Nino Rota

Music, Film and Feeling

Richard Dyer

• Editorial: British Film Institute
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717360
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film History & Criticism

Nino Rota is one of the most important composers in the history of cinema. Both popular and prolific, he wrote some of the most cherished and memorable of all film music – for The Godfather Parts I and II, The Leopard, the Zeffirelli Shakespeares, nearly all of Fellini and for more than 140 popular Italian movies. Yet his music does not quite work in the way that we have come to assume music in film works: it does not seek to draw us in and identify, nor to overwhelm and excite us. In itself, in its pretty but reticent melodies, its at once comic and touching rhythms, and in its relation to what's on screen, Rota's music is close and affectionate towards characters and events but still restrained, not detached but ironically attached. In this major new study of Rota's film career, Richard Dyer gives a detailed account of Rota's aesthetic, suggesting it offers a new approach to how we understand both film music and feeling and film more broadly. He also provides a first full account in English of Rota's life and work, linking it to notions of plagiarism and pastiche, genre and convention, irony and narrative. Rota's practice is related to some of the major ways music is used in film, including the motif, musical reference, underscoring and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music, revealing how Rota both conforms to and undermines standard conceptions. In addition, Dyer considers the issue of gay cultural production, Rota's favourte genre, comedy, and his productive collaboration with the director Federico Fellini.

1

Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche

THE GODFATHER, IL GATTOPARDO and THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

In 1972 the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused the nomination of The Godfather for an Oscar in the category of Best Original Dramatic Score. They argued that for the love theme its composer, Nino Rota, had re-used music from an earlier film, Fortunella (1957), and thus that the Godfather score could not be deemed original.¹ They seem not to have realised that the main theme is based on a motif already used by Rota in Fellini-Satyricon (1969) and Michael’s theme on one used for the funeral at the end of I clowns (1970).²

Many, then and subsequently, would consider the music for The Godfather among the finest of all film scores, certainly more distinguished than the others nominated (Images, Napoleon and Samantha, The Poseidon Adventure, Sleuth³ (all 1972)); bizarrely, the score that won was for Limelight, a film made twenty years earlier, whose nomination was accepted on a technicality.⁴ Besides, Rota had after all re-used his own music, and when he did so again, in Godfather II (1974), he was awarded the Oscar. Yet Godfather II contains very much more of his music for The Godfather than the latter does of Fortunella. Nonetheless, on this occasion the Academy saw no problems of unoriginality in his nomination and award. They probably did not know that several of the new elements in Godfather II were also recycled: the song the child Vito sings while waiting in quarantine on Ellis Island is taken from Rota’s music for Visconti’s 1957 stage production of Goldoni’s L’impresario delle Smirne; the theme for Kay is taken from his music for the television series Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (1965), hugely successful and fondly remembered in Italy but unknown outside it; and the important new motif, known as ‘The Immigrant’, reworked the fourth (andante sostenuto ed espressivo) of his fifteen Preludes for piano (1964).

In its own terms, the Academy’s decision on the first Godfather was correct. The primary burden of ‘original’ in the category’s designation is that the music be expressly written for the film in question. Rota’s use of music from Fortunella for The Godfather was not in this sense original; it was, in the most exacting sense of the term, plagiarism. He knew he was using music he’d used before and does not appear to have made that clear to Coppola or Paramount. They thought they were getting new (‘original’) music from him; he knew they weren’t, and he presumably presumed that no one would realise because Fortunella was a pretty obscure film. Presenting something already heard as never heard before in circumstances where you assume you can get away with it are hallmarks of plagiarism. However, the Godfather–Fortunella link is only a point of entry to a trail of connections, which in turn open onto readily confused meanings of (un)originality, to wit, plagiarism and pastiche.

It seems to have been a product of a kind of laziness. Rota was, as always, extremely busy when Coppola made a late request for a theme for the Sicily sequence. Deeming it ‘inutile che mi spremessi le miningi’ (‘a waste of time racking my brains’) to come up with a new tune, Rota pulled out a number of old ones and, ‘secondo il mio solito’ (‘as is my way’), ran them past a few friends to see which they thought best (Comuzio and Vecchi, 1986: 10). In any case, said Rota later, all composers re-use material, sometimes an idea jotted down waiting for the right moment, but other times ‘an idea already made use of but transformed, re-elaborated’.⁵ It is only one theme out of the whole score, about twenty minutes in a nearly three-hour film, and played very differently from its previous use. In Fortunella it appears first as a fast march, played with the kind of reckless enthusiasm that Rota often used to suggest the circus or amateur town band; Rota (Comuzio and Vecchi, 1986: 10) refers to it as ‘una marcetta sfottente’ (‘a nice little send-up of a march’). It then goes through a number of variations, including ones much closer in tempo to its reappearance in The Godfather (although in context even the more sentimental variant is either comic or sad, neither of which it is in The Godfather). At no point is it used, as in The Godfather, in an arrangement for mandolins and strings, nor played fortissimo over the images or in relation to the romantic evocation of landscape and love. Aside from the tune itself, the actual sequence of the melodic line, it is really quite far musically and affectively from its appearance in The Godfather. This is unlike the re-use of the song from L’ impresario delle Smirne in Godfather II, where the feeling evoked in both cases is very similar: in its earlier incarnation, it is an intensely melancholic serenade sung by a small, lonely boy in prison, just like Vito on Ellis Island.

All of the markers and mitigations of plagiarism in the Fortunella–Godfather case contrast with another instance of Rota’s re-use of a (different) melody in Fortunella. In a contemporary review, ‘m.m.’ (Morando Morandini) observed that in Fortunella, Rota ‘arriva al punto di plagiare se stesso’ (‘goes so far as to plagiarise himself’).⁶ However, unless plagiarism means here (as it often does) stale but not literal repetition of previous work, only one element of the Fortunella score actually comes from an earlier film and thus might on the face of it be thought auto-plagiarism. This is a fanfare-like motif composed for Il bidone. However, as the latter was made only two years earlier (1955) and was directed by one of Fortunella’s scriptwriters, Federico Fellini, it is unlikely that no one knew what Rota was up to. The theme is very little altered between the two films, punctuating events on and off; the bitter, and in the end tragic, feeling of the earlier film, carried in this theme, makes available an undertow to the more whimsical tone of the later one. Not only did those making Fortunella know the theme was being re-used, but in fact the film works better if the audience pick up on it too. Declared and purposeful re-use is not plagiarism.

Compared to this, Rota’s re-use of a Fortunella theme in The Godfather is indisputably, technically, plagiarism yet all the same it seems pretty innocent at the level of intention and affect. As already noted, it is musically very different, really only involving a melody, and constituting only a small part of the score. It only became plagiarism that mattered when it started to make money. Much to Rota’s surprise, Paramount chose the last minute, Fortunella-derived theme for the short Sicily sequence as ‘The Theme from The Godfather’. It was widely used in the promotion of the film, including in the form of the hit ballad ‘Speak Softly Love’ (words by Larry Kusik), recorded by, among many others, Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams and Al Martino, who plays the crooner Johnny Fontane in the film.⁷ It thus became seen as the principal musical element of the film, sidelining the film’s other much more pervasive and expressly written motifs and perhaps giving the Sicily sequence an undue significance. Paramount had reduced the score to a single marketable element, a tune that could be made into a song. It was this though that caused a problem for the Academy.

The Godfather: Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) croons for Connie Corleone (Talia Shire) on her wedding day

It is in fact rather surprising that the latter had even heard of Fortunella. In Italy it had been a flop, albeit a high-profile one, involving as it did a notable line-up: Eduardo De Filippo, the most famous name in Italian theatre, as director and co-star; Giulietta Masina and Alberto Sordi, very well-established stars by this time; an American star, Paul Douglas; Fellini as one of the scriptwriters;⁸ and Rota’s music. Masina, Fellini and Rota were riding high from the success of La strada (1956), which had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and the character of Nanda (nicknamed ‘Fortunella’) is clearly built on Gelsomina, the winsome character played by Masina in La strada. Rota was also now internationally known for his music for War and Peace (1957). None of this though could secure Fortunella art-house success abroad any more than it could box-office success in Italy. The tune that Paramount had promoted to main-theme status and that was under fire from the Academy was from a film most people had never even heard of. The Academy only learnt of the prior existence of the theme from a telegram, signed by ‘I compositori italiani di colonne sonore’ (‘The Italian film music composers’). It seems probable that Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of Fortunella, was behind this, as he hoped to make money from the huge success of ‘Speak Softly Love’ by claiming his rights in it, even though he had never paid Rota for the music for Fortunella, nor even got him to sign a contract (Lombardi, 2000: 152). In short, plagiarism was an issue because Paramount promoted a tune to main theme status and put words to it to make it at once a money-spinner and a form of advertising, but only really became one when Di Laurentiis thought he could profit from it too. The underlying economic imperative for both Paramount and Di Laurentiis was in turn wittily highlighted when in 1972 the record company Cora reissued the Fortunella soundtrack on LP with the by-line (in much bigger letters than the title itself) ‘La madrina del padrino’ (‘The Godmother of the Godfather’), thus brazenly milking the scandal, and money-making potential, of the accusation of plagiarism.

Rota had never particularly wanted to write the music for The Godfather. By 1971, with a string of successes behind him, to say nothing of a very active life as a composer and teacher, he was not interested in taking on yet more work, especially with a then-unknown American director, Francis Ford Coppola.⁹ The latter, against the wishes of the studio, who wanted Henry Mancini (Cowie, 1997: 63–4), went specially to visit Rota in Rome to beg him to take it on; when Rota, to shake him off, imposed extravagant conditions (such as that he would only compose the music when the film was finished, would never himself come to the USA and would send someone else to conduct it and adjust the score in synchronising it for the image), Coppola went ahead and accepted. It is interesting that he so much wanted Rota (and that, with more promise than track record behind him, he was able to get his way with Paramount). Rota had only once, with War and Peace, worked on a Hollywood film, and then not actually in Hollywood as it was shot in Rome, and though he had worked in many genres, including one or two psychological thrillers, he had never done a Mafia or gangster film. Coppola, however, did not want him to write action thriller music. Rather, as Rota recounted (in De Santi, 1992: 104–5), he wanted music that would evoke, rather broadly, even vaguely, Sicily, such as to suggest how far away it was from America.

The Fortunella score repackaged by Cora Records as ‘The Godmother of the Godfather’

In short, what Coppola wanted from Rota was pastiche, music that, precisely by not actually being Sicilian, suggested Sicily as an idea, that at once communicated directly the feeling of Sicilianness while indicating the fact that this is a notion carried in the fading memories and passed-on values of the characters. Pastiche is able to convey the emotional pull of this notion even while signalling it as a notion, and it is precisely the affective power of everything suggested by this Sicilianness (notably family, loyalty, honour, male bonding) that draws the characters (and especially Michael) inexorably into crime and violence. Rota provided this sense of culturally and historically constructed feeling, above all in the film’s real main theme, a slow waltz, first heard on a solo trumpet recorded with considerable echo, to give a blowsy sound suggesting faraway, nostalgia, longing, loneliness, melancholy.

The theme that caused all the trouble for the Academy (now usually referred to as the love theme) ratchets pastiche up a further notch. The main theme insinuates itself into the texture of the soundtrack, often reticently. The love theme, withheld for just under an hour and three-quarters, appears only in the Sicily sequence; the orchestra plunges straight into the melody, first with gloopy massed strings, then augmented by mandolins insistently to the fore, thus combining, almost to excess, the folkloristic/touristic aural image of Sicily and the conventions of Hollywoodian romanticism. It seems to underline the fantasy of Sicily that the character of Michael experiences, even when, indeed only when, he is actually in Sicily – a fantasy coloured by the American culture that he is in reality so much a part of. You don’t have to ...