Rota is well-known for having been something of a musical chameleon, combining the extensive knowledge of a wide variety of repertories that he had acquired in his youth with a talent for musical mimicry. This was an immense asset to him as a film composer, allowing him to produce whatever was required, whether the film in question was a comedy, a thriller or an epic, and whether it was set in nineteenth-century Russia (such as War and Peace, 1956) or 1930s Egypt (Death on the Nile, 1978). Rota’s musical ‘voices’ range from the rustic, rather sleazy peasant waltz of The Godfather (1972) to the lush, Romantic symphonic score of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). He also put his talent for pastiche to good purposes Il Cappello di paglia di as a composer of comic Firenze was the fifth opera opera: his opera Ariodante by Rota to be performed, evoked Donizetti, while but the first for which he his Torquemada contained gained international fame reminiscences of Verdi. as an opera composer. Il Cappello di paglia di Rota wrote his own Firenze consciously evokes libretto for the work, Rota’s mother (Ernesta Rinaldi), who assisted him with the libretto for Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze. Rossini, harking back assisted by his mother Nino Rota Archive, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice.* nostalgically to an earlier Ernesta. She was keen to golden age of Italian encourage him in his operatic career, maintaining comic opera. However, there are also echoes to be the opinion that her son’s film scores were a trivial heard of Verdi and Puccini, all intermixed with distraction from his work as a composer of ‘serious’ great vivacity, verve and grace with the style of music. Rota himself, meanwhile, appreciated the popular song one would typically have heard at a creative freedom that opera composition allowed nineteenth-century Parisian café-chantant. him, as it liberated him from the controlling hand Alongside the abundant musical pastiche in Rota’s of a film director. The literary source Rota chose operas and films, we might point (in both genres) on this occasion was a popular vaudeville play to an extensive use of self quotation, sometimes called Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (‘The Italian described more harshly as self-plagiarism. But Straw Hat’, 1851) by the nineteenth-century French Rota himself wrote that ‘I’m absolutely convinced writers Eugène Labiche and Marc-Antoine-Amedée that there’s no such thing as plagiarism in music’. Michel (also known as Marc-Michel). A witty Rather, he was an inveterate believer in musical satire upon the conventionalism of the nineteenthrecycling, an ethos that had been the norm during century French bourgeoisie, the play had already earlier centuries (Handel, Bach and Vivaldi: all been turned into a successful French silent film guilty as charged), but which had come to be directed by René Clair, released in 1928. This filmic viewed with suspicion following the increased precedent is unlikely to have escaped Rota’s notice. in the opera’s journey to the stage: he composed the opera in 1944–1945 but it would not be performed until a decade later. In the intervening years Rota returned to the score on many occasions to make revisions but had no firm plans for its performance and later claimed to have forgotten all about the opera. He was, therefore, taken by surprise when the conductor Simone Cuccia (who had heard Rota play excerpts of the opera on the piano in the 1940s) assumed the directorship of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and announced the work for the 1955 season, without informing Rota. The composer recalled the panic of rummaging through his desk in a desperate hunt for the score.
*Images provided by Nino Rota Archive, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice.
Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze
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