C12| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BYJOHNMAUCERI
H
OLLYWOOD’Sgolden
age calls to mind all
sorts of outsize fig-
ures: glamorous stars,
martinet directors,
brilliant screenwriters—and, perhaps
less-known but no less essential, the
composers who wrote the music that
established its world dominance.
Among the most notable of these
composers was Erich Wolfgang Korn-
gold, who was the subject of an illu-
minating biography in 1997: Brendan
Carroll’s “The Last Prodigy.” Now we
have a work to match it, giving us a
portrait of another great composer,
really the founding father of American
film music, Max Steiner (1888-1971).
“Music by Max Steiner,” by Steven C.
Smith, a journalist and producer of
movie-themed documentaries, de-
scribes a long and tumultuous life and
firmly establishes Steiner as not only
a major force in Hollywood but also
one of the most influential composers
in the history of symphonic music.
Steiner and Korngold, as it hap-
pens, have many similarities. They
were both raised in Vienna. They were
both Wunderkinder trained in tradi-
tional composition and conversant
from an early age with the Austro-
German musical tradition. They both
came from Jewish families that had
departed from any traditional religi-
osity. (As Korngold’s widow wrote,
“We considered ourselves Viennese—
Hitler made us Jewish.”) They both
had a soft spot for operetta. At one
point, they even had offices in the
same building at Warner Bros., along
with the German-American composer
Franz Waxman. The very idea that
these émigré composers shared a
workplace in Burbank, Calif., is worthy
of a moment of awe. They form
the core—along with Miklós Rózsa,
Dimitri Tiomkin and Alfred Newman—
of the golden-age elite, creators of the
“Hollywood sound.” These men—refu-
gees of wars and racism—trans-
planted European music to America,
and, with the help of a global ampli-
fier—the movies—made the music
both American and universal.
Steiner grew up in a family that
owned many of Vienna’s theaters. It
was Steiner’s grandfather who per-
suaded Johann Strauss Jr. (“Die Fled-
ermaus”) to write for the stage and
Steiner’s father who created Venice in
Vienna, an immense amusement park
with lagoons, a Ferris wheel, music
halls and restaurants—and music
everywhere. Unlike Korngold, whose
father—the redoubtable music critic
Julius—hated his son’s love for oper-
etta, Max was encouraged by his
parents. Because of the fame of the
Steiner family, the boy’s life was a
heady mix of classical music (he
attended the premiere of “Uncle Rich-
ard” Strauss’s “Salome” in 1905 at the
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With data from NPD BookScancomposer’s invitation) and show busi-
ness. At 19, he composed his first
operetta (“Die Schöne Griechen”),
which was produced in 1907.
Steiner was in London when the
Great War broke out in 1914—he had
gone there because of the popularity
of Viennese music and a short-lived
love affair with a British singer. As an
enemy alien, he would have been
interned had it not been for the Duke
of Westminster, who facilitated a
passport to a country not at war: the
United States. At 26, the composer
began a new life in New York and
would never return to Vienna.
Mr. Smith’s deft tracing of Steiner’s
life in Vienna, London and New York,
not to mention in his move to Los
Angeles in 1929, helps us understand
the varied experiences that went into
his cultural formation. We learn that
in New York Steiner mixed with the
likes of George Gershwin and Jerome
Kern and roomed with Metropolitan
Opera baritone Emanuel Liszt. He was
naturally charming and hopeful,
though often irresponsible when it
came to money.
Steiner, an immediate success as an
arranger and conductor of Broadway
musicals, was invited to Hollywood
when the studios converted into
movie-musical factories. There he
earned a reputation as a composer
who could arrange in any style from
operetta to jazz. He hit his stride at
RKO Pictures, which quickly promoted
him to music director. Within three
years, he would make history by
composing a fully underscored dra-
matic talking film—“Symphony of SixMillion”—something that had never
been done before.
As Steiner’s career blossoms, Mr.
Smith gives us a picture of a delight-
ful and kindly man-child, living in
Beverly Hills on Benzedrine, coffee
and cigars, scribbling obscenities in
the margins of his scores to entertain
the boys who were orchestrating
them. He was obsessed with music at
the cost of his personal relationships,
including those with his wife and their
tragic only child, whose life ended
in suicide. All of this, Mr. Smith
occasionally reminds us, played out
as World War II was tearing apart
Steiner’s homeland.
Throughout the pre-Hollywood
years and well after, Steiner kept
alive his connection to the European
musical tradition, attending concerts
and socializing with fellow compos-
ers and conductors, but, unlike them,
working only in the movies. His film
scores—once studio chief David O.
Selznick supported the idea of fully
scored dramas in 1932—are imbued
with Steiner’s classical-music eru-
dition. He employed, for instance,
Richard Wagner’s leitmotif method
for long-form dramatic storytelling—
with characters and images given
recurrent themes and sequences. But
Steiner’s music is only vaguely
Wagnerian in sound—mostly when it
swirls in constant upward modula-
tions. What makes his voice so strik-
ing has far more to do with his abil-
ity to construct themes that are
effective and memorable. Nothing
could be simpler than the theme
for “King Kong” (1933) heard at thetop of the film. Only Steiner could
invent something that, using only
three descending notes, expresses
immense power and dread when
played by the lower brass but can
then be transformed through orches-
tration and a change in harmony to
make Kong a sympathetic hero, oneworthy of our pity. Steiner makes us
root for the monster at the end. That
is genius.
The reader will know some of the
films that Mr. Smith discusses and
can access others through streaming
services. If you don’t know the 1932
“Bird of Paradise,” go to YouTube
and watch it. If you want to accom-
pany your reading of the chapter
on Steiner’s score for “Casablanca”
(1942), put it on whatever screen you
wish, or listen to a recording without
the film, and you will hear the fecun-
dity of Steiner’s talent. Great film
music can be appreciated with your
eyes wide shut, just as ballet scores
like “The Rite of Spring” can be
detached from the synchronicity of
visual gesture.
Listen to a Steiner score and you
will hear resonances of other com-
posers, including not only Wagner butMusic by Max Steiner
By Steven C. Smith
Oxford, 480 pages, $34.95
also Richard Strauss and, not least,
Gustav Mahler. Indeed, Steiner pre-
pared the way for our acceptance of
the symphonies of Mahler in the
1960s, when the millions who grew
up on Steiner’s scores—with their
marches, their passionate love
themes, their disruptive jumbles
of naiveté and sophistication—dis-
covered them in the concert hall.
(Steiner first heard Mahler’s sym-
phonies when the composer re-
hearsed them in Vienna a half-cen-
tury before.) Just listen to Libby’s
theme in “They Died With Their
Boots On” (1941) and you will hear a
melody worthy of Mahler himself.
And of course, take any of Steiner’s
themes of happiness, duty and love—
say, from “Gone With the Wind”—and
you will hear Viennese operetta.
Steiner was frequently required to
use pre-existing popular songs in his
scores, mostly against his will. His
deft treatment of “As Time Goes By”
in “Casablanca” is perhaps the most
famous example. And, like Brahms,
Puccini and Weill, he was a master of
musical references. Think only of the
hat tip he gives to the Walt Disney
Co.’s theme song—“When You Wish
Upon a Star”—in his score to Disney’s
“Those Calloways” (1965).
It is no easy task to write about
music, and, given that Steiner wrote
so much of it—over 300 film scores—
any biographer faces the challenge of
making his descriptions comprehen-
sible. I winced at times, as when Mr.
Smith explains a chromatic descent
(“Imagine that you are climbing a tall
ladder....Todescend...youplace
one foot on the step below”), but mu-
sically trained readers should give
him a pass on this.
Of course, the music itself is only
part of the story. Mr. Smith’s chronicle
is filled with incident and sometimes
jaw-dropping detail. At the Atlanta
premiere of “Gone With the Wind”
(1939), the movie’s Caucasian stars
(Hattie McDaniel wasn’t invited) and
the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell,
were serenaded by an African-Ameri-
can chorus that included the 10-year-
old Martin Luther King Jr. dressed
as a slave.
Steiner’s music for “Gone With the
Wind”—its soaring main theme has
become a sonic emblem of Holly-
wood’s glory years—is a reminder of
the heights that “mere” film scores
can reach. Our ignorance and snob-
bery—Mr. Smith describes the New
York Philharmonic’s principal cellist
leaving his instrument in its case for
a single rehearsal of Steiner’s music—
have given Steiner and the other com-
posers in that Burbank building a
reduced status they simply don’t
deserve. We need to hear more of
their music. We owe it to them and
to ourselves.Mr. Mauceri is the founding director
of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra
and the author of “For the Love of
Music—A Conductor’s Guide to the
Art of Listening.”Play It Again, Max
HOLLYWOOD SOUNDSteiner, as music director of RKO Pictures, conducting his score for ‘King Kong’ (1933).
.TOM PERRY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITYSteiner wrote the music
for ‘King Kong,’
‘Casablanca,’ ‘Gone
With the Wind’ and
hundreds of other films.BOOKS
‘‘If Wagner had lived in this century he would have been the number one film composer.’—MAX STEINER