It’s as if the “Godfather Waltz” says, “I never wanted this for you, Michael,” before Vito Corleone himself can say it. The film seems to be cognizant of what the future holds, but while Coppola makes the audience, as well as the characters in the film, work towards this ending, Rota surreptitiously clues them in through his Main Title.

While the song serves as a roadmap for Michael’s future, it simultaneously explores Vito’s struggle with granting the reins of his deadly business to his son. Rota, we’ll see, translates the nostalgia of the father-son relationship into the music of the Main Title or “The Godfather Waltz.” Rota focuses on the dualities of the relationship. It’s as if “The Godfather Waltz” says, “I never wanted this for you, Michael,” before Vito Corleone himself can say it. This type of nostalgia is concerned with the future, but a future that has been tenuously predetermined. That general nostalgia is amplified through another more specific nostalgia found within the film-the nostalgia that gives a charge to Vito and Michael Corleone’s relationship. As a period film, its story set in the mid-1940s, though filmed through the scope of a 1970s camera, The Godfather cannot help but become subject to the yearning for a time before. It is ironic, then, that his best-known work is the score to The Godfather-a film that, on the surface, offers violence and loss rather than “good humor and optimism.” Yet Rota’s Godfather score draws out aspects of the film that lie beneath the surface- its dark humor and its nostalgia -and helps give the film’s nostalgia its emotional pull and complexity.

Nino Rota once said, about his work as a composer, “They reckon my music’s just a bit of nostalgia plus lots of good humor and optimism? Well, that’s exactly how I’d like to be remembered.”

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