When I was growing up, CBS-TV (channel 2) in NY offered "Picture For A Sunday Afternoon" at 1pm or 2pm, and they would deliver two movies (the second was billed as "The Early Show") until 5pm or 6pm after which there was news followed by the prime-time lineup.
"Picture For A Sunday Afternoon" used a hauntingly beautiful theme that stuck in my head for years and years. One day as I was walking down a corridor at IBM in White Plains casually whistling this music, a young man popped into the hallway from his office. "Is that 'The Legend of the Glass Mountain'?" he asked. I shrugged. I had no idea what it was called. It turned out that he was right.
Years later when I worked for Fawcett Publications (a division of CBS), I called down to the music library at Black Rock, the CBS headquarters in NYC, and spoke to one of the archivists. All he could tell me was that, yes, the music was 'The Legend of the Glass Mountain', and, no, he didn't have it on record or tape and didn't know where it might be found.
Years passed. I finally located — on this new-fangled internet — a CD version, and I ordered it shipped to me. It remains one of my favorite discs. It was from that disc I learned the composer's name: Nino Rota.
'Who?' you might ask. Nino Rota. Between 1933 and 1979 when he died, Rota scored 150 films, working most often with Federico Fellini. In fact, from about 1950 onward, Rota scored every Fellini film including La Strada, 8½, and Juliet of the Spirits. He wrote the music for the first two 'Godfather' films as well as Franco Zefirelli's Romeo and Juliet and the 1978 'Death on the Nile'. His musical output was phenomenal. He could write — and did write — music in almost any style you can name from casual to classical. People know Johann Pachelbel from the one piece that ever became a hit; they don't know Rota, a real musical genius, from Adam.
You should fix that.
Anyway, I just found a DVD copy of the movie, The Glass Mountain, for which Rota wrote that hauntingly beautiful melody, and I'm looking forward to watching it even if it did only get 3½ stars.
Update: The Glass Mountain is a beautiful love story worth much more than a measly 3½ stars.
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