Nino Rota - Film Scores

Film Scores

In his entry on Rota in the 1988 edition of The Concise Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Composers and Musicians, music scholar Nicholas Slonimsky described Rota as "brilliant" and stated that his musical style:

"... demonstrates a great facility and even felicity, with occasional daring excursions into dodecaphony. However his most durable compositions are related to his music for the cinema; he composed the sound tracks of a great number of films of the Italian director Federico Fellini covering the period from 1950 to 1979."

During the 1940s, Rota composed scores for more than 32 films, including Renato Castellani's Zazà (1944). His association with Fellini began with The White Sheik (1952), followed by I vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954). They continued to work together for decades, and Fellini recalled:

The most precious collaborator I have ever had, I say it straightaway and don't even have to hesitate, was Nino Rota — between us, immediately, a complete, total, harmony ... He had a geometric imagination, a musical approach worthy of celestial spheres. He thus had no need to see images from my movies. When I asked him about the melodies he had in mind to comment one sequence or another, I clearly realized he was not concerned with images at all. His world was inner, inside himself, and reality had no way to enter it.

The relationship between Fellini and Rota was so strong that even at Fellini's funeral Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, asked trumpeter Mauro Maur to play Rota's Improvviso dell'Angelo in the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome.

Rota's score for Fellini's 8½ (1963) is often cited as one of the factors which makes the film cohesive. His score for Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965) included a collaboration with Eugene Walter on the song, "Go Milk the Moon" (cut from the final version of the film), and they teamed again for the song "What Is a Youth?", part of Rota's score for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

The American Film Institute ranked Rota's score for The Godfather #5 on their list of the greatest film scores. His score for War and Peace was also nominated for the list.

In all, Rota wrote scores to more than 150 films.