Suite (Il Gattopardo)

For Visconti's Il Gattopardo, released in 1963, Rota wrote music that had to stand beside a ball sequence running some forty-five minutes and filmed in a Palermo palace. An unpublished Verdi waltz was found in manuscript and orchestrated for that scene, so that the Sicilian aristocracy of 1860 dances to music of its own decade rather than to a later composer's idea of it. Rota's own themes for the film are elegiac and deliberately old-fashioned. His collaboration with Visconti was more formal than the one with Fellini, and the results are correspondingly more restrained.