Anonimo Veneziano

Stelvio Cipriani wrote the score for Anonimo veneziano, Enrico Maria Salerno's 1970 film about a dying conductor who returns to Venice to see his estranged wife. The main theme became a hit independently of the film and was recorded in dozens of versions through the 1970s. Its harmonic outline is built from the Adagio of the oboe concerto in D minor by Alessandro Marcello — a Venetian source for a Venetian subject — and Cipriani was afterwards drawn into litigation over the borrowing. He worked mainly in Italian genre cinema, writing well over a hundred scores.