The Elf theme played in the Prologue and when The Fellowship enters Lorien Orc Theme, usually accompanied by a 5/4 rhythm in the percussion.
First introduced on the track, "Many Meetings" and used throughout the trilogy. (When Frodo and Sam are in the corn field and Sam says: "If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been."
The track ends with the violin and then the flute repeating the first melody. The track then quiets down and the solo flute plays a second melody, followed by the orchestra. On the soundtrack, it starts by a solo flute playing the theme, followed by a solo violin and then the complete orchestra repeating this theme. Howard Shore hints in the production commentary for the film that it is a theme pertaining, in fact, to Gondor. The One Ring theme: a minor-key string melody plays over the "Lord of the Rings" title card for all three films.Principal leitmotifs First appearance in The Fellowship of the Ring 3.6 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: The Complete Recordings.3.5 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.3.4 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: The Complete Recordings.3.3 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.3.2 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Complete Recordings.
3.1 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.1.3 First appearance in The Return of the King.1.1 First appearance in The Fellowship of the Ring.The rest may admire its ambition and the haunting set pieces, but without a deep knowledge of the film or books they will inevitably find it. And since Shore has conceived the score for all three films as a single orchestral whole, the music of the middle section by definition lacks resolution.ĭie-hard fans of Tolkien (are there any other kind?) will cherish this album as a painstaking musical description of the Middle-earth mythology.
Driven by the visuals, not its own logic, it is a series of musical vignettes rather than an organic whole. An Icelander singing in English sounds far more otherworldly than the choirs singing in Old English and Tolkiens made-up Sindarin.įine qualities aside, the soundtrack is ultimately marred by the partial nature of its form. The closing track, "Gollum's Song", is an instant winner.Performed by Iceland's latest singing elf Emiliana Torrini (and originally intended for Björk), this elegy is tormented, twisty, infinitely strange. But the endless succession of unresolved crescendos and the ever-escalating sense of doom get a bit much.Įlizabeth Fraser (of Cocteau Twins fame), Sheila Chandra and Isabel Bayrakdarian provide banshee accompaniment so high that it approaches ultrasound. The dark elements invoked in the earlier score now dominate as the struggle of Frodo and friends becomes more intense. It begins with the fulminant "Foundations of Stone", all serried choirs and pounding percussion. The music is mercifully far from airy-fairy. Leitmotifs are picked up from the first soundtrack, for example, the perky Hobbit anthem in "Samwise the Brave", and new ones developed as the groups diverge. With the fellowship now splintered into three, the score of the second part becomes more complex than the first, weaving between the plot strands with different musical themes. As before, he has created a full-blown orchestral score of Wagnerian proportions, each character and realm with its own musical identity. In 'The Two Towers', the difficult middle part of the Middle-earth saga, he further develops his weird aural landscape. Howard Shore won an Oscar for scoring the first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.