Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (review)

Admirers of Richard Dyer’s recent and thought-provoking book Pastiche (2007), which in places offered tantalising glimpses of the author’s formidable knowledge of Italian cinema and film music, will be delighted to discover that his latest monograph constitutes a thorough and in many respects groundbreaking study of one of the most highly regarded of all Italian film composers. Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling is not merely a factual account of Rota’s many creative achievements – though the book would have been a valuable enough addition to English-language film music literature even if it had restricted itself to such a remit – but by closely investigating the composer’s idiosyncratic approach to film scoring, Dyer also forces us to re-examine our own sometimes deeply entrenched assumptions of how music functions in conjunction with visual images. Readers of Pastiche will not be surprised to find that the aesthetic validity of non-original composition and self-recycling becomes a crucial consideration here, and these approaches are of considerable practical benefit to any composer working in the highly pressurised environment of the film studio.

Chapter 1 (‘Tales of Plagiarism and Pastiche’) gets straight to the heart of Rota’s characteristically pragmatic response to commercial pressures by exploring his canny attitude towards recycling and the composition of meaningful pastiche. Beginning by examining the well-known circumstances of Rota’s being barred from an Oscar nomination for Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) on the grounds of tacitly recycling musical material from an earlier project, Dyer shows how it was commercial pressure that both impeded Rota’s nomination but then subsequently catapulted his controversial theme into the limelight and accorded it an importance it arguably did not possess in the film itself. Sicily-associated pastiche here promoted ‘a sense of culturally and historically constructed feeling’ (8). Moving on to Visconti’s Il gattopardo (1963), also set in Sicily and for which the music was extensively recycled from Rota’s earlier concert music and film scores, Dyer demonstrates how pastiche musical romanticism seems appropriate to the film’s historical context (Risorgimento): what to some viewers might appear to be a stolidly old-fashioned film with disappointingly hackneyed music is viewed, more positively, as a unique attempt ‘to recreate a form that never in fact existed, the nineteenth-century film’ (10). Of course, anachronistic styles can be deployed either strategically (as Dyer argues they are here) or merely because they are conveniently formulaic and time-honoured ways of composing under pressure; in other filmic contexts, following traditional Hollywood models of film scoring, the use of pastiche may simply be regarded as ‘business as usual’ (15). Not surprisingly, at times it is difficult to decide which of these strategies Rota is using. Dyer freely admits that the composer occasionally seems guilty of a certain laziness by recoursing so readily to recycling, whether this involves self-borrowing from one project to another or even the tendency relentlessly to recycle thematic material within a single film score, and this realisation can inevitably weaken attempts to argue that such a modus operandi can at other times yield designedly impressive results.

The importance Dyer accords to considerations of pastiche and recycling is indicated by his postponement of his historical account of Rota’s life and creative career to chapter 2 (‘Nino Rota: Life, Works and Times’), a chapter with which many less imaginative authors would have commenced their book. Dyer effectively describes the 1920s stylistic context in which Rota studied with Pizzetti and Casella, and offers brief comparisons with the work of Rota’s contemporaries and thoughts on his neo-classical engagement with the styles of his historical forebears. The biographical sketch continues with Rota’s time in Philadelphia in the early 1930s, when he was exposed to US culture and enjoyed a close association with Copland before returning to Italy to teach, and then increasingly devoting himself to film projects from the 1940s onwards. Rota’s prodigious talent included a particular aptitude for a wide range of stylistic imitations and...