Fellini and Popular Music: A Journey Through Sound

Federico Fellini’s relationship with music runs deep, and a particularly fascinating aspect of that relationship is how he engaged with popular music. The director’s attitude toward popular genres in his films deserves careful study, separate from his celebrated collaborations with composers like Nino Rota and Nicola Piovani, because it reveals something essential about his artistic vision. To explore this territory, three works offer especially rich material: Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, and The Voice of the Moon. Spanning more than three decades, these films show how certain themes persist even as Fellini’s style evolves.

What Do We Mean by \"Popular Music\"?

Before proceeding, we should clarify what \"popular music\" means in this context. Drawing a hard line between art music and popular music is not always possible or even desirable. Nino Rota himself is a brilliant illustration of how these categories can mix. For Rota and Fellini — two artists who worked in close symbiosis, each influencing the other — the boundary between high art and popular music constantly blurs and reappears.

In this analysis, popular music refers to the music that was popular when the films were made, especially music from North and South America — mambo, rock, and pop — along with other popular and folk traditions from Italy and Europe that appear in Fellini’s movies: marches, fanfares, devotional songs, and tunes like La Titina.

A Sound Obsession

Music pours through Fellini’s films almost without pause. In La Dolce Vita, for example, music appears in nearly every scene. Emilio Sala counted sixty-seven musical pieces in that film. Music researcher Maurizio Corbella noted that in a film lasting almost three hours, the average silence between pieces of music lasts only about three minutes. The Maestro himself described music as mysterious and frightening:

\"How mysterious music is for me ... I am fascinated and afraid of it, so much so that my anxieties have become a legend in restaurants, as soon as I see itinerant players coming towards me, as if they had a machine gun instead of a guitar or an accordion ... [...] it would take a psychoanalyst of genius to try to identify what it is that attacks me in such a way that I prefer to escape it.\"

Fellini went on to mention a few melodies that haunted him since childhood: the Entrance of the Gladiators heard at the circus, La Titina, and a rumba — three traumatizing motifs that stayed with him.

This obsession with sound was not limited to La Dolce Vita. It had already become a defining feature of Nights of Cabiria, the first of the three films we will examine closely.

Nights of Cabiria: Mambo in the Street, Mambo in the Nightclub, and a Picnic Without Rock and Roll

Sound in this film, starring Giulietta Masina as a prostitute, has drawn significant attention from scholars since its release. In a publication from 1957, Lino Del Fra identified five recurring themes in the soundtrack that appear in different guises throughout the film. Del Fra quoted Rota saying that the protagonist’s musical themes were designed to affect the structure of the story profoundly. This observation aligns with Claudia Gorbman’s later argument that music is, in fact, the subject of the film.

Gorbman identified four recurring melodies (adding that the fifth is silence) alongside several one-time musical occurrences: pieces played on a radio, songs performed by a nightclub orchestra, music from a variety show, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. To these, we can add three devotional folk songs: Canto del pellegrino, Mira il tuo popolo, and È l’ora che pia. Rota’s themes wind together and intersect with these occasional pieces. Sergio Miceli has written that when you also consider the dense overlap of dialogue and ambient noise, \"the overall result appears chaotic indeed.\"

To understand Fellini’s relationship with lowbrow music, we can focus on a few key scenes where contemporary popular music appears — even though, in this case, the popular-style music was composed by Rota rather than taken from pre-existing songs. Popular music was gaining attention among Italian intellectuals at the time, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, who co-wrote the screenplay for this film. Pasolini’s influence may have reached beyond the Roman dialect dialogue he contributed; he may also have shaped the film’s use of popular music.

In 1956, when the magazine Avanguardia asked why Italian song lyrics could not have greater dignity, Pasolini responded: \"I believe that I would be interested and amused to apply verses to beautiful music, be it tango or samba.\" In Nights of Cabiria, Fellini’s sense of the magical blends with Pasolini’s realist leanings, creating a stream of ambiguities between fiction and reality. Music plays a central role in this game. By slipping between diegetic and extra-diegetic levels, it creates a \"squared artifice.\"

After the opening scene, in which Cabiria’s boyfriend steals her money and throws her into the river, we find her at home listening to light music on the radio. Later, in the Passeggiata Archeologica near the Baths of Caracalla, she joins a group of prostitutes, clients, and pimps gathered around a new car. A mambo plays, its appearance marked by Cabiria’s scream. The script says the music comes from the car’s radio, but the sound mix makes the source ambiguous: the music sounds too loud and clear for such a small speaker, as Gorbman has observed. A young man who calls himself the best dancer in Rome invites Cabiria to dance, but their performance breaks off when she fights with another prostitute.

In the next scene, Cabiria is drawn by syncopated music coming from behind a small glass door near the Rivoli cinema. This music guides her to the next adventure — meeting Alberto Lazzari, a famous actor. Music remains crucial in the scenes that follow. In the first, Cabiria dances another mambo in an elegant nightclub, this time with Lazzari. The rhythm is the same, but the setting is entirely different. Cabiria’s uninhibited dancing looks out of place among the wealthy patrons. Later, Lazzari plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the turntable in his residence while reciting Shakespeare. Here, the music itself underscores the distance between the prostitute and the actor.

ACTOR: \"Do you like it?...\"
CABIRIA: \"I don't know much of this stuff…\"
ACTOR: \"Beethoven… the Fifth…\"

The actor adds that the symphony is his passion. Then, inspired, he stands and recites a poem by Shakespeare in English, following the music’s rhythm.

Another essential scene occurs during a picnic. Cabiria, drunk and disappointed after visiting the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Divino Amore, shouts at her companions for their lack of grace. Gorbman sees this picnic scene as pivotal and draws a parallel to the final sequence: both contain the same theme played by the same instruments. In the finale, however, the performance is harmonically simpler, and according to Gorbman, it completes Cabiria's journey: \"it is salvation.\" During the picnic, the music initially seems extra-diegetic — like ordinary film score. Then we see two boys playing guitar and accordion in the background, with a third beating rhythm on a stool, performing all the film's themes. A companion interrupts directly: \"This music is boring! Play some rock and roll!\" This sequence tears down the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic music, creating the aforementioned \"squared artifice.\" We hear what seems to be the soundtrack, then see the musicians present in the scene, and finally watch a character try to change what they are playing. The final scene uses a similar structure. It strikes me as significant that rock music is the genre invoked to break this wall, even though the musicians keep playing as they were.

Across these scenes, music not only drives Cabiria forward; she identifies with the popular music of her time. This was the conclusion reached by Gorbman, building on Lino Del Fra’s earlier interview with Rota, who explained the soundtrack this way:

\"In the soundtrack of the film the ballabili [danceable songs] prevail. The Neapolitan song, the mambo and, above all, the 1920s rhythm aim to reflect, with their 'popular' nature, a character like Cabiria, who has been deeply immersed in this kind of taste. The ballabili are as simple as all desires dreamed of, they use the elementary language of the heart, they represent the testimony of what we do, they speak directly to our lost condition...\"

La Dolce Vita and Rock and Roll

For Nights of Cabiria, Rota wrote original pieces that imitated popular music or reworked existing songs. In La Dolce Vita, Fellini left room for actual popular music of the 1950s. The soundtrack includes tunes like Perez Prado’s instrumental Patricia (another mambo) and the hugely famous Arrivederci Roma. The score alternates between Rota’s compositions (sometimes in the style of more serious music, as in the opening credits) and the most banal kind of consumer music, caught between ambient surroundings and pure entertainment.

The film also contains a scene where classical music introduces the character of Steiner. He plays the Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 by Johann Sebastian Bach on the organ. The piece itself could not have been more obvious, and Sergio Miceli has catalogued the criticisms it stirred. Yet Miceli concluded that the overall selection of both high and low music in La Dolce Vita speaks of an artistic personality whose expressive egocentrism treats every musical genre with curiosity and a appetite for powerful impressions.

In fact, Fellini consistently operates within a popular frame of reference, even when handling classical music. For him, Beethoven's Fifth in Nights of Cabiria, Bach's Toccata in La Dolce Vita, and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube in a later film are all the most predictable choices imaginable. But perhaps that predictability serves a purpose. It draws attention to how Fellini perceived music: not as abstract form developed in scholarly tradition, but as a reservoir of immediate associations — a way to evoke emotion, memory, and entire worlds.

These constant motives of mambo, rumba, folk song, circus music, symphonic tradition, and the ever-shifting line between where music comes from and where it belongs remain vital across Fellini’s entire body of work. They tell us something fundamental about his idea of art: that high and low are, finally, inseparable companions in the way we experience sound and meaning.

Adriano appeared as a lively popular answer to a weary, false old world. At the time of the film, singer Adriano Celentano, playing himself, was the rising star of Italian popular music. According to Celentano’s wife, Claudia Mori, Fellini felt fascinated by that young man “perhaps because he sensed that he was the representation of how much the society was changing. His [pointed] pointed out to us what kind of society we were living in: but young people preserved the hope of how it should change.” Spanish journalist Quico Alsedo argued that in this film “rock is a baby in the arms of a wiser man, Fellini. A drop of innocence in seas of dissatisfaction.”

The Voice of the Moon: Strauss at the Rave

In Fellini’s last film, The Voice of the Moon (1990), the reflection on sounds that surround us remains tied to what the director had expressed earlier, though the auditory theme is brought to the forefront. Sound in all its nuances and variations—from silence to noise—serves as the film’s leitmotif, from the title to the final line (“if we all created more silence, maybe we’d be able to understand something”). The first character who tells his story, the oboist, says that “music should be prohibited by law,” again underlining the director’s autobiographical sound obsession, where music can be treated like noise. “The spectator—writes Matteo Martelli—is faced with multiple levels of noise: sound as attraction, as mystery (the voice of the wells, the soundtrack of the countryside and, in part, the voice of the moon); then we have another level of urban sounds, or sounds of the contemporary world, which invariably create an obstacle, a cognitive block (also witnessed by the many and very noisy road works, or by the crowd); and, finally, noise as absence: the empty room of Salvini’s house, the room of inner ghosts and demons and, perhaps, the silence evoked by the last line of the film.”

Amid all this comes the long sequence of the disco, which appears suddenly through a spectacular solution. In the middle of a silent, deserted countryside, two huge mirrored walls slide open before the two protagonists—the meek, candid Salvini (Roberto Benigni) and the hateful, paranoid “prefect” Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio)—letting them into an environment full of young people dancing to Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel. Salvini joins a group of girls, finding euphoria in dance and female company. Gonnella, meanwhile, enters the DJ booth and shouts into the microphone: “Barbarians! Destroyers! Even music you are killing! Drums of Hell! Scrap metal! Singers of death! Silence! Be silent!” After being carried out, he says: “What can you know of it? Have you ever heard the sound of a violin? No, because if you had listened to the voices of violins as we heard them, now you would be standing in silence and wouldn’t have the impudence to believe you are dancing. Dance is an embroidery, it is a flight, it is a glimpse of harmony from the stars, it is a declaration of love. Dance is a hymn to life.” Then the Michael Jackson track stops, and in the silence the “Duchess of Alba” (Lorose Keller), an old flame of Gonnella’s, appears. He bows and invites her to dance. A few sounds on a celeste introduce Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube waltz, in its orchestral version. The couple dances before the astonished, silent crowd of young disco attendants, who eventually cheer Gonnella and the lady but then quickly surge toward and engulf them while Strauss’s waltz gives way once again to Michael Jackson’s music.

The scene underscores the contrast between the two main characters through their opposing reactions to popular music. As happened in Le notti di Cabiria with the scene at Lazzari’s house, classical and popular music here mirror the different personalities of two characters who find themselves close at a certain moment. This time, Fellini’s message might seem conservative, and popular music could be taken as part of those contemporary world sounds that create the “cognitive block” Martelli describes. Salvini’s final words about silence seem to hint in this direction. Yet rather than rejecting popular music itself, Fellini appears to be criticizing—consistent with what he’d done since Orchestra Rehearsal (1978)—the masses, in contrast with the relationality expressed by the two individuals dancing. So even in this film, Fellini’s relationship with music is not dualistic (classical versus popular). The issue is not one of genre: for Fellini, no music is noise, or any music can be noise; it depends on context and characters. It’s true that Salvini hopes for silence in the finale, but he had shortly before found comfort in Michael Jackson’s popular music, somewhat like Cabiria did while listening to songs on the radio or dancing the mambo. Conversely, by dancing Johann Strauss’s waltz, Gonnella displays the distance between that music and that world and the music and world around us. Millicent Marcus interprets his protest “offers the more obvious indictment of postmodernism in its failure to acknowledge a hierarchy of culture.” But this is a character’s stance—Gonnella, who cannot reconcile what he sees as two opposing poles, is built entirely on the opposition between himself and others. He certainly also embodies Fellini’s nostalgia for bygone times: from this angle, the character played by Paolo Villaggio resembles Marcello from La dolce vita thirty years later, now completely alienated from current mass culture.

Conclusions

Music also carries a kind of warning, in its perfect laws evoked and expressed. Through these subtle laws, it alludes to a kingdom you cannot inhabit, but it also strikes me as somewhat moralizing, wanting to admonish us, recalling a heavenly, perfect world. I want to be imperfect, ramshackle; I want to live like a dog that sniffs the bags left and right. Fellini’s approach to music mirrors his holistic, omnivorous approach to cinema and life, even if the presence of someone controlling chaos—starting from Orchestra Rehearsal—seems increasingly necessary.

Let’s consider one more passage from his radio conversation with Lucio Dalla. The director tells the musician: “The first time I saw you, I saw you in a vision that was a bit hellish, a bit like the disco in my last film, La voce della luna. It was at the Tenda Theatre. I went in and (…), amidst a great smoke, I saw you at the end of a stage. In front there was a screaming, strident audience, yelling and screeching like bats, with unreachable decibels… there you were, behind a keyboard with your beret on your head. You looked like one of Salgari’s characters, a corsair, a pirate, a Sandokan, especially since the clangs coming from your keyboard could sound like broadsides, or cannon shots.’ I saw that you controlled the situation; it was you who unleashed that enthusiasm.” Encouraged by composers such as Rota and Piovani, who despite their classical training show no problem “tainting” their music with popular elements, Fellini presents a kaleidoscope of varied sounds and music in his films. According to Sergio Miceli, the insistence on songs in La Dolce Vita’s soundtrack suggests “a certain satisfaction, a visceral subjugation that, even before catching Cabiria, caught Fellini, who in this case was unable to balance ‘high’ and ‘low’ music in a lucid and measured way.” Fellini’s inability is not technical but existential. One could argue that through sounds and images, the director aims to show “the dance of life” not only to our eyes but also to our ears: dance becomes a way for characters to ‘process’ popular music (including Strauss) in all three films examined.

Nevertheless, certain elements linked to the presence of popular music in Le notti di Cabiria and La dolce vita reemerge many years later in La Voce della Luna, set in a contemporary world where many things have changed yet the issue of listening has remained important. Popular music appears at crucial moments in these films, arriving to unblock a stalemate and generating turmoil: the fight between Cabiria and Matilde, Sylvia’s struggle with her partner, and Gonnella’s confrontation with the DJs. Likewise, rock music serves as the code that breaks the fourth wall during the picnic scene in Le notti di Cabiria and in the party in La dolce vita; also in La Voce della Luna, the music appears as we see two large mirrored sliding walls on screen. The arrival of popular music is frequently “magical” and cannot be neatly defined within diegetic or extra-diegetic categories. All said, it functions as a generator of life with a liberating effect, even if for a character like Gonnella—or Steiner—fanatical about order, it becomes a generator of death and destruction. Yet in this case Fellini, generally more at ease in chaos, cannot share his character’s view, though one line from Steiner may reflect the director’s perspective: “The most miserable life is better, believe me, than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.”

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