ANTON COPPOLA, A MAESTRO WITH MANY ENCORES

 By COREY KILGANNON 

 Francis Ford Coppola may have created the “Godfather” films, but these days, the real godfather of the Coppola clan is his uncle Anton Coppola.

“I don’t know if I like the Mafioso connotations of that,” said Mr. Coppola, who is 99 and still composing, conducting and devoting his life to opera. He is also uncle to the actress Talia Shire, and great-uncle to the actors Nicolas Cage and Jason and Robert Schwartzman, and the filmmakers Sofia and Roman Coppola.

Anton Coppola, 99, conductor, composer and uncle of Francis Ford Coppola, at his home in Manhattan.CreditSantiago Mejia/The New York Times

Creatively, the maestro is every bit as active as his younger relatives. Besides holding opera rehearsals and master classes, he spends his days composing and arranging in longhand, in the Central Park West apartment he has shared since 1956 with his wife, Almerinda.

Mr. Coppola, a lifelong New Yorker, works at a card table with folding legs by a window overlooking Central Park and Tavern on the Green. He writes out his ideas on long pages, his baby grand piano next to him.

The park provides inspiration. Last month, he wrote an ode to a tree, “The Tree and Me,” and as with many of his compositions, sent it to his nephew Francis, with whom he has kept in frequent contact. This includes visits to the filmmaker’s Napa wineries and the resort he opened in Bernalda, Italy, their ancestral hometown.

“Forget four-star — this is 10-star,” Anton Coppola said on Wednesday in his apartment. “You just have to think you want a cup of coffee, and the staff will bring it to you.”

Wit, wisdom and wisecracks pour out of Mr. Coppola along with the music.

On Wednesday, he was completing a song for a performance he plans to conduct in March with the Opera Tampa, of which he was the conductor and artistic director until he retired in 2012.

The program will include his alternate ending for the Puccini opera “Turandot” and a selection from his 2001 opera, “Sacco and Vanzetti,” about the Italian immigrant anarchists executed in 1927 in Massachusetts.

His tree song will be played as an encore, he said.

“There will be several encores — I guarantee it,” he said.

In the 1990s, Francis Ford Coppola had asked Anton to write music for a television special he was planning on Sacco and Vanzetti. The director shelved the show but said of the music, “Uncle, you’ve got an opera here,” recalled Anton, who took the advice.

“By then, I was pregnant with the piece, and I couldn’t stop,” he said.

These days, he sticks to composing shorter works. “My wife would kill me if I started another opera, at this point,” he said.

Mr. Coppola said he grew up mostly in East Harlem, one of seven brothers. His parents had no daughters because, he joked, “My father wouldn’t permit it.” His brother, Carmine — Francis’ father — was a flutist and composer who helped write music for numerous Coppola films before his death in 1991.

During the Great Depression, Anton left the Juilliard School to take a job with an opera company sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, and got his break because of the maestro’s drinking problem, filling in at age 18 to conduct “Samson and Delilah,” the Saint-Saëns opera, at a Sunday matinee on Staten Island.

He has conducted the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Opera, but also for Broadway shows and national tours, including “My Fair Lady” and “The Boy Friend,” in which Julie Andrews, at 18, made her American debut in 1954.

While working as a conductor at Radio City Music Hall in the late 1940s, Mr. Coppola caught the eye of a ballet dancer named Almerinda Drago, who became his wife.

In his study, which is adorned with stained-glass windows, are photos of the opera titans Puccini and Verdi.

“His two gods,” said his wife.

But Mr. Coppola enjoys modern music, too. In his apartment, alongside his opera scores, was the sheet music to “Hamilton,” which he saw recently and enjoyed. He uses the score to follow the rapid-fire lyrics.

He recently made a cameo in “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon series created in part by Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman.

He improvised the role after receiving a script.

“I said, ‘Am I supposed to read this nonsense?’” Mr. Coppola recalled. “The director said, ‘Oh, just do what you want.’”

“It’s so hard to believe he’s 99 — he’s so energetic and full of ideas,” said Sofia Coppola, who said her great-uncle gave her a “crash course” on Verdi’s “La Traviata,” as she prepared for the production of the opera she directed in Rome this year.

Francis Ford Coppola, in an email, wrote that his uncle was “lively and with all his marbles at age 99!” and called him “an extraordinary example and element in our lives.”

Before returning to his composing desk on Wednesday, Anton said his wife’s healthy cooking and his zeal for composing kept him young.

“I’m not tired yet,” he said. “When people ask me how did I live this long, I say, ‘pasta e fagioli.’”

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