Of course, there's no way the ''Revenge" score could rival the impact of the first ''Star Wars" music 28 years ago. It wasn't that there had never been anything like it; quite the opposite. What Williams did was restore a major part of the film-music heritage that was in danger of being lost in an era of title songs and pop-music scores. I still remember sitting in a theater in New York watching ''Star Wars" in the early days of the phenomenon. From the first notes, it was clear we were in for something that was grand and nostalgic, but also adventurous and forward-looking. Williams's genius in writing for a science-fiction film was to compose in the style of the great romantic/adventure films of the 1930s and '40s.
At the time, Williams thought ''Star Wars" was a one-off project; he had no idea there would be future installments in the series. So the later films, and especially the prequels, required him to develop new themes that harmonized with the earlier ones -- that could be developed in contrast and counterpoint to them. Ultimately he produced about 12 hours of music, as much as Wagner poured into his ''Ring" cycle of operas.
The ''Star Wars" themes developed associations, accumulated memories, and morphed into other themes. ''Anakin's Theme," for example, composed years after the evil ''Imperial March," contains within it the thematic DNA of the march. As writer/director George Lucas writes in the liner notes to the ''Revenge" album, Williams's music describes the characters and ''essentially tell[s] the story."
What Lucas does not say is that the music often tells the story more clearly and in greater depth than the filmmaking does; the music's emotional resonances reach further than the dialogue and the acting do. Actress Carrie Fisher is not a romantic figure, for example, but Princess Leia's theme is full of myth, mystery, and romance.
