Nino Rota: 100th Birthday on 3 December 2011

Nino Rota once said: ’Composing does not seem like work for me.’ This could be because music was already a completely familiar language to Rota from his early childhood; he experimented with composition at the same time as learning to write and began singing while learning to speak. His first song, La mia prima canzone scribbled on a piece of paper, shows that his writing and musical notation were both somewhat untidy. The creation of music was however the most natural thing in the world for the infant prodigy born in Milan. His mother was intelligent enough not to develop the ambitions of a ’stage mother’ and insisted on a solid and child-oriented education for her son. The highly gifted boy soon mastered instrumentation and form alongside learning to conduct a large orchestra: at the precocious age of eleven, he stood in front of a professional orchestra and conducted the first performance of his large-scale oratorio L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista.

As an adult, the exceptionally gifted melodic inventor devoted himself almost exclusively to the composition of film music and gained worldwide fame with his approximately 150 soundtracks. These works are complemented by a no less impressive oeuvre comprising concert works, sacred music and music theatre compositions which have been somewhat upstaged in the public eye by his film compositions. Some works were never performed and others not even published. Rota did not see any difference in the quality of the two halves of his output:

There are not two Nino Rotas. Admittedly, the music you have just heard is less well known than the principal melody of Armacord, but for me it is the same music. It is my music. It is others who see the difference.

The interest in Rota’s ’serious’ music only really picked up after the composers death and has continued to grow. Schott regularly issues first publications of works not previously available, the latest example being the Allegro danzante for clarinet and piano; next up is the publication of Il richiamo, a quintet for soprano and strings. We have recently issued a catalogue of all Rota works available at Schott (right) which we would be happy to send you free of charge.

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