Arguably the most anticipated film ever made, George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace (1999) is the first instalment of a Star Wars prequel trilogy in which the director revisits, and re-imagines, the foundation for the entire saga. Series composer John Williams also returns, along with his late nineteenth-century European recipe of broad, sweeping melodies, chromatic harmonies, monophonic textures and lush instrumentation. Williams’s concept was unfairly dismissed in certain quarters as pastiche, a regressive melange of Gustav Holst filtered through Erich Korngold. These critics conveniently forgot that Williams’s intention was to create a familiar emotional and intellectual ambience to counterbalance the decidedly unfamiliar planets and creatures inhabiting Lucas’s universe. In so doing, the composer single-handedly revived, in tandem with his music for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (also released in 1977), the romantic film score as personified by Golden Age masters such as Rozsa, Newman and Waxman.
Reflecting the symbolic and mythological bases of at least five story arcs, Williams’s leitmotif design is weaved with such fluidity that The Phantom Menace score resembles the uninterrupted flow of a Wagner opera. This cine-music narrative begins with an obligatory recapitulation of the famous, Korngoldian main theme from Star Wars (‘Main Title’). The score’s major set-piece, titled ‘Duel of the Fates’, follows in Track 2. All of the orchestral and vocal details are captured perfectly by Shawn Murphy’s reference-calibre recording, produced at Abbey Road’s Studio 1.
The score’s second major invention is ‘Anakin’s Theme’, which careful listeners will recognize as a sweet, innocent deconstruction of ‘The Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Williams even uses the same minor cadence to foreshadow Anakin’s future transformation into Darth Vader, an event scheduled for Episode III. The main body of the theme is youthful, however, and articulated by the LSO with their customary unity and lyric clarity. Newer material includes a light, Prokofiev-inspired characterization of a comic ally (‘Jar Jar’s Introduction’), a blazing, Rozsa-esque fanfare (‘The Flag Parade’) and spirited action-music with fragmentary melodic turns that charm long enough to be remembered (‘The Droid Invasion’).
Those who remain indifferent to Lucas’s pop-art phenomenon will find nothing in The Phantom Menace to alter their mind-set. But in the booklet- notes, Williams reveals that ‘during our first intermission, several of the younger players approached me and explained that, as children, they had seen and heard Star Wars and immediately resolved to study music’. Indeed, one of the surprising by-products of the original Star Wars film was the commercial popularity of the score album. Since The Phantom Menace is destined to duplicate this success, John Williams deserves our applause for introducing yet another generation to the symphonic tradition, and perhaps inspiring these young people to embrace classical-based music in their lives. '