at the beginning by a trumpet solo), the son theme (not used), and the love theme (for the scenes in Sicily). The third one became the most popular, and it is sometimes erroneously called “The Godfather theme.” The love theme was an elaboration of a march Rota had composed for De Filippo’s film Fortunella (1958). This self-borrowing prevented Rota from being nominated for an Academy Award, but he did win an Academy Award in 1974 for the sound track of the sequel, The Godfather, Part II.

Nonet. Rota’s chamber music is distinctively neoclassical. He never included extended techniques, electronics, aleatory passages (sounds chosen by the performer or left to chance), or other typical twentieth century innovations; rather, he scored for nineteenth century classical instruments and ensembles (string quartet, wind quintet, piano trios, piano and solo instrument sonatas). The Nonet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass was composed in 1959 for the ensemble Solisti Dauni, led by bassoonist Domenico Losavio. Rota revised the piece from 1974 to 1977 for publication. Considered Rota’s chamber masterpiece, the Nonet is remarkably long (about thirty minutes) compared with the rest of his works. The closest model seems to be Stravinsky’s neoclassical style of the 1920’s, although Rota’s style is simpler harmonically and rhythmically, and it does not feature Baroque forms. Instead, the Nonet is shaped in five classical movements: sonata-allegro (Allegro), slow movement (Andante), scherzo (Allegro con spirito), theme and variations (Canzone con variazioni), and rondo (Vivacissimo).

Musical Legacy

After the late 1950’s, Rota’s concert music was considered out of date by prestigious Italian critics. Rota was accused of pleasing popular taste and using an inappropriate film-music style for serious music. However, for Rota any difference between popular music and cultivated music was spurious. “The only thing that changes,” he wrote, “is technical domain.” Rota preferred not to experiment with more fashionable compositional techniques and, alluding to the omnipresent Webernism, he was not afraid to state that most contemporaneous serious music rompe le palle (stinks).

Even though Rota was likely remembered for scoring Coppola’s The Godfather and the best of Fellini’s films, a burgeoning group of scholars argued that it was time to remove the unfair discrimination imposed on Rota’s concert and theater music. With the advent of postmodern ideology and aesthetics, according to which it is no longer possible to invent anything absolutely new, Rota’s derivative attitude could be wholly appreciated. In retrospect, the main characteristics of Rota’s nonfilm music—his eclecticism, his self-indulgent irony, his pervasive borrowing, his parodies, his pastiches, and his refurbished use of uncomplicated harmony and appealing tuneful idioms—identified him as a postmodern composer.

Principal Works

ballets:La rappresentazione di Adamo ed Eva, 1957 (scenario by Aurelio M. Milloss); Aci e Galatea, 1971 (scenario by Marcella Otinelli; based on Ovid’s Metamorfosi); Le Molière imaginaire, 1976 (comedic ballet); Amore di poeta, 1978 (A Poet’s Love; scenario by Maurice Béjart; based on Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine’s song cycle Dichterliebe).

chamber works:Invenzioni, 1933 (for string quartet); Viola Sonata, 1934; Canzona for Eleven Instruments, 1935; Quintet, 1935 (for flute, oboe, viola, cello, and harp); Sonata for Flute and Harp, 1937; Violin Sonata, 1937; String Quartet, 1954; Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano, 1958; Elegy, 1959 (for oboe and piano); Nonet, 1959; Sonata for Organ and Brass, 1968; Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, 1973.

choral works:L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista, 1922 (The Childhood of Saint John the Baptist; oratorio for solo voices, chorus, orchestra, and organ); Il martirio di San Giovanni Battista, 1924 (oratorio for solo voices, chorus, and organ); Allegro concertante, 1953 (for chorus and orchestra); Meditazione, 1954 (for chorus and orchestra); Mysterium catholicum, 1962 (oratorio for voices, chorus, children’s chorus, and orchestra); Il natale degli innocenti, 1970 (oratorio); La vita di Maria, 1970 (oratorio for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra); Roma capomunni, 1971 (cantata for baritone, chorus, and orchestra).

film scores:Treno popolare, 1933; Il birichino di papà, 1943; Le miserie del signor Travet, 1946; The Glass Mountain, 1949; Lo sceicco bianco, 1952 (The White Sheik); Filumena marturano, 1951; I vitelloni, 1953; La strada, 1954; Il bidone, 1955; War and Peace, 1956; Le notti bianche, 1957; Le notti di Cabiria, 1957; La dolce vita, 1959; Plein soleil, 1959; Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960; Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio, 1962; The Taming of the Shrew, 1967; Romeo e Giulietta, 1968 (Romeo and Juliet); Toby Dammit, 1968; Satyricon, 1969; I clowns, 1970 (The Clowns); Waterloo, 1970; The Godfather, 1972; Roma, 1972; Amarcord, 1973; Film d’amore e d’anarchia, 1973 (Love and Anarchy); The Godfather, Part II, 1974; Il Casanova, 1976; Caro Michele, 1978; Death on the Nile, 1978; Prova d’orchestra, 1979.

operas (music): Il principe porcaro, written 1926, premiered 2003 (The Swineherd Prince; based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale); Ariodante, 1942 (libretto by Ernesto Trucchi); Torquemada, 1943 (libretto by Trucchi; based on Victor Hugo’s poem); I due timidi, 1950 (radio opera; libretto by Suso Cecchi d’Amico); Il cappello di paglia di Firenzi, 1955 (musical farce; libretto by Ernesta Rota and N. Rota; based on Eugène Labiche and Marc-Michel’s comedy Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie); La scuola di guida, 1959 (for voices and orchestra; libretto by Mario Soldati); La notte di un nevrastenico, 1959 (opera buffa; libretto by Riccardo Bacchelli); Lo scoiattolo in gamba, 1959 (libretto by Eduardo De Filippo); Aladino e la lampada magica, 1968 (based on the Arabian Nights stories); La visita meravigliosa, 1970 (based on H. G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit); Napoli milionaria, 1977 (The Millions of Naples; based on De Filippo’s play).

orchestral works: Cello Concerto, 1925; Balli, 1932; Serenata, 1932; Symphony No. 1 in G, 1939; Symphony No. 2 in F, 1941 (Anni di pellegrinaggio: Tarantina); Sinfonia sopra una canzone d’amore, composed 1947, first performed 1972; Harp Concerto, 1948; Variazioni e fuga sul nome B-A-C-H, 1950; Variazioni sopra un tema gioviale, 1954; Symphony No. 3 in C, 1957; Fantasia sopra dodici note del di W. A. Mozart, 1960; Two Piano Concertos, 1960; Concerto in F, 1961 (Festivo); Fantasia sopra, 1961; Concerto in C, 1962 (formerly Partita); Concerto soirée, 1962 (for piano and orchestra); Fifteen Preludes, 1964; Concerto for Strings, 1965; Sonata for Organ, 1965; Trombone Concerto, 1968; Divertimento concertante, 1969 (for double bass and orchestra); Cello Concerto No. 1, 1972; Cello Concerto No. 2, 1973; Castel del Monte, 1976 (for horn and orchestra); Bassoon Concerto, 1977; Piano Concerto in E, 1978 (Piccolo mondo antico).

vocal works:Die Maus, 1925 (for voice and small orchestra); Messa “Mariae dicata,” 1960 (for solo voices and orchestra); Rabelaisiana, 1977 (three songs for solo voice and orchestra).

Bibliography

Dyer, Richard. “The Talented Mr. Rota.” Sight and Sound 14, no. 9 (2004): 42-45. An evaluation of Rota’s originality and his ability to compose musical scores for comedies.

Sciannameo, Franco. Nino Rota, Federico Fellini, and the Making of an Italian Cinematic Folk Opera “Amarcord.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Case study on the Rota-Fellini relationship, with biographical information and many photographs.

Simon, John. “The Other Rota.” The New Criterion 19, no. 1 (2000): 53-39. Includes a discography of Rota’s nonfilm work.