Suite (Kings Row)

Korngold scored Kings Row in 1942, for Sam Wood's film of Henry Bellamann's novel about the buried cruelties of a small American town, and treated it as an opera without singing: themes attached to characters, developed across the whole picture rather than dropped in scene by scene. The main title, a brass fanfare rising over a wide interval, was studied closely by John Williams and can be heard in the shape of the Star Wars theme. Korngold had left Vienna for Hollywood in the 1930s; after eighteen films and two Academy Awards he returned to concert writing.