Italian composer Nino Rota enjoyed a collaborative career with world-famous film director Federico Fellini that lasted over two decades and included several of his best-known works. Among the scores Rota composed for Fellini is the music for the film La Strada, which was awarded an Oscar in 1954. The film depicts the tragic triangle of Zampano, a strong man in a circus; Gelsomina, an innocent but dim-witted country girl whom he buys into indentured servitude and seduces; and Il Matto, a tightrope walker who shows kindness to Gelsomina. By the time he penned the score for La Strada, Rota had a handful of operas under his belt, as well as a number of film scores (including music for Fellini's 1952 work Lo Sceicco Bianco) and thus had already established himself as a composer of dramatic music. So successful was the music for the film that later in 1966, he resurrected some of its more poignant moments as a ballet suite for La Scala that would continue to receive regular performances throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. Just as Fellini's films from the period tended toward a kind of neo-realism, Rota's approach to composition has a certain emotional pragmatism; that is, he doesn't unduly concern himself with formalistic complexities of technique or the psychological indulgence of expressionist exaggeration. At the same time, because Fellini's context places the music on the outskirts of the real by focusing on people whose livelihood depends on their ability to evoke the unreal (for Zampano, executing feats of unusual strength; for Il Matto, performing acts of uncommon danger), Rota is free to pursue a wide variety of musical emotions. In doing so, he draws on a wide range of styles. Because of the circus context, much of the music is designed as if happening as part of the visible action. The music for the circus performers and jugglers is light, energetic, and busy, with jazzy syncopated brass, galloping woodblocks, and gaudy oompahs from the drums and cymbals. Il Matto's solo violin music reflects his sympathetic nature in a rhapsodic, bittersweet fashion. When Zampano works into one of his fits of rage, however, his imposing stature, his grim personality, and the danger that he poses to the defenseless Gelsomina lead Rota to borrow almost verbatim from a violent passage of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (where a young girl likewise finds her demise). Rota invokes more difficult musical vocabularies, but always in the service of dramatic tension; the murder scene is swathed in dissonance and unwieldy orchestration, while Gelsomina's consequent descent into insanity is accompanied by eerie string harmonics, faint brass echoes, and the surreal sounds of the celeste. Most effective, however, are Rota's memorable and unabashedly lyrical melodies, which sometimes formally function in a Leitmotiv fashion, but more directly convey and enhance the sheer emotion of the drama.

© Jeremy Grimshaw, Rovi