Nino Rota

Between the concert hall and the cinema Nino Rota kept no hierarchy. Born in Milan in 1911 into a musical family, he wrote an oratorio as a child, studied with Giacomo Orefice and Ildebrando Pizzetti and then with Alfredo Casella at Santa Cecilia in Rome, and — on Toscanini's encouragement — spent 1930 to 1932 at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, taking composition with Rosario Scalero and conducting with Fritz Reiner. A degree in literature from the University of Milan followed. He wrote operas, ballets, symphonies, concertos, chamber and sacred music, and directed the conservatory in Bari from 1950 until his death; the wider public knows him through more than 150 film scores. The sequence made with Fellini — La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, Amarcord — is inseparable from the films themselves, and he worked also with Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo De Filippo. The Godfather Part II brought him an Academy Award. Marches, waltzes, circus bands, jazz and operatic gesture share the same page in his scores, and the tenderness and the irony arrive together. He died in 1979. The boyhood oratorio was L'infanzia di San Giovanni Battista, set down at eleven, and a comic opera, Il Principe Porcaro, followed two years after it. The Milan degree, taken in 1937, came with a dissertation on Renaissance music, and the Oscar for The Godfather Part II was awarded in 1975. Ten operas and five ballets belong to the concert side of the catalogue.