Darth Editous said:
Isn't it also the case (I may have imagined this bit) that the prequels were (re-)edited after the music was composed and recorded, unlike the original trilogy, where the music was recorded after the edit was complete?
DE
This is the main reason I'm not a fan of the scores for the prequel trilogy. A lot of the music gets recycled. Duel of the fates never appears in Episode I or anywhere else in its complete form. Part of what made the OT great was how the music flowed through the films. The PT doesn't have that.
I heard a story, and this might be entirely fictional, that John Williams was so unhappy with the way his score was butchered in Episode I that he wrote George Lucas a letter where in he disowned the score as it appears in the final cut of the film. Urban legend perhaps? I don't know. I do know that the way Lucas makes his movies now prevents Williams from scoring them the way the OT was scored. Hence why so many musical cues are recycled over and over in each film.