A Little Space Music

(May the, um, sixth, be with you!)

Anyone who’s read the liner notes for a Star Wars score (there must be at least a baker’s dozen of us) has run into composer John Williams’ use of the leitmotif. A leitmotif is a brief musical theme (or “motif”) associated with a particular character or concept, which, when played, brings that character or concept to mind. Think about the slow horn call of Luke staring off into the binary sunset of Tatooine, which is called Luke’s Theme, or the Force theme. Or Princess Leia’s theme, another haunting horn call in a similar melodic register. Or the bombastic menace of the Imperial March. When we want to signal that the bad guys are here, we play the Imperial March. When Luke successfully connects to the Force, the Force theme plays. Locking S Foils in Attack Position? Time for the trench run theme!

And that’s, more or less, how the leitmotifs are deployed throughout the Star Wars saga—to undergird and, I guess, underscore the drama. But there’s more to the concept of leitmotif than a simple musical underline, and what might be my favorite musical moment in the series uses the form’s range and possibilities to breathtaking effect.

The leitmotif descends —like so much of film music, but that’s another story—from the Ring Cycle operas of musical supervillain Richard Wagner (Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung). The Ring Cycle is a sprawling piece of mythological fantasy, full of gods and monsters and all sorts of larger- (and smaller-) than-life characters, and spectacle setpieces more suited to CGI blockbusters than to 19th century opera production. There are giants and dragons. Gods walk across a rainbow bridge. At one point the action hinges on the god Odin convincing Alberich the Nibelung, an evil overlord type of person, to shapeshift into a small toad so that Odin can step on him, and hold him helpless while Odin steals his magic ring. I will remind you that this is a work of live theater. It takes a certain kind of maniac to write “and then the singer shapeshifts into a toad” in the stage directions. Wagner was that kind of maniac and that’s just for starters.

Wagner pushed the limit of what was possible on stage with the practical effects technology of the mid-19th century. He developed a giant steam-powered mechanical dragon (prop), which never worked, and which—if I recall correctly—was broken into three pieces after the first performance of Siegfried, and then lost, like a fantasy MacGuffin, until its head was discovered in a London warehouse a hundred years later. But he sells the Ring Cycle’s dragons and gods and magic swords through music.

Wagner wouldn’t have called the Ring Cycle ‘operas,’ of course, he claimed to have invented the new form of ‘music-drama’—or, since this was the mid-19th century, recovered it from the original root of all performance on the classical Greek stage—anyway, ‘music-drama’, a totally new form, which is, you know, a totally different thing from opera, of course, just imagine I’ve included that Jennifer Lawrence “oh yeah, sure, totally” thumbs up gif here. But if you and I call them operas, here in email, and don’t tell anybody, I think we can get away with it.

To understand what Wagner’s doing with leitmotifs in the Ring Cycle, it helps to know the basic outline of the plot, especially the setup of the Cycle in the first opera, Das Rhinegold. As we go, I’ll include a quick youtube link to the leitmotifs associated with particular themes. If you have headphones, try to listen to them—it’ll help me make my point.

At the dawn of time, a dwarf named Alberich tries to woo some mermaids in the primordial waters of the Rhine. The mermaids scorn him, rebuff him, play tricks on him—but as the scene plays out, Alberich learns that the mermaids guard a glorious treasure, the Rhinegold (which they name in this song). Anyone who forges a ring out of the Rhinegold will have the greatest power in the universe—but who would do that, since to use the Rhinegold that way, one must renounce all love. Alberich, bitter from the mermaids’ rejection, goes full incel. He renounces love, steals the gold, makes a magic ring, and becomes the lord of the Nibelungs. If you’re getting Tolkien flashbacks with all this about magic rings, well, yeah.

Time passes. The god Wotan (Norse Odin if you’re following along with D'Aulaires' or Jack Kirby at home) is feeling chuff because he’s commissioned some giants to build him an awesome god-palace. Bad news, though, his wife reminds him: you promised to pay the giants by giving them the goddess who brings us eternal youth! So Wotan has to find something at least as great as eternal youth, to offer the giants instead. He hears about this magical dwarven treasure, goes for it, and gets it by tricking Albericht (that’s the toad bit, above). But Alberich, enraged at the loss of his ring, curses anyone who holds it to destruction. Wotan’s entranced by the ring and its power, but he has to surrender it to the giants—and so the trap of the rest of the opera (and of history) is set.

Now, when I tag motifs like this, it’s easy to make, let me call it a taxonomist’s mistake: this particular sequence of notes is the Ring, or the Rhinegold, with a clear conceptual wall separating it from all other sequences of notes. But if you focus on the differences, on the flash-card version, “which motif is this,” you can miss the connections between them, the extent to which they are transformations of one another—a vision of their meaning which is, to my way of thinking, every bit as important.

I’m no music theory person, so I lack a lot of the language for this. But did you hear how the dawn-of-time music contains, or points toward, the ecstatic fanfare of the Rhinegold motif? If you play them side by side, you can hear how the Rhinegold motif takes that primordial pentatonic material and makes it—ecstatic, brilliant, shining, rapturous, brief? Gold emergent from the natural forces of the universe.

Then play the Renunciation of Love motif next to the Curse motif. It’s not quite as direct a link, to my ear, but I think the Renunciation, which is initially this bitter, personal decision, becomes bombastic and all-devouring in the Curse. The curse isn’t a later decision predicated on a dramatic event—it’s a flowering of the seed that is the renunciation of love. And the Renunciation music’s first few notes feel like they’re a continuation, or a distortion, of the Rhinegold fanfare.

Listen to the Ring theme, and then listen to the Valhalla theme. They’re almost the same music—with a different vibe—because no matter how their affects differ, Wotan and Alberich both seek absolute power over the cosmos. Wotan might not consciously surrender all love forever, but he’s more than willing to deal away youth and beauty and lie to himself that he’ll be able to weasel out of his debt, and what’s the difference when the chips are down? And then—if you listen to the Ring and the Curse side by side, you hear how the Curse is sort of essential to the Ring, that there is no Ring without the Curse, just as there is no curse without the Renunciation of Love. And no matter how awesome Valhalla sounds, no matter how beautiful and how glorious it is—it’s the same thing, really.

The themes’ distinctions and their connections become the musical warp and weft of the Cycle, and as you live with them you can feel them evolve, in real time, slipping from one to the other the way thoughts—your actual thoughts, the ones you have in your head, not the way you’d write them out on paper—unfold, this concept turning out to have contained that concept, in an Indra-net of implication and connotation and meaning that comprises your universe. Listening, with familiarity, to the Ring Cycle, can feel like inhabiting a new and alien mind, a mind that is a world.

(It can also, if you’re unfamiliar, or not just in the mood, feel like an intense slog. The prologue to Götterdåmmerung is a solid forty five minutes of three norns we’ve never seen before sitting around a tree on stage. That’s it. For forty-five minutes.)

Now, certainly John Williams (remember John Williams?) connects his themes. It’s shocking, for example, to think that nobody knew Luke and Leia were related in the first movie, since they’re both represented by kissing-cousin french horn themes in similar registers. But I seldom hear the Star Wars thematic material speak to itself the way Wagner motifs do, not with that sense of surprise and evolution, driving story and characters forward. Instead the themes surface from the orchestration like sharks from the ocean: “oh, here I am!” For example, the Imperial March appears from time to time, up-tempo, in chase scenes or dogfights, to signal “here come the baddies.” It’s tremendously effective, and I imagine it’s more audience-friendly in cinema, where so much is happening at once. On an opera stage, there’s always time to wonder.

But one moment from the new films goes beyond. It feels organic and inevitable and surprising, a moment of growth in a series that so adores its icons. And, fittingly, it’s one of the climactic moments of The Last Jedi, the Star Wars film most committed to the growth, change, and rebirth of Star Wars.

I’m talking about Luke’s March.

To set the scene: we’re near the end of the film. The Resistance, led by Princess Leia, has been cornered by the First Order. Luke, we’ve seen earlier in the film, is on the other side of the galaxy, depressed and cut off from the Force and more than a little unhinged, not unlike Yoda in Empire. But, in this darkest moment, Luke arrives. Thankfully, some helpful youtube person put together a music-only cut of the scene—which you can see (and more importantly, hear) at this link.

From the opening bars, there’s something special here. The bass interval echoes the opening jump of Luke’s horn theme in a lower register, an instant’s hope before it plunges into the depths of despair—the spark of resistance has gone out, no rescue is coming—to rise again, with that recognizable twinge of weird Yoda magic in the strings, and then there, at 0:48, out of the anxiety and indecision, is that clear horn call, rising out of the ocean, fulfilling the promise of that earlier jump—to melt into Leia’s theme, as brother and sister meet for the last time. As late as 2:02 I hear the strings echo and transpose the Force theme, before melting back into the heartbreaking Han and Leia theme as Luke passes her the Falcon’s dice.

This much is breathtaking and dense, though still within the realm of Williams’ earlier transformations of material. But what happens next, at 2:15, after he kisses her on the forehead, just drops me.

I didn’t even understand the full nature of what I was hearing until I was re-listening to this material for this essay, and if you tell me this next bit is a reach, I won’t fight you, but: you hear that pulse, which builds through the strings into a full-fledged march beat? Go back and listen to the Force suite from A New Hope. Listen, specifically, to the twinge in the strings just after 0:23, between the swell of the horns, and again at about 0:31. Isn’t that the same pulse in the strings? Almost a heartbeat?

In A New Hope, it’s hidden beneath the soaring horns, beneath the mystic’s vision and the young man’s dreams—the call beyond the horizon, the setting of the twin suns. The horn reaches and yearns—rises and falls. But the strings don’t let any fall be the last. The strings commit, and endure. Here, that pulse becomes the core material.

In Star Wars, the good guys don’t get to march to war. They’re a ragtag band—they’re kids doing their best with what they’ve got, and okay, they do fuck up from time to time. Or, constantly. They have a victory march—to which they arrive almost apologetically, as uncomfortable with being such a center of attention as the audience is, on some level, with the Riefenstahl staging—but their operations are desperate, last-ditch, scraped-together heroism, rather than disciplined and consistent action. There’s an immaturity to them.

But The Last Jedi is, at its best, a story about growing up. About how you there’s always more growing up to do—and growing beyond.

Luke marches. We hear, foregrounded at last, the ceaseless beat, the heart that’s driven him through and beyond the yearning and the dreaming and the suns over the horizon. He’s not just a man broken by years of trying to be what he thought his teachers wanted him to be, by failing. . He’s not just a kid heading into a confrontation with the Dark Side without a hint of a plan beyond The Power of Love. He was a boy whose visions of manhood were visions of failure—of retreat, hiding, collapse, and evil. But now, he knows what he’s doing. He has walked here, across the sky.

And then—right at 2:54 in the clip, when he steps out of the shattered fortress—that explosion of horns means one thing in Star Wars. It’s the Imperial March. Only—it’s not the Empire’s any more. We see the Empire, the First Order: scared children wearing their grandfathers’ clothes. This isn’t their triumph. In a musical instant, in a single fanfare, Luke and Williams reclaim Anakin Skywalker: the Anakin Obi-Wan remembers in A New Hope, the hero, the cunning warrior, the good friend. We see what he might have been, unfallen. We see Luke no longer afraid of what he might become.

And he strides out with his lightsaber, to face the entire First Order, and save the day.

Music transforms, and grows. The warp and the weft of difference and similarity create meaning across time and space. The Star Wars leitmotif becomes, in this moment, a complex and living thing, as tangled and alive as any Wagnerian score. It is the Force that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. And it, too, grows beyond.

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A few items of business:

Last Exit is out in the United Kingdom this week, in a handsome Titan Books edition!

In honor of my birthday month, I’m offering a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions. I love writing this newsletter, and I look forward to another year of fun and essays that most of the time begin, I swear, with the intent of being 500 words on “this scene in TLJ is cool” and end up incorporating a thousand-word Wagner digression.

Happy reading. Take care of yourselves, and work for the liberation of all sentient beings.