The influences on Nino Rota’s music for The Godfather aren’t hard to identify – Stravinsky, Ravel, Puccini. It’s an ironic commentary on the sordid story to back it with surging neo-romantic symphonic music. Coppola’s two-part epic of Italian immigrants in the USA and the drift into mob rule was probably the biggest assignment of Rota’s long career (he was 58 when he started work on it in 1970, but had been composing for over 40 years). Rota’s score made a huge contribution to the film’s success – so much so that after his death the studio returned to his music for Godfather III. Its mixture of Neapolitan folk-song spattered with jazzy honky-tonk makes for a pleasant opening to this second CD of Rota’s music by Riccardo Muti and the Scala Philharmonic. The first disc (Sony, 8/95) had Rota’s ballet La strada as its main item – there is nothing here of comparable strength – so to say that the sequence of six film scores approaches the success of the first CD is high praise.
Rota composed music for 150 films, inevitably most of it forgotten or discarded. His career was inextricably bound up with those of the two most influential Italian film-makers of the 1950s and 1960s – Fellini and Visconti. Fellini’s two big successes of the early 1960s, La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo are represented by brief extracts – the open-air circus-parade finale of the latter score still has a mysterious, exuberant feel. The sources Rota drew on for this are similar to those in The Godfather but his use of them is surer and more original. The last collaboration with Fellini was the comedy about a rehearsal – Prova d’orchestra. Time is not being kind to a lot of Fellini’s work which now seems self-indulgent, but conversely Visconti’s films have a massive grandeur that is overwhelming. Il gattopardo (“The Leopard”) remains one of the most startling and ambitious films ever made. Rota/Muti Vol. 1 had the ballroom sequence; here there is a brief suite of themes from the film. Rocco e i suoi fratelli caused a scandal in Italy in 1960 with its depiction of organized crime and corruption and it led to Visconti’s rift with La Scala because of government interference. He would surely have smiled to think, 38 years later, of the orchestra playing Rota’s score for the film.
Anyone who enjoyed Vol. 1 will be pleased with this follow-up, but those who have not yet heard La strada should start with that. I hope Sony and Muti will continue the project: it would be fascinating to hear some of Rota’s unknown pieces, such as the songs he composed for Visconti’s staging of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.'