Once Upon a Time in Italy: Music from the most famous Italian films
The most beautiful songs are born under the Italian sun. The same legendary Italian musicality that gave birth to opera in the 17th century was responsible for the genesis of the film soundtrack in the 20th century – a unique phenomenon by which music broke free from the silver screen and lives on on records... and in concert halls.
Italy was one of the countries in Europe where the film industry started developing right from the start of the 20th century.
Yet Italian cinema only entered its "Golden Age" after World War II with the generation of representatives of the movement called neorealism and their slightly younger contemporaries who stretched the neorealist tenets into existential or sometimes even surrealistic proportions. With these directors came into the film studios a multitude of composers, whose names – along with their music and indeed even the films for which they selected or wrote said music – are today mostly forgotten save, as is so often the case, for one: Nino Rota.
Nino Rota (1911-1979) had a classical music education, but thanks to his lucky stars he very soon got the opportunity to also gain a footing in the world of musicals, entertainment and folk music, and soon thereafter put this all to work for movie directors, of which his work with Federico Fellini became a legendary tandem, together producing a total of fifteen films.
In the programme of this concert evening we take a look into the musical world of Fellini's films La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Amarcord. The music naturally differs in each one, but they do have a common attribute: a kaleidoscopic musical imagination that enables rapid changes in expression and mood. In short, Rota's music resonates with the emotional core of both the characters and the audience.
Many other directors also invited Nino Rota to collaborate with them and the composer created over 170 film scores. He composed the music for several films by Luchino Visconti – for his historical drama The Leopard (based on the eponymous novel by G. T. di Lampedusa) he made use of an unpublished waltz by Giuseppe Verdi. The melody from the films The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet number among his "immortal" works.
A special category in the history of Italian cinema is the "Spaghetti Western" and related action and detective films from the 1960s. Riding this wave was director Sergio Leone and alongside him his former schoolmate, composer Ennio Morricone.
Ennio Morricone (b. 1928) also had a classical music education, stylistically geared toward the modernist avant-garde, and he too was intimately familiar with the world of popular music – from a young age he had filled in for his father as a trumpet player in the bars of Rome.
Thanks to his talent for visualising sound, he soon made his way as an arranger sought out by television, radio, theatre and eventually also film production teams, which paved the way for original music gigs as well. Today the nearly ninety-year-old composer is the king of movie music, not just in terms of number of film scores composed – for than 500 (!) – but above all due to his inexhaustible melodic inventiveness, instrumental ingenuity and the courage – sometimes bordering on audacity – to experiment.
Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone collaborated on eight films. Some of the melodies even became hits beyond the silver screen – for example the famous coyote song from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in the unique popularisation by Hugo Montenegro or the main theme from the film Once Upon a Time in the West in the original with the composer's "house" singer Edda Dell'Orso, today in the concert repertoire of many others. For the music to Leone's last film Once Upon a Time in America, Ennio Morricone was nominated for a Golden Globe and won the top prize from the British Academy and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Morricone was nominated for an Oscar five times – for a long time neither Morricone's fans nor the composer himself could accept the fact that he did not win it for Roland Joffé's film The Mission, because even after thirty years it is an exceptionally powerful film with compelling music. The movies Cinema Paradiso and Maléna are united by the figure of director Giuseppe Tornatore, who followed Sergio Leone in choosing Ennio Morricone as his personal composer, and their collaboration continues to date. For Cinema Paradiso he also invited the composer's son Andrea, who chose a truly difficult path – to follow in his father's footsteps as a film composer.
It is no easier for the others to step out of the shadow of classics Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone – Luis Bacalov (b. 1933) and Nicola Piovani (b. 1946) have each worked once with Federico Fellini and attesting to their profile as composers who, in the packed ring of cinematic music, have managed to cross over from mere craft into artistic distinction, are the Oscars for Bacalov's music to Il Postino (directed by Michael Radford) and for Piovani's score to the movie Life is Beautiful (directed by Roberto Benigni). Both films are from the 1990s and the good news is that they are keeping up the tradition of Italian film music and continuing to carry the torch.
A recording of the concert is broadcast by ČRo Dvojka.
