Duel of the Fates (Star Wars)

John Williams scored the first Star Wars film in 1977 with the London Symphony Orchestra, choosing a late-Romantic symphonic idiom at a moment when film music had largely abandoned it; the Hollywood scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold were an acknowledged model. He went on to write for nine films across four decades, building some sixty or seventy recurring themes — among the largest networks of leitmotif in film music, in which characters, places and ideas each carry an identifiable musical sign. Concert suites entered orchestral programmes early, and the 1977 soundtrack reached platinum certification.