Happy Valentine's Day: The Sequel

Okay, here are some more fun, achingly beautiful and slightly off-beat love songs to help celebrate the day, though not in lieu of candy.

The 1964 British musical Robert & Elizabeth tells the romance of two of the most-popular poets in the English language, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett.  It has one of the best, most elegant scores of a musical I've heard, by Ronald Millar and Ron Grainer, though never played on Broadway because of legal complications with the source material, the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street.  It's difficult to choose which love song to post here, most particularly because two stand out tall.  But I'm going with "I Know Now," a gorgeous song that ends the first act, when a reluctant Elizabeth -- who's spent much of her life ill in bed and overly-protected by her father -- finally declares her love for Browning.  This song wins out because there's actually footage of the two original stars, Keith Michell and Australian opera singer June Bronhill, recreating the number in costume seven years later on a  British TV special starring Michell.  (Fans of the TV series, Murder She Wrote, may recognize him for his recurring role as reformed thief Dennis Stanton.  And fans of the classic PBS Masterpiece Theatre production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII will recognize him as King Henry.)

This next song is a funny number from the Broadway musical, Little Me, with a score by Carolyn Leigh (who wrote a lot of the lyrics in Peter Pan) and Cy Coleman.  "I Love You" is performed by Sid Caesar, who's incredibly wealthy, and Virginia Martin, a poor girl from the other side of the tracks.

Given how many love songs my fave Steve Goodman wrote, I have to include at least one here.  And this is one of his most beautiful, which is saying a lot, called "I Keep Falling in Love," which is sort of an atypical love song, but full of passion, none-the-less.

​"Still" is a heart-breaking number from the Tony-winning musical of Titanic (that whimsically won the same year the film of the same story won Best Picture).  With a score by Maury Yeston, this song comes late in the show, as the ship is clearly going down, and women and children are told to board the lifeboats.  But Ida Straus refuses to leave her husband Isador (co-owners of Macy's Department Store) of many years, and stays with him to the end.