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La Dolce Vita: The Music of Italian Cinema
T
he Italian film industry emerged in the
early years of the 20th century and
achieved a moment of distinction as a component of Italian Futurism in the decade of
the 1910s. Apart from that, early Italian films
remained mostly modest entertainments
aimed at a strictly domestic audience. Their
conservative tendency was officially reinforced during the years of Mussolini’s Fascism, when the immense studios of Cinecittà
were constructed in Rome as Italy’s answer
to Hollywood.
Italian cinema came into its own just after
the end of World War II with the emergence of
the Italian Neorealist filmmakers, who often
depicted the economic challenges and moral
desperation of those times through films set in
poor or working-class neighborhoods. The
films were often shot on-site — a practical necessity since much of the Cinecittà complex
had been damaged in the war — and frequently employed non-professional actors.
Some of the enduringly great names of Italian cinema emerged at this time, including
Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Cesare
Zavattini, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, and Federico
Fellini. Most of the work of these figures
evolved toward other cinematic explorations,
but the films produced during the flourishing of Neorealism in the 1940s and early ’50s
were so extraordinary, and their influence so
persistent, that those years are still viewed
as the Golden Age of Italian Cinema. This
concert visits some of the notable films created by Italian Neorealist filmmakers and
In the Artists’ Words
Italian director Giampiero Solari, who created the visual screenplay for La Dolce Vita: The Music of Italian Cinema, describes it as “a concert where the audience is taken on a musical journey through the most important sound tracks of Italian cinema.” He adds:
The uniqueness of the project is to reinterpret the relationship between music and movies, where the images usually assume the leading role. In this case the visuals are conceived to increase the emotional power
of the music, played live by the orchestra, like a sort of movie of the sound tracks, which allows the audience
to experience the atmosphere of the original movies.
Solari collaborated with visual artist / set designer Giuseppe Ragazzini, whose designs, through the use
of mega projections and a “mapping” technique, lend the pictorial elements a theatrical aspect. He says:
From a visual point of view La Dolce Vita has
been a hard but very exciting challenge: the
music of the show was originally created for
some of the most important masterpieces of
the Italian cinema … Using my collages, painting, and animations, we found a completely different language, somehow evocative and not
too abstract, in order to accompany the music
and set this amazing and unique performance.
A Ragazzini visual from La Dolce Vita evokes the canals of Venice
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— The Editors
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the figures who emerged in their wake, approaching them through the musical scores
that did so much to bring those now-classic
films alive on the screen.
When one thinks of the great collaborations
between film directors and composers, a
handful of names are likely to come to mind:
Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev, Alfred
Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, François
Truffaut and Georges Delerue, Steven Spielberg and John Williams. At least two duos
come from the roster of the Italian A-list: Sergio
Leone and Ennio Morricone, and, above all
others, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota.
It seems that Fellini (1920–93) met Rota in
1951, when they first worked together on Lo
sceicco bianco (The White Sheik); it was released the following year. From then until
Rota’s death, 28 years later, they collaborated
on no fewer than 16 films, including such
classics as La strada (1954), Le notte di Cabiria
(Nights of Cabiria, 1957), La Dolce Vita (1960),
Otto e mezzo (a.k.a. 8½, 1963), Juliet of the
Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965), Fellini
Satyricon (1969), Amarcord (1973), and Prova
IN SHORT
Nino Rota
Born: December 3, 1911, in Rome, Italy
Died: April 10, 1979, in Rome
Theme from Amarcord
Music composed: 1973
Film premiered: December 18, 1973, in Italy; September 19,
1974, in the United States; Federico Fellini, director
Valzer del Commiato from The Leopard
Music composed: 1962–63
Film premiered: March 28, 1963, in Italy; July 15, 1963, in
the United States; Luchino Visconti, director
Suite from La Dolce Vita
Music composed: 1959
Film premiered: February 3, 1960, in Italy; April 19, 1961, in
the United States; Federico Fellini, director
Suite from 8½
Music composed: 1962-63
Film premiered: February 14, 1963, in Italy, under the title Otto
e mezzo; June 25, 1963, in the United States, as 8½; Federico
Fellini, director
Estimated durations: Theme from Amarcord, ca. 4 minutes;
Valzer del Commiato, ca. 3 minutes; Suite from La Dolce Vita,
ca. 7 minutes; Suite from 8½, ca. 6 minutes
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d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1979).
Rota’s scores for Fellini films represent
only a modest fraction of his work in the
genre. All told, Rota produced some 150 film
scores, including sound tracks for all the
leading Italian directors of post-World War II
cinema (Soldati, De Filippo, Visconti,
Pietrangeli, Castellani, and Zeffirelli among
them), as well as for leading French, American, German, and Soviet directors.
Nino Rota was already composing music by
the age of eight, and at 12 an oratorio he had
written, on the theme of John the Baptist, was
premiered to very positive reviews. That year
he began studies in composition, first with Giacomo Orefice at Milan Conservatory, then privately with Ildebrando Pizzetti, and with
Alfredo Casella at the Accademia Nazionale
di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Conductor Arturo
Toscanini recommended him to Rosario
Scalero at The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia,
who took him on as a composition student;
he studied conducting concurrently with
Fritz Reiner.
In 1932 Rota returned to Italy and let loose
a stream of classical works. Over the ensuing
decades these would include three symphonies, nearly a dozen concertos, a good
deal of chamber music, numerous ballet
scores, and a handful of operas. By and large,
these display a musical language rooted in
the mainstream of post-Romanticism, a style
that was easily digestible for popular audiences in the concert hall and that served him
well in his music for the cinema.
Rota’s compositions carry an instantly recognizable fingerprint, and certain of his formulas were adopted into the lingua franca of
Italian film composition, as listeners will
likely notice in the course of this program. Entirely typical is the famous Theme from
Amarcord, Fellini’s semi-autobiographical
Angels and Muses
Notwithstanding what some commentators have identified as a musicality in the unrolling of Fellini’s films,
and the important role that Nino Rota’s scores play in their realization, the director showed little interest in
music outside the studio. Rota stated in an interview that Fellini,
has never gone to an opera or to a concert and he does not like to hear music; on the contrary, music bothers him because he feels it so intensely and he does not want to be forced to follow it, because he only
wants to follow his images.
To another interviewer, Rota explained that Fellini
nonetheless took an active role in the creation of film
scores. He detailed the process:
We’ll sit down at the piano, like always, and make
music. I’ll play some themes, if I have an idea ready
I’ll play it for him. Sometimes we actually compose
together. Fellini gives me an outline, not as a musician, but with a clear rhythmic foundation, maybe with
a melodic entry. In short, he suggests an initial form
of musical expression. … [Fellini] gives more weight
to the music than I myself would. In scenes with a
musical comment, he often irritates the sound technicians by eliminating all natural sounds, all realism.
Nino Rota conducting
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recollection of coming of age during the 1930s.
The film’s title means “I remember” in the dialect of the northern part of the Emilia-Romagna, and Fellini used his film to express
some of the moral outrage he felt over Mussolini, the Roman Catholic church’s complicity in supporting him, and the Italian people
for letting it all happen. Still, Fellini filters his
tale through the balm of memory, yielding a
narrative that is often comical and dreamlike.
Rota’s theme is romantic and sentimental, but
he invests the tune with a touch of yearning
via flatted intervals and a lightly dotted accompaniment, and he enriches his melody
with broken intervals that imply an elaboration of simple counterpoint. What’s more, he
is repeatedly drawn to re-examine this melody
from new perspectives, turning the piece into
a sort of theme-with-variations.
La Dolce Vita follows a journalist for a gossip magazine (Marcello Mastroianni) who
spends a week in Rome looking for the good
life of love and contentment, encountering
the likes of Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimée.
Rota captured the film’s leisurely optimism by
providing unhurried music. His score also reinforces the film’s role as a valentine to the
city of Rome by borrowing from, and building
on, material in Ottorino Respighi’s famous orchestral suite of tone poems The Pines of
Rome. (The main theme’s allusion to the Kurt
Weill song “Ballad of Mack the Knife” also invites speculation about ulterior messages that
may be encapsulated in Rota’s score.)
Fellini’s 8 ½ also has an autobiographical
slant, telling the story of a famous film director (obviously himself, but portrayed by Mastroianni) whose output to date consisted of
six feature films, two short movies, and a codirected collaboration — his oeuvre therefore
totaling 8 ½ films. The 1963 release received
the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Rota’s scores for Fellini sometimes include snippets from pre-existing
classics. A scene in 8 ½, for example, elides
from a quotation of Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries” to Rossini’s Barber of Seville Overture, a pungent juxtaposition of the ultraserious and the ultra-comical.
Only six weeks after the premiere of 8 ½
came the first screening of The Leopard, Visconti’s film after the historical novel of
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The novel
(published in 1958, a year after its author’s
death), is based on the history of his own
family, and particularly on a period in which
his noble ancestor, the Prince of Salina (portrayed by Burt Lancaster) tries, with dignity,
to uphold his family’s social status despite
its crumbling monetary fortune in 1860s
Sicily. The Valzer del Commiato (LeaveTaking Waltz) from Rota’s score evokes the
era through a carefree quick waltz, reminiscent of operetta.
The son of a professional trumpet player,
Ennio Morricone excelled on that same instrument as a young musician and graduated from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa
Cecilia as a trumpet major in 1946. In 1954
the school also granted him a diploma in
composition, following extensive study with
the noted composer Goffredo Petrassi. Already active as a theater composer, Morricone began making arrangements for radio
and soon entered the world of film, as an uncredited ghost writer for more famous composers. He penned his first attributed film
score in 1961 and within a few years became
attached to the director with whose films his
music would become most identified: Sergio
Leone. Morricone would provide the music
for five of Leone’s “spaghetti westerns” from
1964 to 1971.
Morricone’s oeuvre, meanwhile, extends
to more than 400 films, for which he has
worked with a succession of the world’s most
admired directors, including Pier Paolo
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Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski,
Adrian Lyne, and Pedro Almodóvar. He was
awarded a Lifetime Achievement Academy
Award in 2007. Like Rota, Morricone’s fame
as a film composer has overshadowed his
parallel achievements in concert music,
which by now exceeds 100 titles. Many of these
pieces employ the avant-garde procedures of
contemporary music, and some reflect his interest in experimental jazz, which he actively
performed for many years as a member of the
free-improvisation ensemble Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
One of the Leone films that was most
formative to Morricone’s career was the 1968
western Once Upon a Time in the West, a
joint Italian-American production from Paramount Pictures with a cast that included
Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, and Claudia Cardinale. Morricone’s
score is strewn with leitmotifs relating to the
various characters, a procedure that did much
to help bind the film together. The music was
composed in its entirety before Leone began
shooting the film, and he sometimes played
the score in the background as the actors performed their scenes, to help inspire the mood
he was trying to capture. The sound track, including the song “Your Love,” became immensely successful, and its recording has
sold some 10 million copies worldwide.
IN SHORT
Ennio Morricone
Born: November 10, 1928, in Rome, Italy
“Your Love” from Once Upon a Time in the West
Music composed: 1968
Lyrics: Original by Maria Travia; English lyrics by Audrey Stainton
Film premiered: December 21, 1968, in Italy; May 29, 1969, in the
United States; Sergio Leone, director
“Non Penso a Te” from Incontro
Music composed: 1971
Film premiered: October 29, 1971, in Italy; apparently not
released for distribution in the United States, but released in Hong
Kong under the English title Romance; Piero Schivazappa, director
“Se” from Cinema Paradiso
Music composed: 1988, by Ennio Morricone jointly with — or
seemingly mostly by — his son Andrea Morricone (born October 10,
1964, in Rome)
Film premiered: September 29, 1988, in Italy; February 2, 1990,
the United States; Giuseppe Tornatore, director
Estimated durations: “Your Love,” ca. 4 minutes; “Non Penso a Te,” ca.
4 minutes; “Se,” ca. 4 minutes
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Less known is Piero Schivazappa’s Incontro, a melodrama that met with commercial
success in Italy but never penetrated the export market. The plot concerns a 30-something, wealthy, married woman from Rome
who gets involved with an alluring 20-yearold fellow from Parma. Learning of the affair,
her husband forces her to choose between
him and the boyfriend. By the time the
woman finally decides — in the boyfriend’s
favor — the young lover has committed suicide. Morricone’s score includes the song
“Non Penso a Te.”
The final Morricone entry in this concert
is “Se,” the love theme from Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, the story of a
filmmaker who recalls his boyhood and the
beginnings of his passion for motion pictures in post-World War II Sicily, thanks to
encouragement from the village projectionist. The film won an Academy Award as Best
Foreign Language Film in 1989, while the
score was honored with Great Britain’s
BAFTA Award. The film score was a joint production of Ennio Morricone and his son Andrea, who was schooled at the Accademia
Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and went
on to conduct orchestras in Europe and the
Americas and to compose nearly 20 film
scores on his own.
As a child, Stelvio Cipriani became fascinated with the organ in his local church, and
the parish priest provided instruction that
readied him for the Accademia Nazionale di
Santa Cecilia. His earliest steps as a professional musician involved gigs on cruise
ships. That brought him, by chance, in contact with the jazz great Dave Brubeck, with
whom he studied in the United States and
who proved to be a formative influence. Like
Morricone, Cipriani established himself in
the movie business as a composer of scores
for “spaghetti westerns” in the 1960s, but in
1970 he achieved an international hit in a different genre with Enrico Maria Salerno’s romantic tragedy The Anonymous Venetian.
The film marked the directorial debut of
Salerno, a respected theater and film actor
who would go on to direct a handful of films.
This sensitive tearjerker traces the reunion,
in Venice, of a married, but long-separated
couple. He is an oboist in the orchestra of the
opera house La Fenice; she is now living
IN SHORT
Stelvio Cipriani
Born: August 30, 1937, in Rome, Italy
Suite from The Anonymous Venetian
Music composed: 1970
Film premiered: September 30, 1970, in Italy; September 14, 1971,
in the United States; Enrico Maria Salerno, director
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
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with another man and is not aware that the
reason for her husband’s invitation to visit is
that he is dying of some incurable disease. It
turns out they still love each other — very
sad, but at least they are in Venice, which is
unspeakably picturesque. A thread of the
plot involves the husband playing a recently
unearthed piece of Baroque music for the
oboe, a piece with no composer attribution
and therefore identified as the work of “The
Anonymous Venetian.” (In actuality, it is a
concerto by the Baroque composer Alessandro Marcello.) The score’s main theme was
turned into a song, “Venise va mourir,” that
was recorded by a raft of pop stars; a version
in English, “To Be the One You Love,” scored
a moderate hit for Nana Mouskouri in 1973.
The comedic tragedy Life Is Beautiful, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni,
struck gold at the 1999 Academy Awards,
winning in the categories of Best Foreign
Language Film, Best Actor (for Benigni), and
Best Original Dramatic Score (for Nicola
Piovani). The love of a father for his son
stands at the heart of this fable, in which an
Italian Jewish bookshop proprietor manages
to steer his little boy through the horrors of a
World War II concentration camp by convincing the child that he is participating in
an elaborate game and ceaselessly coaching
him toward victory that is at once fictional
and very real indeed. Some viewers were
shocked by the idea of infusing a Holocaust
drama with elements of comedy, but the film
nonetheless snared the hearts of viewers.
Today it holds its place as the fifth highestgrossing film in Italy (just above Il Postino)
and the second highest-grossing foreign film
in the United States.
The score’s composer earned a degree in
piano from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory
in Milan and later studied orchestration with
the esteemed Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. Among his 148 film scores are three he
composed for late Fellini films: Ginger e Fred
(1986), Intervista (1987), and La voce della
luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), which
IN SHORT
Nicola Piovani
Born: May 26, 1946, in Rome, Italy
Buongiorno Principessa, from Life Is Beautiful
Music composed: 1997
Film premiered: December 20, 1997, in Italy;
October 22, 1998, in the United States; Roberto
Benigni, director
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
A scene from Life Is Beautiful
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starred Benigni. For some years rumors circulated that Nicola Piovani was an alias for
Ennio Morricone; although there was no
truth to this, Piovani was known to exploit
this misapprehension in interviews and
public appearances. It became mostly a
moot point following the terrific success of
Life Is Beautiful.
An Argentine-Italian composer of Bulgarian
heritage, Luis Bacalov moved from his native Buenos Aires to Rome in the late 1950s
and began working as an assistant to Ennio
Morricone. Early in his career he composed
scores for the “spaghetti westerns” that were
flooding the Italian cinema market at that
time, but before long he was able to move on
to more diverse assignments. He currently
serves as artistic director of the Orchestra
della Magna Grecia in Taranto, Italy, and is active as a composer of major choral and orchestral pieces. One of the most prominent is
Misa Tango (1997), a Spanish-language variant
of the traditional Mass set to tango music, its
text altered (including excising most references to Christ) to allow it to be embraced as
an interfaith work by Christians, Muslims,
and Jews; the work was recorded by
Deutsche Grammophon with soprano Ana
María Martínez and tenor Plácido Domingo.
The composer of more than 150 film
scores, including Fellini’s City of Women in
1980, Bacalov was far better known in Europe than in the United States when, in 1995,
his music for Il Postino won the Academy
Award for Best Music (Original Dramatic
Score). The film, directed by Michael Radford, imagines the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, in political exile on an Italian island, befriending the local postman, who
gradually learns to appreciate poetry and
Neruda’s politics. Among Bacalov’s particular admirers is director Quentin Tarantino,
who included several tracks of Bacalov’s
music in his films Kill Bill (2003/04) and
Django Unchained (2012).
IN SHORT
Luis Bacalov
Born: March 30, 1933, in Buenos Aires, Argentina
“Mi Mancherai,” from Il Postino
Music composed: 1994
Film premiered: September 1, 1994, in Italy; June 14, 1995, in
the United States; Michael Radford, director
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
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