Nino Rota / Henry Mancini
Nino Rota Medley
Like most of the other composers featured on today’s program, Nino Rota displayed his musical talents at an early age. He began writing compositions when he was eight, and entered the Milan Conservatory in 1923, just before he turned 12 years old. His first opera, L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista (The Childhood of St. John the Baptist) was performed in the same year. At 19 he received a diploma in composition from the Accademia di S. Cecilia in Rome, then moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia from 1930 to 1932, to Milan University for a diploma in literature, and finally to the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he became a teacher and served as director from 1950 until 1978.
But though all these studies made him well-versed in musical theories of the
day–indeed, he became great friends with
Igor Stravinsky–Rota favored a style that focused on melody, spontaneity, and
emotional expression over harmonic complexities and formal innovations. From the
1940s to the 1970s, he wrote a number of successfully produced operas and
ballets. It was his film music, however, that earned him worldwide recognition.
In 1933 he had begun writing music for the movies, mainly the high-society
comedies and musicals popular at the time.
In 1952 he began his 30-year collaboration with Federico Fellini, writing the
music for Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik), and thereafter
scoring every one of the director’s movies until Rota’s death in 1979. Rota’s
works for Fellini include such classics as La Strada (1954), which Rota
later adapted into a ballet, La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1962), and
Amarcord (1974). He was in demand by other directors as well, including
Luchino Visconti (Rocco E I Suoi Fratelli, 1960), King Vidor (War and
Peace, 1956), Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet, 1968), and Francis
Ford Coppola (The Godfather, 1972). He earned an Oscar for best film
score for The Godfather, Part II, in 1974.
The medley of Rota’s work heard in today’s concert was arranged by another film composer whose career was just as stellar as Rota’s: Henry Mancini. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Mancini entered the Juilliard School of Music in 1942 where he studied classical composition, but his first love was big band and jazz. He scored his first film, an Abbot and Costello comedy called Lost in Alaska, in 1952, and soon paid homage to his big band heroes in scores for The Glen Miller Story (1954) and The Benny Goodman Story (1956). Mancini’s many film hits include 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with its ever-popular song, “Moon River;” Days of Wine and Roses (1961); Hatari (1962), featuring “The Baby Elephant Walk;” Charade (1963); and of course, The Pink Panther (1963).