Nino Rota

About Nino Rota

Along with his equally prolific countryman Ennio Morricone, Italian film composer Nino Rota had an immeasurable impact on how audiences heard—and felt—some of the greatest movies ever made. Born in 1911 in Milan, Rota was a child prodigy who began composing music at the age of 11. Though his long career creating music for film began in the ’40s, his first film for Federico Fellini in 1952—The White Sheik—was the one that established him internationally. Shifting between the playful and the poignant, his music for Fellini classics like 1963’s 8½ demonstrated the same range and depth that Rota soon brought to his most celebrated scores of all: his Oscar-winning music for 1972’s The Godfather and 1974’s The Godfather Part II. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the Corleone family without thinking of Rota’s sumptuous and sinister themes. Rota’s equally distinctive body of concert music was another focus of his energy and ingenuity until his death in 1979.