Music & Score¶
One trumpet. No accompaniment. That is the whole family, in eight bars.
Nino Rota's score is famous for what's in it. It should be famous for what isn't.
The three ideas¶
The main theme. A solo trumpet, unaccompanied, over almost nothing. It is the first music you hear and it recurs across three films.
It is worth sitting with how strange this is. This is a film about the most tightly bound family in American cinema — a household of a dozen people who eat together, work together, and die for each other — and its theme is one voice, alone, with no ensemble behind it. Rota could have written a family theme for strings. He wrote a solitude.
The "Love Theme" (Parla Più Piano) — the mandolin waltz attached to Sicily and to Apollonia. Warm, simple, and slightly too sweet, which is correct: it belongs to the one stretch of Michael's life that was uncomplicated, and it plays as nostalgia even while it's happening.
The waltz — the family and wedding music, which returns throughout the trilogy as a memory of before.
Rota's method throughout is restraint that borders on refusal. The instrumentation is thin. The melodies are short and repetitive. Nothing swells. This is a composer who scored Fellini for twenty-five years and learned there that music which insists on a feeling is music the audience stops believing.
Where there is no music¶
The most important compositional decisions in the trilogy are silences.
The restaurant murders. No score. Just room tone and, at the crucial moment, an elevated subway train screaming past outside — grinding, metallic, unbearably loud, held far longer than is comfortable. The noise is doing what a score would do and is diegetically justified, which makes it feel like it's coming from inside Michael's head. It is the single best sound decision in the film, and it was added in post; Walter Murch was the sound montage supervisor.
The baptism sequence. No score at all. What you hear is a church organ — Bach, played in the church, continuously and unbroken across all five murder locations. Because it never stops and never modulates, the killings happen inside the sacrament rather than beside it. See The Baptism Sequence.
Sonny at the tollbooth. No music under the shooting.
Fredo on the lake. Michael at the window. Rota's theme plays — and then stops, and the shot is a small distant sound over water.
Mary on the steps (Part III). Michael screams and the audio is cut entirely, then returns with Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.
The pattern is consistent across three films and eighteen years: Rota scores the family; he refuses to score the crime. Every time the Corleones do something unforgivable, the music either stops or is revealed to be coming from somewhere in the room. The score will accompany a wedding, a courtship, a memory. It will not accompany a murder, because that would be a form of endorsement.
The diegetic layer¶
A great deal of the trilogy's music is being played by people you can see, which is unusual for a film of this period and does real work:
- "C'è la luna mezz'o mare" — the Sicilian folk song at Connie's wedding, sung by Morgana King (Carmela) undubbed, with the band led by Carmine Coppola on screen.
- Bach's organ works under the baptism.
- "Pop Goes the Weasel" and a swing band at Anthony's First Communion in Part II — the point being that it isn't a tarantella, which is why Pentangeli ends up bellowing at the musicians alone.
- A brass band playing in the street below while Vito shoots Don Fanucci during the Feast of San Rocco.
- Cuban dance music in Havana, cut off at midnight by a revolution.
- Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana in Part III, sung by Michael's son.
The trajectory across the three films is exact: Sicilian folk → American swing → grand opera. The family's music assimilates at the same rate its money does, and by the third film the Corleones are patrons of an art form rather than participants in a culture.
The disqualification¶
The Academy nominated the score for The Godfather, then withdrew the nomination on discovering that the Love Theme had been adapted from Rota's own music for the 1958 Italian comedy Fortunella.
The rule barred previously used material. The music was Rota's, reused by Rota, from a film nobody in Hollywood had seen. The nomination was rescinded anyway.
Two years later he won Best Original Dramatic Score for Part II, shared with Carmine Coppola.
The AFI subsequently ranked the Godfather score #5 among the greatest film scores ever written — for the film whose nomination was cancelled.
Evans hated it¶
Robert Evans heard the score and thought it too "highbrow" and too Italian, and pushed to have it replaced. Coppola fought him and won, on the argument that the Italianness was the entire point.
It is the clearest instance of the pattern that runs through this production: nearly every element people now consider untouchable — Brando, Pacino, the length, the period, the darkness, the score — was something the studio tried to remove.
Part III¶
Rota died in 1979. Part III's score is Carmine Coppola's alone, working from Rota's themes.
It is faithful, competent, and audibly a different hand — heavier, more literal, more inclined to tell you how to feel. Carmine was nominated for the song "Promise Me You'll Remember" (with lyricist John Bettis) and lost.
The film's best musical moment isn't his. It's Mascagni.