Love Theme (Romeo and Juliet)

Rota scored Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1968, a film cast with actors of roughly the ages Shakespeare gives the lovers. The love theme, sung on screen to the words What Is a Youth, was afterwards fitted with several sets of English lyrics and had a commercial life quite separate from the picture. Rota kept the orchestration close to Renaissance consort sound in places — recorder, lute, tabor — while writing the melody itself in a plainly modern idiom. He had been Fellini's composer for two decades by then; the Zeffirelli films showed how differently he could write elsewhere.