La strada

La strada, film score by Italian composer Nino Rota for the 1954 film of the same name by Federico Fellini. Rota’s music was one of the relatively rare European film scores to attract wide attention in the United States as well.

Many European composers of Rota’s generation had relocated to Hollywood at the outbreak of World War II, but Rota was not one of them. Although he had studied music in Philadelphia before the war, he returned to his native Italy for further studies and spent most of his career there. Of the more than 100 films for which he wrote the music, few others were widely distributed outside of Italy.

Rota’s score for La strada masterfully conveys moods ranging from energy to poignancy, and it demonstrates his deft handling of music to portray quirky characters. He also used a technique practiced by many of the great composers of opera, using the recurrence of a character’s unique musical motif to convey the memory of that person in the thoughts of another.

A dozen years after the film was released, Milan’s La Scala, one of the world’s principal opera houses, asked Rota to write a balletic version of La strada; it premiered in 1966.