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•	2002 Album

Through careful reconstruction, the Silva Screen label has, over the years, treated Goldsmith's score with great care, reconstituting most of its cues on multiple releases. While collectors of the composer's works assume that his music would have been better suited for the picture in its original arrangements, this is a case in which even a casual observer could say the same. Goldsmith's score is lyrical and thematically beautiful, a relative rarity at a time in his career when he was using his music in a variety of more abrasive applications. Sensitive in its attitude and fantastically evocative in its use of melody to soften the characters at the heart of the faerie tale, his music for Legend is rich with texture and choral majesty. The thematic battle between good and evil is masterfully matched to the attempts by the Dark Lord to reign in the film. Instead of resorting to several completely separate motifs throughout the score, Goldsmith establishes a central faerie tale theme and simply elaborates on different sections of that theme to represent other characters and locations in the story. The performances of the National Philharmonic Orchestra are dynamic and precise, with the endless electronic supplements integrated with skill. Goldsmith had always stated that he wanted to treat his synthesizers like a fifth section of the orchestra, and this score is among the composer's best such merging. Many of the techniques he employed with the electronics in this score would directly inform his music of the next fifteen years. The dynamic range of emotions in Legend extends from cute, dancing interludes for innocuous creatures to deep brass explosions for the Dark Lord. The latter representation culminates in "Darkness Fails," the last three minutes of which present harsh, lower range brass performances of the kind of satisfying resonance that bridges Poltergeist and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The score really doesn't feature many extended action sequences, content to meander through contemplative territory of an airy fantasy atmosphere. At several points in the work, Goldsmith transitions into lyrical female vocal performances of "My True Love's Eyes" and other material, some of which is vaguely Celtic in its tone, and these are always fully integrated into the orchestral recordings.

The only major detraction from Goldsmith's Legend score is a crashing glissando, or wobbly electronic pulse, that jabs at the listener several times near the beginning of the score as dark events are suddenly foreshadowed in the film. These "oiya-oiyu, oiya-oiyu" noises (as opposed to the hard "doyng!" noises heard courtesy the Blaster Beam in the original Star Trek score, though just as metallic in general tone) often interrupt Goldsmith's best thematic statements and nearly ruin the integrity of a few cues. Aside from those bizarre blasts of the synthesizer, Goldsmith's electronics match the eerie setting well. They are slowly removed from the equation and replaced with the choir almost completely in the last twenty minutes of the work. At the outset, though, the rolling synthetic effects are so alien to the ear that they may be considered to be the score's weakest element by some listeners. Such folks will gravitate back to the soft vocal performances of the angels and central female character. The "My True Love's Eyes" lullaby served as proof that Goldsmith was young at heart and could, conceivably, have made an entire career out of lyrical children's film scores. The score is completed by a suite-like restatement of all the extended components of the title theme in the remarkably enjoyable "Re-United" at the end of the film. Unfortunately, as the studio distributed the film around the globe, more sorrow was in store for Goldsmith's score. The earth shattering event that was avoided in the European release of the film was experienced by Goldsmith collectors when the score was entirely dumped for the film's subsequent American release. The single man at Universal responsible for this decision was then-executive Sydney Jay Sheinberg, who is the idiot known for making some of the most disastrous decisions for the studio in the 1980's (also replacing Michael Kamen's score for Brazil and blessing the production of Howard the Duck). Sheinberg decided that Legend needed more appeal to teenagers and thus oversaw editing of the film himself (in MTV style) so that it included more kissing and other sexual material. He commissioned the German electronic group Tangerine Dream to rescore the film in haste, figuring that their score for Risky Business had enhanced a previous Tom Cruise film and the same could result again.

What Tangerine Dream provided was electronically and thematically inferior compared to Goldsmith's symphonic/synthetic hybrid effort, and the members of Tangerine Dream themselves became frustrated when Sheinberg would mutilate their score in the final edit as well. Ironically, when the film was extended in length for American television, scenes with Goldsmith's score from the European version ended up alongside scenes with Tangerine Dream's music, making the ultimate experience a musical embarrassment. After Sheinberg's foolish actions, Legend was a total failure in America, seizing neither teenagers nor families, and part of this failure was no doubt due to the removal of Goldsmith's score. On album, all of the music for Legend music is widely available. The Tangerine Dream score was released by Varèse Sarabande on an early CD in 1985 and re-issued in the same form in 1995. The Goldsmith score has been released several times on CD as well. An original German CD was pressed in 1986 with contents identical to the English LP release (which contained ten tracks and about 45 minutes of score). When the Silva Screen label returned to the project for a CD release in 1992, their original intent was to just re-issue the same content in remastered form with better packaging. But upon a mix-up with master tapes and the discovery of superior sounding alternative master copies, Silva produced a full, 70-minute album in excellent quality. This album remained in circulation (as an import in the United States) until it began becoming difficult to find around the year 2000. Varèse Sarabande originally advertised that they would release a "Deluxe Edition" of Goldsmith's Legend in December, 2000, but then backtracked when Silva retained the rights (Varèse only distributed the score at that time through its European branch). Then, in 2002, Silva finally re-issued the album once again (with new artwork, but the same contents as the 1992 product) for total commercial circulation and this album remains in print and readily available. While the 2002 edition claims to have better sound quality than all the others, the 1992 pressing has a very good balance of clarity and resonance itself (either product will satisfy Goldsmith fans). Overall, Legend was a fascinatingly doomed project from which an excellent Goldsmith score has emerged and lived a healthy life apart from its disgraced film.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.3 (in 113 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.32 (in 144,802 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.