Page 10 - Star Wars Insider (Special Edition 2020)

JOHN WILLIAMS
s Imperial
stormtroopers
A overwhelm
the rebel
forces on the
Tantive IV in
the opening minutes of A New
Hope, Princess Leia delivers a
small data tape to astromech
droid R2-D2.
Leia turns to leave, and the
image is accompanied by
a short, muted burst of seven
notes, the first two of which
are separated by six steps on a
musical scale—what’s known as
a major-sixth interval. Through
the film, this cue will recur in a
variety of forms, developing on
each occasion and ultimately
becoming the theme that we
inextricably link with Leia.
This idea of having musical
themes or “motifs” associated
with key characters was central
to writer-director George Lucas
and composer John Williams’
shared vision for the music of
Star Wars. In the vein of classic
Hollywood composers such
01
10 / STAR WARS INSIDER
as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and
Alfred Newman, Williams would
steep his score for Star Wars in the
operatic traditions of the 19th-
century Romantics.
Identifying specific melodies
with individual characters in the
story, Williams would take those
motifs through various iterations,
repeating them to accompany the
character and re-orchestrating
them to reflect that character’s
emotional and physical state as
the saga progressed.
In the liner notes to the first
Star Wars soundtrack LP, he
wrote: “What I wanted to hear
was something to do with a
character here and something to
do with the same character more
developed there. I believed we
needed melodic themes of our
own which I could bend around
and put through all the
permutations that I would need
in the dramatic situations.”
The motif that Williams would
develop for Leia resounded well
beyond A New Hope, gathering
additional facets in successive
films and growing into new
themes that, taken as a whole,
provide an appropriately nuanced
musical portrait of this complex
character and her journey
through the galaxy far, far away.
A New Hope: “Princess
Leia’s Theme”
After its initial, brief statement
aboard the Tantive IV, Leia’s
theme is next heard, more fully
developed this time, when Luke
stumbles across the princess’s
desperate holographic message for
Obi-Wan Kenobi. “I wrote a very
romantic theme for Princess Leia,”
Williams explained in the
soundtrack liner notes. “I thought
of it in terms of when Luke sees
her for the first time and he says
how beautiful she is. It is a
fairytale-type princess melody.”
David W. Collins is a voice
actor, stage host at Star Wars
Celebration, and co-host of
the Star Wars Oxygen podcast,
which offers a deep analysis of
Williams’ work throughout the
Skywalker saga films.