The Peninsula Music Festival - 59th Season 2011 - Program Notes
Program 3 - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - From Broadway to Hollywood
Except for the Rossini William Tell Overture, all pieces on the program are receiving their first PMF performance.
Overture from West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Composed in 1957.
Broadway opening on September 26, 1957.
Leonard Bernstein, a native of Boston, had a productive fascination with New York City for much of his career. Beside being linked with that city’s major orchestra for many years as conductor and music director, the great metropolis also served as the inspiration for several of his original stage compositions — the ballet Fancy Free (1944), the musicals On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1952), the score for Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront (1954) and the epochal West Side Story. The idea for West Side Story was suggested to Bernstein as early as 1949 by the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who envisioned a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet set in New York City. Bernstein was fascinated with the idea, but simply could not find time to work on the project until the middle 1950s, beginning composition as soon as he had finished the brilliant score for the operetta/musical Candide. Stephen Sondheim, in his Broadway debut, supplied the lyrics, Arthur Laurents wrote the book and Robbins staged the show, which was finally completed in 1957. After try-outs in Washington and Philadelphia, West Side Story was unveiled on Broadway on September 26th and ran for almost two years. After a ten-month road tour, it returned to New York and closed on April 27, 1960 after a total of 732 Broadway performances. It was made into a film in 1961 that swept ten Oscars, including Best Picture, and has since entered into the pantheon of the American theater as one of the greatest musicals ever created.
West Side Story was one of the first musicals to explore a serious subject with wide social implications. More than just the story of the tragic lives of ordinary people in a small, grubby section of New York, it was concerned with urban violence, juvenile delinquency, clan hatred and young love. The show was criticized as harshly realistic by some who advocated an entirely escapist function for the musical, depicting things that were not appropriately shown on the Broadway stage. Most, however, recognized that it expanded the scope of the musical through references both to classical literature (Romeo and Juliet) and to the pressing problems of modern society. Brooks Atkinson, the distinguished critic of The New York Times, noted in his book Broadway that West Side Story was “a harsh ballad of the city, taut, nervous and flaring, the melodies choked apprehensively, the rhythms wild, swift and deadly.” West Side Story, like a very few other musicals — Show Boat, Oklahoma, Pal Joey, A Chorus Line, Sunday in the Park with George, Rent — provides more than just an evening’s pleasant diversion. It is a work that gave an entirely new vision and direction to the American musical theater.
Three of West Side Story’s most memorable numbers — Tonight, Somewhere and Mambo — have been arranged into this overture by the American conductor Maurice Peress, who was an assistant conductor to Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and the conductor of the sensational premiere of his Mass in Washington, D.C. in 1971.
My Fair Lady
Frederick Loewe (1901-1988)
Composed in 1955.
Broadway opening on March 15, 1956.
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe were an unlikely pair to have created some of the most cherished musicals of the American theater. Loewe was born in 1901 in Berlin; his father was the famous operetta tenor Edmund Loewe, who created the role of Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow. Lerner was born seventeen years later in New York, where his father’s chain of Lerner Shops was based. Loewe followed a rigorous musical education in the traditional European manner, studying with Busoni, d’Albert and Reznicek, and appearing as piano soloist at age thirteen with the Berlin Symphony. Though his training had been in concert music, Loewe was drawn strongly to the popular idioms, and he wrote several numbers for his father’s variety shows, including Katrina, which became a European hit. The financial privilege of Alan Lerner’s upbringing allowed him to get a broad liberal education at home and in England; he graduated in 1940 from Harvard, where he contributed lyrics and sketches to two Hasty Pudding shows. He went home to New York with the ambition of writing for the theater, but bided his time for the next two years devising over 500 scripts for radio programs. Loewe’s interest in popular music led him to emigrate to the United States in 1924, but he could find no immediate outlet for either his serious or popular composition talents, so he spent several years in New York and in the West playing piano in a beer hall, teaching horseback riding, prize fighting (!), and working as a busboy, gold prospector, horseback mail carrier and cowboy. In 1934, he settled in New York, and started composing again. His shows Salute to Spring and Great Lady, written with lyricist Earle Crooker, found little success, however, and he again went back to playing piano in a restaurant.
In 1942, the producer Henry Duffy was presenting a series of original musicals at his theater in Detroit, and he approached Loewe about adapting the score of Salute to Spring for Barry Conners’ play The Patsy. A writer was needed to rework the lyrics, and Loewe introduced himself to Alan Lerner, whose work he knew from a revue at the famous New York theater society, the Lambs Club. They produced Life of the Party in just two weeks, and that initial collaboration led them to create an entirely new musical titled What’s Up, which opened on Broadway in November 1943. Lerner described the show as “a disaster,” but two years later, The Day Before Spring proved to be a critical and modest commercial success. Broadway stardom came to Lerner and Loewe in 1947 with Brigadoon. Their subsequent collaborations helped to define the great age of the American musical: Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), Gigi (1958, film; 1973, stage adaptation) and Camelot (1960). Ill health forced Loewe into retirement in 1962, but Lerner continued as one of Broadway’s most accomplished lyricists in collaborations with composers Burton Lane (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 1965 and Carmelina, 1979), André Previn (Coco, 1969) and Leonard Bernstein (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1976). Lerner and Loewe’s last project together was the film The Little Prince (1974). Alan Jay Lerner died in New York in 1986; Frederick Loewe passed away in Palm Springs, Florida two years later.
Though George Bernard Shaw forbade the musical adaptation of Pygmalion during his lifetime, the Hungarian movie producer Gabriel Pascal, the only man ever to win permission from Shaw to film his plays, received rights from the Shaw estate for such a project following the author’s death in 1950. Pascal approached many distinguished theater people to undertake the musical — Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Schwartz and Dietz, Rodgers and Hammerstein — but was refused by them all. In 1952, he offered Pygmalion to Lerner and Loewe, but they could not agree on how to adapt such a precisely honed drama into a musical. Composer and librettist worked on separate projects for the next two years before solving Pygmalion’s essential problem which, according to Lerner, “was how to enlarge the play into a big musical without hurting content. It was a big surprise — we hardly had to enlarge the plot at all. We just added what Shaw had happening offstage.” The premiere of My Fair Lady on March 15, 1956 was, wrote critic William Hawkins, “a legendary evening.” Lerner and Loewe’s score for the story of Eliza, the Cockney flower-girl who is transformed into a great lady by mending her diction under the disciplinarian guidance of the patrician Professor Higgins, remains an enduring classic of the American musical theater.
Fiddler on the Roof
Jerry Bock (1928-2010)
Composed in 1964.
Opened on September 22, 1964 at the Imperial Theatre in New York.
Sholem Aleichem, born in Ukraine in 1859, was regarded as the leading Yiddish author and playwright by the time he was driven from his native land in 1905 by the Russian pograms targeting Jews. He moved first to Switzerland and in 1914 settled in New York, where he died two years later. In 1964, composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, playwright Joseph Stein, producer Harold Prince and director–choreographer Jerome Robbins made Aleichem’s 1894 story Tevye and his Daughters the basis what would prove to be one of Broadway’s all-time greatest hits, the first musical to run more than 3,000 performances — Fiddler of the Roof. The show, which takes its title from one of Marc Chagall’s surrealistic depictions of Eastern European Jewish life that included the image of a fiddler, was nominated for ten Tony Awards and won nine (including Best Musical), translated into dozens of languages, made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1971, revived four times on Broadway, and produced by countless professional and community theaters around the world. The story, set in Tsarist Russia in 1905, tells of the poor but pious milkman Tevye and his attempts to raise his five daughters in the traditions of his village and his Jewish faith as the realities of the outside world encroach upon them. The score by Bock & Harnick produced a bounty of songs that have become Broadway classics, including If I Were a Rich Man, Sunrise, Sunset, To Life, Do You Love Me?, Matchmaker, Matchmaker and Miracle of Miracles.
Fantasy on Motives from La Bohème
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Arranged by Gaetano Luporini (1865-1948)
Composed in 1893-1896; arranged in 1908.
Premiered on February 1, 1896 in Turin, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.
Even before the successful premiere of Manon Lescaut at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1893 had rocketed Puccini to international operatic prominence, he had begun searching for his next libretto. He toyed with the curious notion of writing an opera on the life of the Buddha (Richard Wagner once entertained the same idea), and seriously considered a bloodthirsty and rather lascivious drama titled La Lupa (“The She-Wolf”) by Giovanni Verga (one of whose short stories had provided the subject for Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana of 1890), but abandoned those plans in favor of a libretto based on Henri Mürger’s novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, originally published in installments in the Parisian journal Le Corsair between 1847 and 1849 (Le Corsair printed Hector Berlioz’s first music criticisms), and Théodore Barrière’s 1849 stage adaptation of the book as La Vie de Bohème.
Puccini’s librettists, the learned Giuseppe Giacosa and the mercurial Luigi Illica (who had written the libretto for Manon Lescaut and would later do those for Tosca and Madama Butterfly), set to work but they encountered stiff problems from the demanding composer (“To work for Puccini means to go through a living hell,” complained Illica) as well as from the varied and episodic construction of Mürger’s book — the first draft had twenty acts. Puccini’s working method required extensive and time-consuming alterations to the libretto before he was ready to set it to music, and Giacosa and Illica could not get final approval from him for their libretto until the summer of 1894. Puccini, busy travelling to oversee productions of his operas, took the next eighteen months to complete the music.
The premiere of La Bohème, conducted in Turin on February 1, 1896 by the 29-year-old Arturo Toscanini, was greeted with cool indifference by the audience and sharp disappointment by the press, but a performance in Palermo in April 1897 won unbridled approval. It was staged at Covent Garden, London in July 1900 and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York seven months later, and quickly thereafter became one of the most beloved of all operas.
The Fantasy on Motives from “La Bohème” was created in 1908 by Gaetano Luporini (1865-1948), who, like Puccini, studied with Carlo Angeloni at the Instituto Musicale Pacini in his native Lucca before completing his education at the Milan Conservatory. Luporini composed operas, sacred pieces and orchestral and chamber works, and was director of the Instituto Pacini from 1902 to 1937. His Fantasy includes some of La Bohème’s most memorable moments: the opening of Act I and entry of the Bohemians; Rodolfo’s touching aria when he first meets Mimì, Che gelida manina (“What a frozen little hand you have. Let me give it back its warmth”); O Mimì, tu più non torni (“O Mimi, you will return no more”), the Act IV duet in which Rodolfo and Marcello reminisce about their lovers; Musetta’s Waltz from Act II; and the festive crowd scene at the Café Momus on Christmas Eve.
Overture to William Tell
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Composed in 1828-1829.
Premiered on August 3, 1829 in Paris.
First performed at the PMF in 1985 with Paul Polivnick conducting and most recently in 2006 with Victor Yampolsky conducting.
In 1824, Rossini moved to Paris to direct the Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political trends that were then gaining popularity. Rossini was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes, and he began to cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his new position in Paris. Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in the 14th century, had recently created much interest when it was introduced to Paris in a French translation. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at least, a saleable one), and seems to have taken special care to incorporate the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter, symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. From the summer of 1828, when word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829, William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its six-hour length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style of the opera was one which Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera. During the remaining 39 years of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage. The four sections of the Overture, virtually a miniature tone poem, represent dawn in the mountains, a thunderstorm, the pastoral countryside and the triumphant return of the Swiss troops.
Oklahoma!
Richard Rodgers (1902-1979)
Composed in 1942-1943.
Premiered on March 31, 1943 at the St. James Theatre in New York City.
At the beginning of World War II, Oscar Hammerstein II was among the most successful and respected Broadway and Hollywood writers, famed for his books and lyrics for Rose-Marie, The Desert Song, Show Boat and two dozen other productions. Richard Rodgers had long collaborated with lyricist Lorenz Hart to create some of the most tuneful and sophisticated songs ever heard on the American stage and screen — Mountain Greenery, My Romance, With a Song in My Heart, My Funny Valentine, Bewitched and scores of others. By 1942, however, Hammerstein had gone for some time without a hit (a Hollywood producer bought out a contract with him for a four-picture deal rather than take a chance on continued flops) and Rodgers found himself without a lyricist when chronic drinking and failing health forced Larry Hart to give up work. It was just at that time that the Theatre Guild of New York, which since 1919 had been producing American dramas and, occasionally, musicals (including Porgy & Bess in 1935), suggested to Rodgers that he consider writing a show based on Lynn Riggs’ play Green Grow the Lilacs, which the Guild had staged in 1931. The composer was excited by the project, but realized that he would be unable to count on Hart to provide the libretto, so he contacted Hammerstein to inquire if he would be interested in collaborating on the venture. Hammerstein knew the play (he once tried, without success, to talk Jerome Kern into writing music for it), and he thought that it would provide excellent material for musical treatment. He agreed, and the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein was born.
Dick Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had been friends for years — they had collaborated on four songs for a Varsity Show at Columbia University in 1919 — but the Green Grow the Lilacs project (tentatively titled Away We Go) was the first time they had worked together professionally. They started on the musical in August 1942, balancing their creative work with casting and production decisions and soliciting financial backers. Money was not easy to find, since the show had all the earmarks of a disaster: balletic dance sequences (by Agnes de Mille) replaced the chorus line of the traditional musical; realism and character development replaced farce; an unconventional folk-inspired story replaced an elegant or exotic setting; and there were no stars in the cast. The first tryouts, in New Haven in early March 1943, flopped. “No Girls, No Gags, No Chance,” one critic wired to his New York paper. Drastic revisions were undertaken and a new title devised — Oklahoma! — and the performances in Boston later that month drew rave reviews. The show’s Broadway opening, on March 31, 1943 at the St. James Theatre, was a triumph, with critics and audiences united in their praise: “a jubilant and enchanting musical” … “fresh and imaginative” … “musical and visual delight” … “one of the finest musical scores any play ever had.” Oklahoma! ran for the next five years and nine months — 2,212 performances — a record eclipsed on Broadway only by My Fair Lady fifteen years later. The show toured North America, Scandinavia, Australia, England and South Africa as extensively as wartime conditions allowed; a special company performed it in remote military camps in the Pacific. The album of the score, the first ever recorded in its entirety by the original cast, sold over a million copies; sales of the printed sheet music matched that number. The show was filmed in the then-new Todd-AO process in 1955 (starring Gordon McRae and Shirley Jones), and given major New York revivals in 1951, 1969, 1979 and 2001. With Oklahoma!, the American musical comedy reached its artistic maturity, as the noted American writer David Ewen noted: “More than any other single musical before it, even Show Boat, Oklahoma! made the musical play an established institution in the American musical theater that would grow and develop in scope in ensuing years.”
The Overture to Oklahoma!, arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of Broadway orchestrators, contains several of the show’s most beloved melodies: The Farmer and the Cowman, Poor Jud is Dead, Many a New Day, People Will Say We’re in Love and Oklahoma!.
Three Pieces from Schindler’s List
John Williams (born in 1932)
Composed in 1993.
John Williams is one of America’s most widely known composers. Born in New York in 1932, he moved with his family when he was sixteen to Los Angeles, where his father was active as a studio musician. After serving in the Air Force, Williams returned to New York in 1954, working there as a jazz pianist in clubs and on recordings while attending the Juilliard School. He subsequently moved back to Los Angeles to enroll at UCLA and study privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. By the early 1960s, he was composing music for feature films and television, as well as working as a pianist, arranger and conductor for Columbia Records. His music began to receive wide recognition during the 1960s, when he won Emmys for his scores for the television movies Heidi and Jane Eyre.
Williams has since composed music and served as music director for more than 300 movies and television shows, including all of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, Jaws, E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, Home Alone, The Witches of Eastwick, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. His recent projects include the Harry Potter movies, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, War of the Worlds, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. Williams has received 45 Academy Award nominations (the most of any living person) and won five Oscars, 21 Grammys, four Golden Globes and four Emmys, as well as numerous gold and platinum records. The original soundtrack album from Star Wars has sold nearly five million copies, more than any non-pop album in recording history.
In addition to his film music, Williams has written many concert pieces, including two symphonies as well as concertos for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, bassoon, tuba, horn and trumpet. For the 350th anniversary of the city of Boston, he composed the Jubilee 350 Fanfare; for the Boston Pops, he wrote the Esplanade Overture and Pops on the March. In 1986, he wrote the Statue of Liberty March for the celebrations marking the centenary of that national monument. He was among the 21 composers who contributed fanfares to the Houston Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986. His additional concert works include the Essay for Strings, the official themes of the 1996 Summer Olympics (Summon the Heroes) and the 2002 Winter Olympics (Call of the Champions), and numerous chamber pieces. Williams composed Air and Simple Gifts for Clarinet, Cello and Piano for the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama as President of the United States on January 20, 2009.
From 1980 to 1993, Williams served as conductor of the Boston Pops. In addition to leading that orchestra in Boston, on tours across the country and abroad, and in many recordings, he has also appeared as guest conductor with major orchestras in London, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, Toronto, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Williams holds twenty honorary degrees, including those from the Juilliard School, Boston College, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Boston University, New England Conservatory, University of Massachusetts, Eastman School and Oberlin College. On June 23, 2000, he was the first person inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. On New Year’s Day 2004, he served as the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, and the following December he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor, America’s highest award for artistic achievement. In June 2006, Williams received the prestigious Golden Baton Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Symphony Orchestra League.
In 1993, Williams composed the score for Steven Spielberg’s searing screen drama Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes. The film, the most acclaimed movie of the year, won for Williams an Oscar for his music and for Spielberg his first Academy Award as director. As preface to the Three Pieces that he extracted from the score for concert performance, the composer wrote, “The film’s ennobling story, set in the midst of the great tragedy of the Holocaust, offered an opportunity to create not only dramatic music, but also themes that reflected the more tender and nostalgic aspects of Jewish life during those turbulent years. For this part of the soundtrack, I featured a solo violin, accompanied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and our greatest good fortune was to have Itzhak Perlman as soloist for the recording. Included here are three pieces — Theme from ‘Schindler’s List,’ Jewish Town [Krakow Ghetto — Winter ’41] and Remembrances — which embody the main thematic elements of the score.”
Selections from Star Wars
John Williams
Star Wars is a phenomenon, the most successful film series of all time and a cultural icon of almost mythic proportions. George Lucas’ original movie, now titled Episode IV: A New Hope, created an unprecedented sensation when it was released in 1977, and the sequel that appeared three years later — Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back — was praised for the detail and inventiveness of its visual design and the sophistication of its character portrayals. By the time that Empire appeared, Lucas had conceived a screen epic of six films, with the original Star Wars as its centerpiece, that would tell the full tale of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the galaxy of beings, machines and planets that they encounter in the struggle to save the universe from the evil Empire. Following the release of Return of the Jedi (Episode VI, 1983), The Phantom Menace (Episode I, 1999) and Attack of the Clones (Episode II, 2002), the series concluded in 2005 with Episode III, titled Revenge of the Sith. John Williams’ scores for the Star Wars series earned him three Academy Award nominations; he won the third of his five Oscars for A New Hope.
The essential conflict of the Star Wars epic is established in Episode I: The Phantom Menace: a group of dissident worlds has broken away from the Galactic Republic and allied themselves in an attempt to control the universe. The Jedi warriors are sworn to protect the Republic and two of them — Qui-Gon Jinn and his youthful apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi — seek to mediate an end to the dispute between the dissidents and the peaceful planet of Naboo. They are attacked when they reach Naboo and flee to the distant planet Tatooine, where they meet Anakin Skywalker, a young boy who possesses an instinctive gift for the Force from which the Jedi derive their power. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan enlist Anakin in their quest to liberate Naboo, during which Anakin kills the “phantom menace” Darth Maul, apprentice to Darth Sidious, Lord of the Sith, the descendents of Jedi who used the Dark Side of the Force to gain the power to attempt an overthrow of the Republic.
Though the Jedi seek to purge themselves of emotion, the teenage Anakin finds love in Episode II: Attack of the Clones when he meets Padmé Amidala, queen of Naboo and senator to the Republic; they are secretly married. Anakin and Obi-Wan join with an army of cloned warriors to fight against the gathering threat to the Republic.
In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin learns that Padmé is pregnant and he is plagued by visions of her death in childbirth. Anakin rescues Supreme Chancellor Palpatine from dissident forces, and comes increasingly under his influence. Palpatine, however, is revealed to be a Sith Lord, and convinces Anakin that Padmé’s death can be prevented if he gives himself to the Dark Side of the Force. Anakin does, and becomes transformed into the dreaded Darth Vader. Padmé dies in giving birth to twins, Luke and Leia.
In Episode IV: A New Hope (the original Star Wars), the dissidents have established interplanetary hegemony and formed the evil Empire. Luke Skywalker, ignorant of the identities of his parents, lives on his uncle’s farm on distant Tatooine and is restless for adventure. From two used robots (“droids”) — R2-D2 and C-3PO, both formerly property of the forces resisting the Empire — he learns that the rebel Princess Leia has been taken captive. When Imperial troopers search Tatooine, Luke is swept into the conflict. He meets Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi, now living as a hermit in the desert, and teems up with the smuggler Han Solo, the furry Wookie Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2 and Ben to rescue the Princess and destroy the Empire’s immense Death Star. John Williams’ Main Title is one of Hollywood’s most stirring and familiar musical moments. Though she also proves to be a woman of daring and action, the quieter aspects of Princess Leia are suggested by the theme that Williams wrote for her. The score for A New Hope closes with the music accompanying Luke, Han, Ben and the victorious rebels being received by the Princess in The Throne Room and End Title.
In Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is now a leader of the rebellion against the Empire. He has a vision of his mentor, Ben Kenobi, killed in a light-saber duel with Darth Vader, that leads him to seek training in the ways of the Force from the Jedi master, Yoda. Luke uses his new knowledge to rescue Han Solo and Princess Leia, but he makes the stunning discovery that Vader, now commander of the Empire forces, is his father. Williams’ music for The Empire Strikes Back includes the swaggering Imperial March and the graceful Yoda’s Theme.
The epic Star Wars tale reaches its conclusion in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi: Han Solo is rescued from the evil Jabba the Hutt; the Empire and its second, more menacing Death Star are overcome by the rebels; Luke has his ultimate confrontation with Darth Vader; the Republic is re-established; and the romantic triangle of Luke, Leia and Solo is resolved with the revelation that Luke and Leia are brother and sister.
©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda