Great Love Themes

Over on the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, someone posted a thread about "Underrated Love Themes". Of course, "underrated" is kind-of a useless term, I've found; to say that something is "underrated" generally seems to mean "I don't think people talk about this thing as much as I would like". Not that this stops me from using the term, of course. Because, in my opinion, my own blog is underrated!

Now, what was I on about just now? Oh, love themes. Anyway, as I just posted over there, Jerry Goldsmith's The Wind and the Lion boasts a gorgeous love theme. And here are some others, just off the top of my head:

:: The Sea Hawk, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. When the love theme swells as Dona Maria is just too late to stop Captain Thorpe from sailing from Dover, it's one of the great moments in movie music.

:: The Wind and the Lion, Jerry Goldsmith. I've never seen the film, but the score has a wonderful quality that suggests Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade to me.

:: The Mask of Zorro, James Horner. Horner's love theme from Titanic (the basis for the song "My Heart Will Go On") is much more famous, but I find the one from The Mask of Zorro more beautiful.

:: Dances With Wolves, John Barry. This ended up being pretty much Barry's last great score, unfortunately.

:: Far and Away, John Williams. I pretty much had to include a Williams theme here, and his score to the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman bodice-ripper about Irish immigrants tends to fall through the cracks in film music circles.

I could come up with a bunch more if I went through my CD collection, of course.