THE MUSIC

Gustav Holst wrote The Planets between 1914 and 1916, though its real subject isn’t astronomy at all. Holst had recently discovered astrology on a walking holiday in Spain, and became fascinated with the idea that each planet carried its own personality: Mars aggressive and warlike, Venus serene and peaceful, Jupiter bursting with frivolity. When it premiered in 1918, it made the shy, reluctant Holst an overnight sensation he never fully came to enjoy.

Fast forward to 1977, and John Williams needed music for a very different otherworldly story: a rebellion against an evil Empire, set in a galaxy far, far away. When he needed a theme to embody pure menace, Williams drew from the same well Holst had tapped six decades earlier. The result, the Imperial March, borrows the militaristic bones of “Mars, the Bringer of War” almost wholesale. Holst’s score calls for one of the largest orchestras in the standard repertoire, including six horns and an organ, built to swing from Mars’s driving, mechanized violence to Jupiter’s broad, big-hearted brass fanfares. Williams answers with that same late-Romantic language of sweeping strings and blazing brass, carrying the Imperial March’s menace and the swashbuckling wonder of the main theme in a single evening.