Star Wars

Today, this double-LP (and, more recently, double-CD) set seems a quaint anachronism out of a generally silly decade, though much of the music — including the opening fanfare, the music associated with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Ben Kenobi, and the Death Star motif — still resonates 30 years later, so iconic has it become. Actually, back in 1977, the Star Wars soundtrack fairly revolutionized the field of contemporary movie music, as well as energizing it like a lightning strike. There had been a few notable original orchestral scores during the 1960s and 1970s — Maurice Jarre's soundtrack for Doctor Zhivago sold in the millions, and John Williams' Oscar-winning score for Jaws was also a landmark of sorts, but in the main, the music for movies was getting simpler and the soundtrack albums cheaper and shoddier in design and more disposable by the year. Additionally, the old guard among Hollywood's top orchestral composers was virtually gone by 1976 — Bernard Herrmann had passed on at the start of the year, Alfred Newman was long gone as were Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Dimitri Tiomkin was in retirement; only Miklós Rózsa remained active on an intermittent basis, and when his new soundtrack work was issued on LP, it was usually by specialty labels catering to a small audience.

Then came Star Wars and its soundtrack by John Williams, two whole LPs of it played by the London Symphony Orchestra, handsomely designed and looking expensive and important, which matched the sound of the music. In one fell swoop, Williams' defiantly retro, late-19th century-style score, written in a mode and idiom that directly recalled Korngold (not to mention Gustav Holst and Richard Wagner, among many other composers from the concert hall), restored the old-fashioned, 1940s-style full orchestral score to full vitality. And suddenly, a new generation of fans for such music, some as young as high-school age, were seeking out the old soundtracks by Korngold, Steiner, Newman, Herrmann, Rózsa, et al., either in new pressings or new recordings where available or, just as often, in original releases at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift shops.

The music hasn't aged as well as one would have hoped — despite being a breath of fresh air at the time, Williams' overblown romanticism soon became tiresome, although the best parts of the score still hold up. The double-CD reissue was also always something of a sonic disappointment, a bit too compressed and marred by a high level of noise, typical of early digital remasterings of multi-track analog recordings, that made it sound both flat and slightly harsh — the CD seemed to lack the presence and the richness that one recalled from the movie and the LP edition of the score. Even more frustrating, Star Wars would have seemed to be a prime candidate for a special audiophile edition from Mobile Fidelity, but there were doubts about whether a better source tape could be obtained and, assuming it could be, also whether there were enough audiophile soundtrack connoisseurs to buy what would have been a 50-plus-dollar double-CD set, no matter how good it sounded. The flaws in the original CD set were finally fixed in the quadruple-disc Star Wars Trilogy box, which remastered Williams' original music for all three films in the initial movie trilogy in state-of-the-art sound, complete with outtakes and rarities. Own this release for the graphics and the packaging, assuming they have some nostalgia value, but for listening pleasure and a real hint of the majesty of the score as it originally appeared, either a mint copy of the original two-LP set (for those with turntables and expensive equipment) or the Star Wars Trilogy box is the way to go.