The idea Williams is best-known for copping from Wagner-via many other opera and film composers-is the device of the leitmotif: a distinctive musical 'voice' for each major character, a melody and arrangement that can be adapted in various ways to complement the evolving story. Daringly dissonant and boldly dramatic for its time, Wagner's four-opera cycle was the original 'cinematic' composition, its lurid Romantic vocabulary providing the basic toolbox for a century's worth of film composers. The ultimate influence on Williams's vision for Star Wars was Richard Wagner, whose Ring cycle combines a wealth of musical ideas that would inform Williams's work. His triumph, with Star Wars, was to deploy that musical vocabulary with an unprecedented power and sweep-a sweep that grew with each of the film's two sequels, and then with the three prequels Lucas directed 20 years later. In fact, it was precisely in the nature of his assignment that he produce a score harking back to the swashbuckling classics Lucas grew up with. It wasn't Williams's job, then, to break new aesthetic ground. Juilliard-trained, he'd worked with such legends as Bernard Herrmann and won two Academy Awards-including one for his still-iconic score for Steven Spielberg's Jaws, the movie that's credited for establishing the still-booming genre of the summer blockbuster.

In his mid-40s, Williams was already an experienced film composer. Part and parcel of Lucas's approach was to commission a grand symphonic score, rather than an experimental electronic soundtrack. One of the reasons Star Wars made such an impact was that in a decade marked by stark, intellectually ambitious science fiction films-including George Lucas's own THX-1138 (1971)- Star Wars was a shamelessly sweeping throwback to space operas in the Buck Rogers mode.

Dramatic opera music used in movies