Nino Rota¶

At a glance¶

Born: December 3, 1911, Milan — as Giovanni Rota Rinaldi
Died: April 10, 1979, Rome, aged 67 — coronary thrombosis
Trained: Milan Conservatory; Santa Cecilia, Rome; Curtis Institute, Philadelphia
Output: 150+ film scores, 10 operas, 5 ballets
Godfather role: Composer, films I and II
Academy Award: 1 — Part II (1975). Nominated and then disqualified for the first film.

Before¶

A genuine prodigy: an oratorio at eleven, a three-act opera at thirteen. He trained in Milan and Rome under Pizzetti and Casella, and — on Toscanini's encouragement — spent 1930–32 in the United States at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, studying under Fritz Reiner. He took a literature degree at Milan in 1937 and ran the Liceo Musicale in Bari from 1950 to 1978.

He wrote constantly. More than 150 film scores, averaging around three a year, with thirteen in 1954 alone, alongside operas, ballets, concertos, and chamber music that he considered his real work and almost nobody has heard.

Fellini¶

The defining partnership of both their careers, from Lo Sceicco Bianco (1952) through La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, Amarcord, and Casanova.

Fellini's own description: the most precious collaborator I have ever had… between us, immediately, a complete, total harmony.

Rota's Fellini music is where the style is clearest — circus brass, waltzes, small sad melodies that seem to arrive from another room. It is music that refuses to underline. Which is exactly why it works for the Corleones.

The Godfather¶

He wrote it in Rome. Robert Evans hated it on first hearing, thought it too highbrow, and pushed to replace it. Coppola fought him and won, on the argument that the Italianness of the score was the whole point.

The score is essentially three ideas:

The main theme — a solo trumpet, unaccompanied, over almost nothing. One voice, no family. It is the loneliest melody in a film about a family.

The "Love Theme" (Parla Più Piano) — the mandolin waltz attached to Sicily and to Apollonia.

The waltz — the wedding and family music, which reappears throughout as a memory of before.

What's remarkable is the restraint. There is no music at all during the restaurant murders. None during the baptism — that's Bach on a church organ, diegetic. None over Sonny at the tollbooth. Rota scores the family; he refuses to score the crime. See Music.

The disqualification¶

The Academy nominated the score, and then withdrew the nomination when it emerged that the Love Theme had been adapted from Rota's own score for the 1958 Italian comedy Fortunella.

The rule barred previously-used material. The music was Rota's, reused by Rota, from an obscure film nobody in Hollywood had seen — but the rule was the rule, and the nomination was rescinded. It remains one of the more absurd episodes in Academy history.

Two years later he won Best Original Dramatic Score for Part II, sharing it with Carmine Coppola, who wrote the additional material.

The AFI later ranked the Godfather score #5 among the greatest film scores of all time — for the film whose nomination was cancelled.

After¶

He died in Rome on April 10, 1979, aged 67, of coronary thrombosis. He had scored Death on the Nile the previous year.

His death is why Part III's score is Carmine Coppola's alone, working from Rota's themes — competent, faithful, and audibly not the same hand.