Taras Bulba: The Wishing Star (for voice and piano) (1962)

Two of Waxman’s finest film scores were among his last. In 1962, he composed “The Wishing Star” for Taras Bulba and “Rosanna” for Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man.

Nikolai Gogol’s drama of the Cossacks’ fight for freedom in sixteenth-century Russia is the background for J. Lee Thompson and Harold Hecht’s production starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis.

Waxman received his twelfth Best Score of the Year Academy Award nomination for this epic.

During ’The Wishing Star’ sequence in the film, Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Natalia (Christine Kaufmann), the daughter of the Polish Governor, meet secretly to declare their love.

The purposely simple setting has an exotic quality created principally by using a modal scale in the melody.

“The Wishing Star” was recorded and movingly played by the arranger as part of the CD You Must Remember This.