Nino Rota ( December 3, 1911 – April 10, 1979) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirellis Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppolas Godfathertrilogy, receiving the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II (1974). During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti and Zeffirelli, as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years. Rota was a renowned child prodigy—his first oratorio, Linfanzia di San Giovanni Battista, was written at age 11 and performed in Milan and Paris as early as 1923; his three-act lyrical comedy after Hans Christian Andersen, Il Principe Porcaro, was composed when he was just 13 and published in 1926. Encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Rota moved to the United States where he lived from 1930 to 1932. He won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, where he was taught conducting by Fritz Reiner.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 03:59:40 +0000