SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY HUMS ...
The Star Wars franchise’s seductive score continues to pull its fans over to the dark side
It’s said that the Devil gets the best tunes, but composer John Williams proves the maxim applies to Sith lords, too. Within the Star Wars library of leitmotifs — recurring, malleable musical symbols — much of the most insinuating material belongs to the villains, from Darth Maul to Supreme Leader Snoke. The standard by which all villain themes are now judged is the Imperial March, Darth Vader’s theme. “It should be majestic — he’s a majestic fellow,” Williams remarked in 1980, “and it should be a little bit nasty ...”
Vader’s leitmotif is, as music theorist Mark Richards has shown, a deviously sophisticated tune, full of rhythmic quirks and harmonic corruptions. But no one in Star Wars is beyond redemption. Vader’s death in Return of the Jedi occasions a stunning musical transformation. Williams strips away the march’s militaristic trappings, leaving behind a sputtering shadow of the theme, orchestrated with such extraordinary delicacy that part of it seems to evaporate with each new phrase. With a final, hollowed-out rendition on a solo harp, the old dark lord expires, and the once-unstoppable Imperial March achieves a small measure of peace.
Standing in Vader’s musical shadow is his grandson, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Among various motifs assigned to this dark-side scion, the most conspicuous is a motto that’s, as critic Alex Ross puts it, “dominated by a stagey tritone” — the most demonic of musical intervals. There is a distinct quality of overcompensation to Ren’s roar of a theme, a studied attempt to project the menace of his grandfather. Yet behind the bravado is insecurity.
Of all Star Wars Dark Siders, though, Emperor Palpatine has the most intriguing musical representation. Williams’ material for the evidently unkillable Palpatine is aimed at making the character simultaneously repulsive and alluring. Palpatine’s primary leitmotif, introduced in Return of the Jedi, is constructed around commonplace minor triads that progress chromatically, in a kind of violation of natural musical law. As music theorist James Buhler writes, “The music gives the impression that only a very powerful sorcerer, perhaps only a god, could animate these chords thus.”
The brooding, wordless male chorus that intones Palpatine’s theme reinforces the sense of eldritch unease that the character exudes, mysterious and beguiling, like a dark siren’s call. The leitmotif draws from an old association in film and classical music that wordless choruses stand in as the voice of the divine. The emperor effectively takes one of the angelic choirs featured in epics like The
Robe and gives it a satanic makeover. Williams’ compositions also capture Palpatine’s insidious influence on other characters. Some eagle-eared analysts have discerned the emperor’s melodic fingerprints in the themes for Kylo Ren and his light-side counterpart, Rey.
Even more ingenious is the concealed transformation of his theme into a peppy children’s chorus in The Phantom Menace. This is a deliciously cynical little musical Easter egg: While the good guys think they’ve won the day, everything, including the soundtrack, is actually proceeding according to the villain’s design.
George Lucas wanted Palpatine’s rise to echo the ascents of real-life tyrants. “Democracies aren’t overthrown,” he claimed in a 2005 interview, “they’re given away.” Williams’ prequel scores reiterate that narrative. For example, when, as chancellor, Palpatine is granted emergency powers, the soundtrack channels the stately style Williams uses to characterize U.S. politicians in a positive light: John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Such noble strains are perversely incongruent. But they illustrate the dangerous appeal of authoritarianism when presented through a filter of nostalgia and patriotism.
When Palpatine declares himself emperor in Revenge of the Sith, Williams reworks a portentous brass choral from his score for Oliver Stone’s Nixon. The passage occurs during a re-creation of Nixon’s fiery speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention. The sequence exaggerates Nixon’s fascistic tendencies and, through Williams’ hyperbolic score, works hard to whip the viewer into a fevered, receptive emotional state. As scholars of music and propaganda have shown again and again, music is as powerful as spoken rhetoric when it comes to opening people up to political messaging. Such turbulent tunes invite us to root for the disgraced president — or space dictator.
The clearest demonstration of the seductive power of Williams’ music occurs in Revenge of the Sith, which finds Palpatine attempting to plant dark desires in Anakin’s heart during an opera house performance of Squid Lake (really). At no point in the scene does the emperor’s leitmotif play, but his musical machinations are all over the score. The first half of his narration is accompanied by the deepest male choir yet heard in the saga, chanting a single low B on naked vowel sounds, in the style of Tibetan Gyuto monks. The choir ceases being underscore and becomes part of the movie’s fictional space, hearable by its characters. It is as though the emperor’s malignant music has seeped out of the soundtrack and into the world of the film.
When Palpatine makes his pitch to Anakin, his music does something most uncharacteristic for a Sith: It gets ecclesiastical. For a brief 15-second span, the violas and cellos state a hushed, reverential hymn in pure, unadulterated C-sharp minor. But these measures are profoundly salient, evocative of an antiquated style that has not been heard before in Star Wars. In the orchestral score, the performance instruction is “liturgico” — like a prayer.
The ultimate appeal to evil in this series, it would seem, hinges on a feeling of religiosity. A promise of occult knowledge, presented with just the right musical halo, is all it takes. For the Jedi, the seductive power of evil is a constant threat. And for those of us watching their adventures, likewise, it’s something we can easily hum along to. The Washington Post
Emperor Palpatine has the most intriguing musical representation … simultaneously repulsive and alluring.