Words by Lillian Crawford

You know the scene; two lovers coming together in close up, their lips pressed together, their gazes brightly met as they smile at each other.

The camera pans back to reveal the monitor, time codes running along the bottom, and an adjacent screen running the score on composition software. It’s how Nancy Meyers’s 2006 rom-com

The Holiday begins, not with the movie we are watching, but another in the process of its musical love theme being born. The music is actually by Hans Zimmer, but in this universe it’s written by fictional film composer Miles Dumont, played by Jack Black.  

Later on, when Miles is listening to Ennio Morricone’s 1988 score for Cinema Paradiso in his car, he tells his girlfriend to be quiet — “The flutes! This is the best part!” As he enters the driveway he meets Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet), and they experience a classic meet-cute as the saxophone of Morricone’s love theme swells diegetically around them. Only in Hollywood — but the scene perfectly illustrates the influence of classic film scores on the modern romantic movie, bringing together these essential instrumental ingredients: soaring strings, wandering flutes, sexy sax, and a beautiful lilting piano.

Because love themes seldom call for brass or percussion, romantic scores often feature a stripped-back orchestra. Ludovic Bource’s score for The Artist, a pastiche of silent movies released in 2011, largely consists of woodwind and strings to imitate the style of early film music played live in the auditorium itself. Another meet-cute, this time silent star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) dancing briefly with extra Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) in a scene which keeps needing to be reshot. Bource gives the scene a delicate waltz, thrown between piano, strings, flutes, and clarinets, the couple spiralling as they come into each other’s orbit. It is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s score for his 1931 film City Lights, his ‘Flower Girl’ theme tearing at the audience’s heartstrings to echo those of the Little Tramp himself. And when they finally recognise each other in the film’s achingly romantic final moments, the music itself skips a beat.

In the 1930s the love theme became a staple of Hollywood movie scores, including those for films including The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 and The Sea Hawk in 1940 by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Like Bource’s ‘Waltz for Peppy’ in The Artist, these themes are often composed in 3/4 waltz time, with a bed of rushing strings lifting up a searing solo violin. So beautiful were these themes that Korngold worked several into his 1945 Violin Concerto in D Major, showing off the virtuosity of his writing and of the principal violinist. The master of the love theme, however, was Korngold’s contemporary Max Steiner, whose scores for Gone With the Wind in 1939 and Casablanca in 1942 wrenched audiences out of war-torn reality into high melodrama. Both films do not feature singular love scenes, but work the melodies as leitmotifs to signal the ebb and flow of aching hearts. When Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) wants to take us in a flashback to the heady days of pre-war Paris, she asks to hear the music of their love: “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.”

Just as Korngold was working his film scores into his classical works, Hollywood composers were influenced by Russian romantics. Echoes of Tchaikovsky are heard everywhere, not least in the use of his ‘Pathétique’ symphony in Now, Voyager from 1942, but the most influential composer was Rachmaninov. In 1941 Richard Addinsell wrote a score in imitation of Rachmaninov’s piano concerti for the British film Dangerous Moonlight, which became one of the most popular works of the period: the Warsaw Concerto. Four years later, David Lean went one step further and exclusively used Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto to score Brief Encounter, relying on the work’s devastating melodies to heighten the burgeoning affair between Laura and Alec. “It shakes me! It quakes me! It makes me feel goose-pimply all over! I don’t know where I am, or who I am, or what I’m doing!”, exclaims Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder’s 1955 comedy The Seven-Year Itch as Tom Ewell plays it to her.

The opulence of the grand Hollywood love theme has often been mocked as gushing, including in Elmer Bernstein’s score to the 1980 disaster comedy film Airplane!. Bernstein layers brass and percussion on top of the traditional strings and solo violin, ending with a women’s chorus which wails in collapse as they cannot ascend crescendo any further. The eighties and nineties gave way to a more chilled-out mode of scoring, swinging their love themes rather than swelling them. Jazzier rhythms can be heard in the scores of George Fenton, who scored the 1987 film 84 Charing Cross Road and Nora Ephron’s 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail, and Alan Silvestri’s eclectic score for Charles Shyer’s 1991 film The Father of the Bride. Riffing on Mendelssohn’s Wedding March and Wagner’s Bridal Chorus, Silvestri pays homage to the grandiloquent love themes of old with swung waltzes and arrangements of jazz standards.

Fenton and Silvestri work into their scores an instrument largely absent from earlier romantic soundtracks: the tenor saxophone. Piercing through the heart swells of the string section, the sax adds some sex to the texture of post-Golden Age moviemaking. It is the focal point of Vangelis’s steamy love theme from the 1982 sci-fi Blade Runner, rupturing the wash of synthesised textures with raw, analogue sound as Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard has sex with Sean Young’s Rachael. It is an obvious euphemistic choice of instrumentation, but nonetheless an effective one.

It is this mode of lustful composition that can be heard in the erotic thrillers of the 1990s, although the end of the decade saw a return to sentimentality. While best known in its version performed by Céline Dion as ‘My Heart Will Go On’, the instrumental motif in the 1997 film Titanic features wordless vocalisations by Norwegian singer Sissel and uilleann pipes. James Horner had already written a searing love theme for Braveheart in 1995 and echoed the pastoral, folk-like textures for James Cameron’s epic after being asked to imitate the style of Enya. The melodies created by these instruments are offset by Horner’s use of a synthesised choir, which he used to prevent the score from having a church-like sound.

We hear it in Hans Zimmer’s romantic scores, too, including The Holiday and historical epics such as Michael Bay’s 2001 film Pearl Harbor. The motif ‘...And Then I Kissed Him’ features a plucked classical guitar, a choice inspired by the music of Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo best known for his Concerto de Aranjuez. It is also reminiscent of Stanley Myers’ ‘Cavatina’, written for 1970’s The Walking Stick but better known as theme to 1978’s The Deer Hunter, and Nino Rota’s heartbreaking love theme in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. It echoes the sound of a young man serenading a beautiful woman, the simplest and most heartfelt mode of musical lovemaking.

Even in the 21st century, when soundscape scores are more à la mode, the love theme has persisted as an easy way to signal to an audience that two characters are destined to be together. Craig Armstrong even has a short clarinet motif appear every time the various couples in Richard Curtis’s 2003 festive romcom Love Actually fall for each other. Composers like Rachel Portman, in scores such as 2011’s One Day, and Dario Marianelli in his collaborations with Joe Wright, including 2007’s Atonement, have kept the simple piano, flute, and strings tradition alive, especially in the context of period drama and literary adaptation.

By contrast, something more scintillating and modern has emerged over the past decade. Its origins can be identified in Wong Kar-wai’s choice of Shigeru Umebayashi’s theme to the 1991 Japanese film Yumeji as a recurring motif in his 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love. As time slows, the pizzicato waltz and scratching violin solo like a Paganini caprice dances between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in an alley or between apartment rooms.

It is suggestive of a forbidden romance, and it vibrates through Nicholas Brittell’s scores for 2016’s Moonlight and 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk — both directed by Barry Jenkins — and Carter Burwell’s 2015 score for Carol by Todd Haynes. There remains in these modern soundtracks the magnificence of old Hollywood love themes, but they have a more bitter edge.

Ultimately, every great film composer takes the love theme in their own direction, but each is always indebted to the work of the last. Morricone does it for Miles Dumont in The Holiday, Rachmaninov hits the spot for Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, and for others, it just takes a bit of tickling the ivories.