Notes on THE GODFATHER score

Notes on The Godfather Score

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This famous Passacaglia  by Bach (click on link to listen) was used for the Baptism Sequence in The Godfather. This is a MIDI version, of course, not the real music. A passacaglia is a musical form using a repeated ground bass over which variations are played.
    The original music score was by Italian composer, Nino Rota (who also scored Romeo and Juliet). Oddly enough, though the music score received an Academy nomination (and almost certainly would have won), the nomination was withdrawn when it was discovered that a small part of the score had been used in another (Italian) film several years before, which is against Academy rules.
    Even more oddly, in order to replace the excluded Godfather score, the Academy nominated Charles Chaplin's score for Limelight! How is this possible, since Limelight was released exactly twenty years before?
    Because by another odd rule, a film is not considered eligible for Academy consideration until the year of its release in California. Now because of Chaplin's political problems in 1952, Limelight was released only in New York in 1952 and quickly withdrawn from circulation, until re-released in California in 1972, the year of The Godfather movie!
    So Limelight was eligible for an Academy nomination and received one for its musical score, co-written by Chaplin. Even more oddly still, it won that year's music Oscar! Thus a man who never won an Oscar for his most famous contributions to movies (as actor, writer, director) finally won for his music!
    Other music in The Godfather is called source music: that is, music with a source shown in the film, such as department store music (Sinatra singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas) and the song, I Have But One Heart (performed by "Frankie Fontane" in the film; actually an Italian song set to English lyrics). Sinatra recorded the song in the 1940s, but his version was not used.
    As everyone knows by now, the character of "Frankie Fontane" (the singer at Don Vito Corleone's wedding) was supposed to have been the legendary pop singer, Frank Sinatra, though the facts behind the story have been disputed.

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