Nino Rota

Nino Rota wrote the music for every film Fellini made from 1952 until his death, and won an Oscar for The Godfather Part II after the Academy had disqualified his score for the first one. He was a child prodigy in Milan, composed an oratorio performed when he was eleven, studied under Ildebrando Pizzetti and Alfredo Casella, and was sent to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where Fritz Reiner taught him conducting and he shared a corridor with Samuel Barber. He then took a literature degree in Milan and spent most of his working life as director of the conservatory in Bari, which he ran for almost thirty years while writing film scores in the gaps. He wrote for around 150 films. With Fellini the method was collaborative to the point of oddity: Fellini would play recordings on set to set the rhythm of a scene, and Rota would produce circus marches and waltzes that undercut what was on screen, most famously in La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. Visconti and Zeffirelli used him too. The Godfather theme was ruled ineligible for the 1972 Academy Award because he had reused a melody from an earlier Italian comedy, and the sequel's score won in 1974. He also wrote ten operas and three symphonies and regarded that as his real work, which almost nobody else did. He composed quickly, was said never to have missed a deadline, and was known for absent-mindedness so complete that Fellini treated it as a form of concentration. He wrote the theme for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1968, which became a standard. He never learned to drive and disliked being interviewed. Fellini said after his death that he had lost the person he could talk to without explaining anything.

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