He wrote the ‘Godfather’ theme and over 150 film scores. There’s more to hear.
Note: Since this concert review is no longer available online, we are reprinting it here.
“There is only one real function of film music,” Igor Stravinsky wrote in 1946 in the Musical Digest, “namely to feed the composer.”
That wasn’t very nice. But his sentiment remains as sticky as a multiplex floor. Even as Hollywood composers achieve new levels of fame and name recognition, and even as American orchestras faithfully devote a night or two per season to music from the movies, film music may never entirely shake this stubborn stigma.
What gives? Is it that the mystique of a composer’s work sheds its uncanny sheen when it assumes the shape of a job? (Haydn and Mozart also worked hard for the money.) Is it that a film’s music is always subservient to the image, always supporting in its role? Or is it, as Stravinsky railed, that music “explains nothing” and should stay out of storytelling altogether?
The compounded effect of these questions is a lingering suspicion among many that film composers are fundamentally less serious than their concert-hall counterparts. To Angel Gil-Ordóñez, conductor and music director of PostClassical Ensemble, this is a script worth flipping.
“When it comes to film composers, they’re often victims of their own success,” Gil-Ordóñez said over lunch recently. He was referring specifically to Nino Rota, the Italian composer who wrote more than 150 film scores for directors including Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli and perhaps most notably Federico Fellini. (Rota scored all of Fellini’s films until the composer died in 1979.)
Born Giovanni Rota Rinaldi in Milan in 1911, the composer was something of a child prodigy, writing his first oratorio at 11. He took up composition studies first in Milan and then at the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia in Rome. After two influential years spent in the United States at the Curtis Institute of Music (a move advised by Arturo Toscanini), Rota returned to Italy and started scoring film in the 1950s. At one point, he was producing up to 10 scores a year.
To American ears, Rota is best (if not exclusively) known for scoring the first two installments of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy — its iconic themes looming so large over his oeuvre that you can barely hear anything else. (Especially if you’re hearing it via Paulie Walnuts’s car horn.)
Gil-Ordóñez often explores intersections of music and the cinema in his programs. But for “Beyond the Godfather,” PostClassical’s season-closing concert at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Tuesday (which proceeds to the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Meyerhoff Auditorium the following day), he’ll train the focus on Rota’s concert music — of which there’s quite a lot. Rota composed five ballets, 10 operas and more than 80 orchestral, choral and chamber works.
In recent years, it has become less novel to spot symphonic works of composers conventionally typecast as “film composers,” such as John Williams, Alex North and Erich Korngold. But “Beyond” goes deep.
In addition to selections from “The Godfather,” Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Fellini’s “La Strada,” “Amarcord,” “La Dolce Vita” and “8½,” the program will detour away from the sounds of cinema.
These works include Rota’s Concerto for Strings (composed in 1965, revised in 1977); the “Canzone con variazioni” from his 1959 “Nonetto” (an example of his attachment to themes and variations); selections from the ballet suite “Le Moliére imaginaire”; and “Castel del monte,” an unavoidably cinematic work for French horn and orchestra, to be played by soloist Christy Klenke.
Gil-Ordóñez assembled the program with help from Rota scholar Francesco Lombardi and film scholar Claudia Gorbman, a professor emerita of film studies at the University of Washington at Tacoma, who serves as the evening’s “guest curator.”
The title of Gorbman’s 1987 book, “Unheard Melodies” — a founding document in the study of film music — hints at the strange role and responsibility of music in film, the way it draws attention but eludes listening.
“When I’m watching a film, I’m not listening to the music; it’s part of a larger dramatic structure” Gorbman said in a preconcert discussion held over Zoom on Wednesday. “So to be able to foreground these melodies, to not have the distraction of a narrative, characters and images is really special. You can understand the inherent beauty of his composing.”
At the same talk, Robynn Stilwell, a Georgetown University music professor, noted that Rota thrived in the realm of film music because of his skill with the fundamental tools of orchestral composition: Rota loved a leitmotif, a theme and variations, small-scale repetition and large-scale development.
“Something about film music is that it often doesn’t have that almost geometrical structure we get from other types of music,” Stilwell said. “One, because it doesn’t need it — the visuals help provide structure. But two, the music actually needs to be flexible. Phrases and themes often don’t come to a close; they’re open-ended.”
In his orchestral works, these structures reassert themselves without fencing in Rota’s imagination. In the composer’s plainspoken but gently nuanced melodies, a magical simplicity takes hold — channeling both a dark humor and a childlike innocence. “You can almost always imagine his melodies in a music box,” Stilwell said.
Gil-Ordóñez also suspects that Rota appreciated the immediacy of writing for films — the flash revisions and pressing deadlines. That is, he loved the work part of the work.
“Films were for Rota an easy way to develop his talents,” Gil-Ordóñez said, “but maybe it also has to do with his appetite — this feeling like he had to write something.”