This year marks the 75th anniversary of the first Academy Awards in Music. While the Best Song category has remained essentially unchanged since its inception (except for those continually bizarre behind-the-scenes nomination rules), the Best Scoring category has been subjected to numerous permutations and title changes over the years as the Academy rethinks and bends the rules to suit its needs during any particular year. Film music as we know it was still in its infancy in 1934, so the first Best Scoring nominees were culled from a mixture of original scores and adaptations of pre-existing material.

ONE NIGHT OF LOVE

The inaugural winner for Best Scoring, ONE NIGHT OF LOVE, was a showcase for the vocal talents of Metropolitan Opera star Grace Moore. Moore stars as Mary Barrett, a feisty young soprano who falls in and out and back in love with her vocal teacher, Guilo Monteverdi (Tullio Carminati), as she rises to the top.

The film earned big bucks at the box office and was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture (losing to IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT). It turned Moore into a movie star and a Best Actress nominee, though her subsequent films never matched the popularity of this one. The film was considered a major step forward in bringing “highbrow” culture to the masses, and its success opened the door for other filmmakers to feature opera singers in lead roles, often with less successful results. As Films In Review stated, the music was “more a job of arranging than scoring” and the “thematic music” (as it is listed in the credits) consists mainly of the theme for the title song, composed by Victor Schertzinger (also nominated as Best Director) with lyrics by Gus Kahn.

Schertzinger (1890-1941) was a former concert pianist who contributed scores to numerous silent films (including Rudolph Valentino’s screen debut) before making his directorial debut in 1917. Schertzinger’s biggest hit as a composer, “Marchéta (A Love Song of Old Mexico),” written when he was 25, sold over four million copies. With over a hundred films to his credit, including two of the popular Bob Hope–Bing Crosby “Road” pictures, he is relatively forgotten today.

Lyricist and vaudeville entertainer Gus Kahn (1886-1941) was one of the stars of Tin Pan Alley, penning such classics as “Mammy,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “It Had to Be You,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “My Buddy,” “San Francisco,” and “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” In 1951, M-G-M produced the biopic I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS, starring Danny Thomas as Kahn and Doris Day as his wife. Kahn received a second nomination in 1934 for the popular dance song, “The Carioca,” from FLYING DOWN TO RIO, which starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first film pairing. Kahn would receive one more nomination for the song “Waltzing in the Clouds” from the 1940 Deanna Durbin vehicle, SPRING PARADE.

The title song is sung at the end of the opening credits by Mary, who is competing on a weekly radio contest for up-and-coming opera singers, and the tune later serves as the underscoring of her blossoming love for Monteverdi. The melody begins with the same first four notes that Puccini wrote for the entrance of Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly. Unfortunately, the tune is used under almost every “love” scene, diluting its effectiveness until the climax of the film as Schertzinger weaves his own melody with Puccini’s as Mary and Monteverdi finally express their love, which (not so coincidentally) happens to occur during a performance of Butterfly. Much of the rest of the underscoring consists of transitional travel montages that blatantly (and for the most part appropriately) crib from well-known opera melodies. From the very beginning, Oscar has been impressed by the “snob appeal” of classical music and Moore’s performances of operatic arias from Butterfly, La Traviata and Carmen no doubt contributed to the win.

Though Moore’s singing can sound shrill to modern ears, it is understandable given the constraints of 1930s sound recording techniques (which, incidentally, won an Oscar, as well as a special technical Oscar for the application of the Vertical Cut Disc Method). Still, thanks to her performance, the film holds up quite well. But because of the arcane rules of the category at the time, Columbia Studio Music Department head Louis Silvers was awarded the Oscar while Schertzinger and Kahn went home from their “one night of love” empty-handed.

THE GAY DIVORCEE

THE GAY DIVORCEE marked the first star billing for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred stars as Guy Holden, an American dancer on vacation in England who falls for Mimi (Ginger) and feigns an illicit affair with her to help her secure a divorce from her geologist husband. The film’s title started out as THE GAY DIVORCE when it was a hit Broadway musical in 1933, but was changed for the film. In 1930s Hollywood, the idea of a happy divorcee was palatable. The idea of a happy divorce? Not so much.

Another alteration in the transfer to celluloid was the axing of all but one song—”Night and Day“—from Cole Porter’s score. To fill out the rest of the movie, songs were added by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel (“Don’t Let It Bother You” and “Let’s K-nock K-nees”), and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (“A Needle in a Haystack” and the first Best Song winner, the 22-minute dance number, “The Continental“). The score is credited to adaptors Kenneth Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein.

Webb (1892-1966) began his career in movies directing silent films. He and his younger brother, fellow composer (and later Oscar nominee) Roy, also signed the original charter that formed The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Webb later became a writer and advertising executive in Hollywood.

Known more as a screenwriter than a musician, Samuel Hoffenstein (1890-1947) received a nomination in 1932 for his adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, which won a Best Actor Oscar for Fredric March (who tied with THE CHAMP’s Wallace Beery). Hoffenstein later did uncredited work on THE WIZARD OF OZ and scripted films such as PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1943) and Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir classic, LAURA.

The film’s replacement songs are charming, if not up to the standard of Cole Porter’s original Broadway score. But Webb and Hoffenstein’s musical adaptations sparkle, enhanced by the nominated sound recording. Max Steiner, who served as music director on the film, as he did for most of the Astaire-Rogers pairings, actually received the nomination as head of the RKO Music Department.

Not only did THE GAY DIVORCEE and ONE NIGHT OF LOVE benefit from their musical storylines, they also started two trends that continue to this day. Oscar voters are often easily impressed if a film exhibits a high musical cache (i.e., if it features live music or is about music). And having a Best Picture nomination attached never hurts your chances in other categories.

THE LOST PATROL

When he wasn’t composing, conducting, or serving as the head of RKO’s Music Department (on a month-to-month basis), Max Steiner was changing the face of film music. Following the success of his groundbreaking score for KING KONG in 1933, Steiner furthered the art of film scoring with his next major project, experimenting with unique techniques to enhance the onscreen images.

John Ford’s THE LOST PATROL was a remake of a 1929 British silent and starred Victor McLaglen (whose brother Cyril starred in the original) as the sergeant of a group of British soldiers lost in the Mesopotamian desert. After setting up camp in an abandoned oasis, the soldiers are picked off one by one by unseen Arab snipers until only McLaglen is left.

Originally Steiner was contracted to compose only the main and end titles. But previews of the film left audiences cold and the film’s December release date was pushed back so that Steiner could supply some much needed musical tension and emotion for the characters. The main titles begin with a military trumpet call that leads immediately into a syncopated Arab theme, which Steiner would later recycle in his score for CASABLANCA. The march that accompanies the soldiers across the desert changes musical colors as the film progresses. What begins as up-tempo and upbeat slows down and takes on a more desperate tone as the soldiers’ situation worsens. Steiner uses eerie piano chords to echo the disbelief of the soldiers at the sight of the oasis, while a wordless chorus (singing “in cupped hands,” according to Steiner’s notes) howls like the wind blowing across the sand.

The score for THE LOST PATROL was composed and recorded in a feverishly fast eight days and is especially accomplished given the time restraints, the composer’s own lack of much previous composition experience, and the state of original film music at the time. Steiner would reteam with Ford again in 1935 and take home the first Oscar for a true dramatic score for his work on THE INFORMER.

* * *

In 1938, following musical director Charles Previn’s controversial award for 1937′s ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL (a film that doesn’t even list a composer in the credits, and a “score” that consists of pre-existing, diegetic classical music), the Music Branch added a “Best Original Score” category. It often didn’t make the scores any easier to categorize or their nominations any more intuitive, and to this day the Music categories are plagued by out-of-place nominees and winners. But I’ll continue to champion any organization that seeks to bring global recognition to film music, even when the telecast segment is mistakenly accompanied by asinine break dancing. Because over the last 75 years, they’ve occasionally gotten it right.

—FSMO

1934: The Year Oscar Scored is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!

“Once the opera is done,” Bernard Herrmann wrote to his ex-wife, writer Lucille Fletcher, “I shall never write another note again.” Herrmann’s opera, Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s classic novel, was to be his “chef d’oeuvre, his fame as a serious composer,” said Fletcher, who also served as the librettist. Herrmann was no stranger to writing “serious” music, including a symphony, several suites for orchestra, a cantata based on Moby Dick, several small choral works, and chamber music. But tackling an opera was another beast altogether. Friend Ray Bradbury was so “stunned and moved” when he first heard the piece that he later dubbed Herrmann “the bastard child of Puccini.” But Herrmann’s insistence on total artistic control of the finished product and unwillingness to trim a single note of the 3-1/2 hour score ruined any chance of the opera being produced during his lifetime. While the opera thankfully was not the end of his composition career (imagine a world without the Hitchcock scores!), Wuthering Heights consumed eight years of Herrmann’s life, and his marriage in the process.

“Wuthering Heights has all the emotional background and atmosphere needed in opera, but you might find the construction of the libretto difficult.”

Though Wuthering Heights was her first and only libretto, Fletcher was an accomplished writer. Her 1943 radio script, Sorry, Wrong Number, starring Agnes Moorehead, was a big hit and later earned Barbara Stanwyck an Oscar nomination for the 1948 film. She also had written the lyrics for “Salaambo’s Aria” for Herrmann’s score to CITIZEN KANE.

Herrmann and Fletcher had “plenty of discussions of what he wanted” before the libretto was written. “He chose scenes from the book that appealed to him and highlighted them, leaving out many other aspects of the novel.” Like the celebrated 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (featuring a classic score by Alfred Newman), composer and librettist agreed to end the story of the opera with Cathy’s death, which occurs halfway through the novel at the end of Chapter 16.

Fletcher also turned to C.W. Hatfield’s Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, which had been published in 1941, “because Bernard felt we needed formal arias here and there—lyric outpourings of feeling in contrast to the dramatic and narrative recitatives.” Long scenes were taken wholly from the book and entire arias from the poems (such as Edgar’s “Now art thou dear” and Isabel’s “How I love them” ), but the libretto often features a combination of interweaving lines from the novel and poems. The libretto was written in its entirety before Herrmann added a note to it. From the time Fletcher sent in the finished libretto in 1947 (100 years after the novel’s publication), “Mr. Herrmann never asked me to change a single line. He set the libretto as I wrote it.”

Differing accounts place the origin of the opera anywhere between 1943 and 1948. Herrmann wrote the date of 1943 on the title page of the manuscript. But a letter to Fletcher postmarked January 13, 1948, reads, “Tomorrow morning at nine I begin working on the opera.”

According to Fletcher, the opera was conceived in 1946, inspired by a visit she and Herrmann made to Manchester. Herrmann had been asked to conduct the Halleé Orchestra, which was led by his friend Sir John Barbirolli. Ernest Bean, the Halle’s manager-secretary, took Herrmann and Fletcher on a tour through Brontë country. “[Herrmann] had already composed much of the [opera’s] music…before he had ever set sight on the scene,” said Bean. “His purpose in making the visit was not, therefore, to ‘acquire atmosphere’ but to assure himself (if such assurance was needed) that the atmosphere already imagined was true to the spirit of the author. As he sang snatches from the opera, the wind playing mocking tricks with his preposterously unmusical voice, we had our first preview of the work.” They stopped at the village of Haworth, visiting the Brontë homestead and an old farmhouse known as High Withens, believed by some to be the original Wuthering Heights. “It was uninhabited, in ruins, and standing all alone in a desolate part of the moors,” said Fletcher. “That gray November day Benny was moved by the place, most particularly by three dead trees standing sentinel at the farmyard gate. Benny said they reminded him of the Brontë sisters, with their ‘sad and withered lives.’”

“I will never do a movie again. It is completely wasted and expended music energy that should go into my own work. I feel that conducting and musical composition are enough for me. I sincerely hope that I will never see Hollywood again.”

Herrmann began to work on the opera in earnest in 1948. At the time, his days of composing and conducting with CBS Radio were at an end and his relationship with Hollywood was rocky at best. With his marriage on the rocks as well, he went to Minneapolis where he could work on the opera fulltime with the future Mrs. Herrmann #2—Lucy Anderson—close by. Even with encouragement about the opera from friends like Leopold Stokowski and Barbirolli, letters to Fletcher in early 1948 poignantly detail Herrmann’s disturbed mental state. Herrmann describes himself as “a drowning man” who must first “finish the opera. I must—it is an obbsession [sic] of mine. It will be enough to be remember [sic] by one work—even if only in the history books.” Holed up in a studio provided by Minneapolis Symphony conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, Herrmann devoted 11 hours a day to the opera: “I plan to work from 9–1, 2–5, 7–11. This is the only way I can achieve this opera, and so finally have it behind me.”

The opera was composed in four acts with a Prologue and Epilogue, with one intermission at the end of Act II. He cast eight solo roles and disregarded the tradition of an operatic chorus, though a small chorus (as well as a child soloist) was added for the Christmas Carol at the end of Act II, one of three scenes that bears Fletcher’s own words instead of Brontë’s.

Wuthering Heights “grew out of a love for England and English folk music,” said Fletcher. A Neo-Romantic style abounds throughout the score, echoing some of Herrmann’s favorite English composers—Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius. “The orchestra may be said to be descriptive of the landscape and weather of each act….Thus, in many ways, each act is a landscape tone poem which envelopes the characters.” In her doctoral dissertation on the opera, Susan St. John (who understudied the role of Cathy in the Portland [Oregon] premiere), identified 10 principal motifs in the score. The motifs are initially introduced by solo instruments or small ensembles within the orchestra, and of the several hundred motivic statements, only 11 are actually sung. The poems and motifs rarely are used simultaneously. The eerie three-note motif that spans the tritone (first heard in the piccolo at the beginning of the score) appears more frequently than any other motif in the opera.

Herrmann also borrows from his 1944 film score for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, using the score’s main theme to underline Cathy’s Act III aria, “Oh, I’m burning.” But it is his 1947 score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir that figures most prominently in the opera. The film’s “Prelude” is reproduced almost note for note in Act I following Cathy and Heathcliff’s duet “On the moors,” and you’ll find more than a hint of the score in the orchestral interlude preceding the second scene of Act I, and in Act II’s closing storm.

Herrmann bristled whenever anyone insinuated that he borrowed music from himself, and in an interview with the Los Angeles Free Press, Herrmann went ballistic when the interviewer brought up the subject of Muir’s inclusion in the opera: “It didn’t come from that picture and I resent that…there might be a couple of phrases that might sound alike, but so what! Who the hell cares!”

While Herrmann displays an expectedly sure hand with his orchestral forces, other problems in the operatic construction show the composer’s lack of experience in the genre. His settings of Fletcher’s text often resulted in awkward accents (e.g., “Heath-CLIFF!”). “Since it [happened] so often,” said Stefan Minde, conductor of the Portland Opera premiere, “I thought there might be some purpose behind it.” There were also problematic cinematic transitions at the end of the Prologue to Act I, where Heathcliff must reverse age from an old man to someone 20 years younger in the span of a few bars, and in Act III where Cathy must change from the staid wife of Edgar to a distraught, disheveled woman within 18 bars of music. Minde said, “[Richard] Strauss would have sensed the timing was wrong.”

“The work was finished rather rapidly,” said Fletcher. “Herrmann was accustomed to working to a deadline, and he worked on Wuthering Heights with the same steady concentration he brought to all his music, whether a symphony or a sequence for Twentieth-Century Fox.” According to a note he wrote on the score, Herrmann completed the opera on June 30, 1951, at 3:45 p.m.

“I know that Wuthering Heights has saved me many times and that to finally finish the opera will leave a tremendous void.”

Reception to the lengthy work, even among friends, was cautiously guarded. Barbirolli had planned to premiere the work until he received the score. The conductor told Herrmann the opera required more forces, orchestral and theatrical, than the Halle could manage. “John didn’t feel the work was entirely good,” said Barbirolli’s widow, Evelyn. “The economic problems he explained to Benny were true, but had John felt that the opera was Moby Dick plus, he would have made every possible effort.” Barbirolli never expressed his true feelings to Herrmann, who hoped for a Halle performance of the opera until Barbirolli’s death in 1970. But Herrmann’s caustic temperament proved to be the opera’s worst enemy.

Herrmann first approached the San Francisco Opera. “It was a very romantic piece,” Kurt Herbert Adler, retired SFO general director, told Opera News. “We liked it, and I thought it would be an excellent project for Leopold Stokowski, who was then on very friendly terms with us. We didn’t go much farther with it, because a short time later we got a call from Stokowski, pleading illness and a desire not to travel to San Francisco. So we decided to drop [it].” But Herrmann’s friend Victor Bay overheard a telephone shouting match between Adler and Herrmann in which the director told the composer, “To hell with you and your opera. We won’t produce it.” Julius Rudel, the director of New York’s City Opera, also liked the piece “and it looked as if he was going to produce it,” said friend Miklós Rózsa, “but Rudel said he wanted some changes. Benny exploded: ‘I’m not gonna change a NOTE!’ So Rudel said forget it.”

Rózsa next suggested doing it at USC, where he was teaching, but Herrmann was still angry at universities that had not heeded CBS’ plea for written letters of support when his “Invitation to Music” radio program was canceled. After Rózsa convinced Herrmann to meet with USC conductor Walter Decloux, Herrmann arrived 45 minutes late, quarreling with new wife Lucy. He disparaged Decloux’s praise of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (“That’s not music—those are IDIOTS conducting there!”) and attacked the powerful Philharmonic philanthropist Dorothy Chandler (“[She] only invites NAZIS!”). But it was Herrmann’s dismissal of Decloux’s war record (“Aww, who cares about the war? I did music!”) that sealed the fate of the opera at USC. When Herrmann showed him the score, “Decloux said, ‘Yes, fine…,’” Rózsa remembered, “but it could have been Die Meistersinger, and he wouldn’t have done it.” Rózsa approached Georg Solti to look at the score and snagged an invitation for Herrmann to attend a rehearsal of Solti’s, who was visiting California. But upon his arrival, Herrmann immediately began berating Solti’s reading of a Schumann symphony and Solti asked him to leave.

The score was published in 1965, but with no interest from opera companies or record labels, Herrmann finally took matters into his own hands. In 1966 he conducted a recording of the opera, financed primarily out of his own pocket, casting little-known British singers Morag Beaton and Donald Bell in the lead roles of Cathy and Heathcliff. Rehearsals took place at the home of Ursula Vaughan Williams (Ralph’s widow), who called the sessions “ghastly,” full of “storms and tears.” “Benny behaved atrociously,” she said. The recording was released on the Pye label and remains the only full recording of the entire opera. Gramophone magazine gave the album a mixed review, complaining about the opera’s “too measured” pace and its “serviceable music…. It is not a great opera, and I would certainly urge very extensive cuts before it was ever staged, but the enterprise of getting the work on record is something to applaud.”

Reactions to the work among Herrmann’s friends also remained guarded. After Herrmann “conducted” the recording one Sunday afternoon, Alfred Newman publically complimented Herrmann but commented privately to his wife that it was an extremely long work. Arthur Bliss sent back a polite note. The BBC returned its copy of the album still unopened, informing Herrmann it was “not appropriate” for broadcast. It would be another 15 years before the opera was staged live.

“I had many years of torment and anguish to bring this work into being. Somehow now my purpose in life seems to make sense.”

Following Herrmann’s death in 1975, Fletcher and Herrmann’s daughter, Dorothy, put the opera up for public performance. But most opera companies were unwilling to dedicate the time and expense necessary for mounting the premiere of a new American opera, no matter the composer’s fame, and certainly not from a film composer. When the opera was finally given its world premiere on November 6, 1982, by the Portland Opera Company, conductor Stefan Minde cut 40 minutes out of the piece and changed the ending to the upbeat ending Julius Rudel wanted nearly 30 years before.

Malcolm Fraser, the opera’s director, was responsible for the revised ending. The original epilogue is set 20 years following Cathy’s death in the same attic room as the prologue, with a shattered Heathcliff tortured by the ghostly voice of Cathy crying. In the Portland version, Fraser had Cathy frolicking on the moors watching Heathcliff die while their spirits become mimes who walk off into the sunset to find happiness in death. “This hokey solution,” said Opera News, “is bad Brontë and bad Herrmann.”

New American operas rarely fare well with critics (or audiences, for that matter) and the critical reception was expectedly mixed. Newsweek called it “resolutely earthbound,” but part of the problem came from the production itself. “Squinting through projections of vegetation rank and withered (not to mention a 25-five-foot-high drawing of a screaming face—whose?—that filled half the proscenium),” said High Fidelity, “it was not easy to make contact with the performers…. Perhaps brilliantly cast, passionately conducted, simply staged and acted, Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights could make a success, but as a repertoire piece, the work is too weak dramatically to overcome its dearth of melody and monotonous scoring.”

After such a poor reception, it should come as no surprise that the opera still struggles to be heard. Jonathan Sheffer has championed the score, conducting excerpts from it in 2001 and 2008, but only Cathy’s Act II aria, “I have dreamt,” has found any life outside the opera, with recordings by Renée Fleming and recently by newcomer Kate Royal.

To date, the Portland premiere remains the only fully staged production of the opera. But a new production is scheduled for The Minnesota Opera’s 2014–2015 season, over 30 years since its last performance and over 60 years since the opera was completed.

“The only thing I ever did do that was foolhardy was to write an opera,” Herrmann said in 1971. “Franz Liszt said that you have to have the soul of a hero to write an opera and the mentality of a lackey to have it produced.” Was Herrmann “foolhardy” and did he have “the soul of a hero”? In 2015, Herrmann fans can judge for themselves.

—FSMO

Further Reading

• Cooper, David. Bernard Herrmann’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: A Film Score Guide. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
• Kinkaid, Frank. “Scaling the Heights.” Opera News, November 1982, pp. 16–19.
• Smith, Steven C. A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.
• St. John, Susan E. A Study of the Opera Wuthering Heights by Bernard Herrmann. Thesis (D.M.A.)—University of Oregon, 1984.

The Bastard Child of Puccini is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!

Film music and the concert hall have always forged a strained relationship. “Classical” (for lack of a better term) composers seldom write for film—Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Corigliano, Glass and Muhly are a few exceptions. And unless it is programmed as part of a pops concert, film music rarely crosses over into the concert world.

That’s why, browsing through the bins in the Classical section of Tower Records at Lincoln Center one day in 1994, I was shocked to hear what I thought was film music soaring from the overhead speakers. The recording was a new Deutsche Gramophon CD of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, performed by Gil Shaham, with André Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. I was unfamiliar with Korngold’s concert music, but what I heard gave me goose bumps and I sat down on the floor in a back corner of the store to listen to the rest of it. Little did I know at the time, but without help from the good folks at Warner Bros., the concerto most certainly would not have existed in its current form.

When it came time to renew Korngold’s contract in 1938, Warner Bros. bowed to all of the composer’s demands, creating a situation for Korngold unique among other composers in Hollywood. Korngold was limited to a maximum of not more than two films in any 12-month period. (Compare that to the 11 films— including GONE WITH THE WIND—Max Steiner scored in 1939.) Korngold was also allowed to select his projects and his name was given its own title card in the main credits, as well as included on the film’s poster. But most important, the music he composed would remain his property to use as he saw fit.

Because of the problems in Europe, Korngold moved himself and his family permanently to Hollywood in January 1938. Though he first began to sketch the concerto in the 1930s, Korngold vowed to stop composing concert music until Hitler was defeated and focused his energies on film music as a means of support. In early 1945, as the war in Europe was winding down, Korngold gave up his film work and returned to the concerto, incorporating themes from four of his film scores.

ANOTHER DAWN (1937) stars Errol Flynn, Ian Hunter and Kay Francis in a Saharan love triangle shot on the sets left over from Flynn’s THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. The title of the film sprang from an inside joke at Warner Bros. Whenever the studio depicted a marquee or poster of a fictional film in one of their productions, the film’s title was always ANOTHER DAWN. Stuck for a title on this Flynn film, the studio opted for ANOTHER DAWN, and had to find another phony film title whenever the necessity arose. The film has since faded into the sands of time except for Korngold’s music, especially from its exposure within the concerto. (A 1996 Marco Polo CD of the score is now out of print.)

The film’s love theme forms the first subject of the violin solo in the first movement. According to Korngold biographer Brendan G. Carroll, Korngold may have sketched this for an early version of the concerto, as he mentioned in a Viennese newspaper interview in May, 1937. In addition, Korngold’s father, renowned music critic Julius Korngold, always admired the theme and suggested it could be the basis for a violin concerto. “But which came first?” asks Carroll. “We shall never know.”

The love theme from JUAREZ (1936) supplies the violin’s second subject. The film, based on the novel Maximilian and Carlotta by Franz Werfel, late husband of Alma Mahler-Werfel (to whom the concerto is dedicated), stars Bette Davis and Paul Muni. The coda beautifully ties the two themes together. In his liner notes for the Shaham recording, Anthony Burton explains, “both ideas exploit the solo instrument’s capacity for expressive melody in all its registers, while the transition between them, the central development section and the coda offer brief opportunities for virtuosity.

“Angela’s Theme” from ANTHONY ADVERSE (1936) forms the main theme for the second movement. Based on Hervey Allen’s 1933 mammoth 1,200-page bestseller, ANTHONY ADVERSE stars Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland (as Angela) and Claude Rains. A huge hit in its day, the film won four Academy Awards, including the first Supporting Actress Oscar for Gale Sondergaard (who won, according to one IMDB reviewer, “simply by grinning satanically for two hours”) and one for Korngold’s score. Today ANTHONY ADVERSE is largely overlooked. The film has never been released on DVD and even Varèse Sarabande’s weak 1991 recording of the score is long out of print.

Because of Academy rules at the time, however, the award went to the head of the Music Department and not the composer. Korngold was unaware of this and, fortunately, did not attend the ceremony. Leopold Stokowski (who was in Hollywood to star with Deanna Durbin in ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL, the controversial winner of the next year’s Oscar for Best Score) presented the award to Warner Bros. Music Department head, Leo Forbstein.

Knowing full well that the award belonged to Korngold, Forbstein sent a conciliatory note to the composer and published a message of congratulations in The Hollywood Reporter. Though the two men got along, Korngold wrote an incensed letter back and refused to accept the statuette even after Forbstein offered it to him. “I am obliged to see a certain intention in the decision of the Academy to give the award to someone other than the composer of the score himself,” wrote Korngold, “and I am not in a position to accept an award given officially and publicly to you by way of a private gift.” The award remained in Forbstein’s office until his death in 1949 when it was finally returned to Korngold.

As part of his contract, Korngold had to complete a second film following ANTHONY ADVERSE before being allowed to return to Vienna. He was offered the lavish production of Mark Twain’s THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, again starring Errol Flynn. The rousing opening French horn call from the film is played almost verbatim in the concerto, but not until the violin has a little fun with it along the way. Beginning with a lively 6/8 gigue, the theme is transformed into a 2/4 folk song in the violin’s second subject and further adapted into a virtuosic 2/4 dance in the coda.

Jascha Heifetz premiered the concerto on February 15, 1947, at a sold out concert in St. Louis, with Vladimir Goldschmann conducting. “In spite of the demand for virtuosity in the finale,” wrote Korngold in the concert program, “the work with its many melodic and lyrics episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso than a Paganini. It is needless to say how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.” One local critic wrote, “Whether the concerto is great music, one, after only a first hearing, would hate to say…Only Time will assess its authentic values. This enthusiastic admirer believes Time will find true values there.”

“My violin concerto was triumphantly received in St. Louis. A success like in the best times in Vienna,” Korngold wrote in a letter to Joef Reitler, formerly a critic of Neue Musikalische Presse, then currently a professor at Hunter College.. “I now have five weeks until the New York critics tear it apart…Is there any chance you could get a small report of its success into the New York music press or even a daily paper…If the knowledge of this success reaches the music world…before the New York critics vent their snobbish, atonal anger on it, the violin concerto may be a decisive turning point for me, a comeback!”

Korngold’s plea was in vain. Olin Downs in The New York Times disparagingly called it a “Hollywood Concerto.” And Irving Kolodin in The Sun quipped, “More corn than gold,” a wisecrack that stuck to the work, and Korngold’s music in general, for 40 years.

“Unfortunately, American critics were merciless in their contempt for composers, conductors, and performers who had ‘sold out’ to Hollywood. This caused Korngold much sorrow,” said renowned violinist Louis Kaufman, who played on numerous Korngold scores, including THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK, THE SEA WOLF, KINGS ROW and BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. “This lyric concerto will long outlast many arid twelve-tone concertos now praised by self-styled ‘Beckmessers.’ Time alone will sort out the music and art worthy of enduring admiration.”

Heifetz recorded the work for RCA Victor in January 1953 with Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “Many consider it to be the finest recording ever made by Heifetz,” said Carroll, “and it was the first major Korngold work to be issued on long playing records.” In addition to Heifetz and Shaham, the concerto has since been recorded by such legendary violinists as Itzhak Perlman, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Hilary Hahn, and is regularly performed in concert.

Time apparently has found the concerto worthy of enduring admiration.

—FSMO

The Hollywood Concerto is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!

On March 26, 1948, film composer Hanns Eisler bid a bitter, final farewell to the U.S. from the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport. Austrian-born Eisler (1898-1962), a successful revolutionary composer in Weimar, Germany, had fled the country in 1933 when Hitler came to power. But his exile in the U.S. found him front and center at the beginning of a political storm conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where Eisler became the first victim of the Hollywood “blacklist.”

Once or twice a year I write a motion picture.
It interests me and I need the money.

Though he left Germany in 1933, Eisler was not officially admitted to the U.S. until October 1940, and only then thanks primarily to the intervention of letters from Eleanor Roosevelt. After securing a job as professor of music at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation granted Eisler $20,000 for research and study of music and films, and the school in turn commissioned him to work on musical scores for the New York Philharmonic. In May 1942, the school gave Eisler a leave of absence to continue his work on the Rockefeller project in California, which later resulted in Composing for the Films, written with Theodoro Adorno and published in 1947. In August, Eisler left New York to pursue a teaching post at the University of Southern California and to try and earn a living as a film composer in Hollywood.

By the time he arrived in Hollywood, Eisler had already written a dozen film scores in Europe. His score for Joris Ivens’s SONG OF HEROES (1932) was adapted into the Suite No. 4 for Orchestra, one of four orchestral suites that Eisler composed using material from his film scores. Eisler’s first Hollywood film—HANGMEN ALSO DIE (1943), directed by Fritz Lang and written by friend Bertolt Brecht—told a fictional version of the May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (nicknamed “Hitler’s Hangman”), the brutal Nazi commander of occupied Czechoslovakia, and the bloody German reprisal on the citizens of Prague. Communist catchwords like “masses” and “comrades” were expunged from the script, but Eisler managed to smuggle his 1929 tune, “Comintern Song,” into the brief 11-minute score and received an Oscar nomination from an unsuspecting Academy.

Eisler’s second nomination came the following year for NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART, directed by another friend, Clifford Odets, and starring Cary Grant as a petty thief and Ethel Barrymore as his dying mother. Eisler’s score weaves in Tchaikovsky’s famous tune, and after seeing the film, Hanns’ brother Gerhart wrote in a letter to Hanns: “I found the music delightful except at times I was deceived in certain hopes…Unfortunately, films are not made for music but music for films…In any event there is certainly no reason to make excuses for the music or the film. And if there were no more unpleasant ways of earning the necessary bread this in no way was the worst and most unpleasant.”

During his tenure in the U.S., Eisler wrote eight film scores and 70 songs, in addition to his teaching. Many of the songs, based on poetry by Brecht, Goethe and others, were later compiled into the song cycle, Hollywood Songbook. Eisler’s modest success as a Hollywood film composer enabled him to earn his own living and still allowed him time for “serious work,” whereas other German exiles were dependent on charity. Though Brecht claimed “Hollywood music was ruining his ear,” Eisler’s aural capabilities were the least of his troubles.

My subversiveness is that I love my brother.
My crime is that I am trying to defend him.

Eisler’s problems began in October 1946 after Louis Budenz, a reformed communist and former editor of The Daily Worker, fingered Gerhart Eisler as the “real head of Communism in America.” Since the 1930s, Gerhart had worked in the U.S. as an agent for the Comintern (an international communist organization, which had disbanded in 1935), but had lived as a journalist in New York City for the last five years. Further troubles arose in November when Ruth Fischer, a former German Communist Party organizer and the Eisler brothers’ sister, published a series of articles in William Randolph Hearst’s Journal American entitled “The Comintern’s American Agent,” in which she accused both brothers of “bringing communism to Hollywood.” An intense smear campaign in the press quickly followed. Though Gerhart insisted he was not “the boss of all the Reds,” Time magazine eventually proclaimed him “the No. 1 U.S. Communist, the Brain, the big tap on the wire to Moscow.”

Gerhart and Ruth were both summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on February 6, 1947. Fischer testified that Gerhart, whom she had been estranged from for over 20 years, was “the head of a network of agents of the secret Russian state police” and a “dangerous terrorist,” and that Hanns was “a communist in the philosophical sense.” Gerhart’s interrogation was brief. When he refused to be sworn in unless first permitted to read a three-minute statement into the record, chairman J. Parnell Thomas held him in contempt and remanded him to the Washington county jail. Gerhart was released on bail and would later stow away on a Polish freighter bound for London, never to return.

Hanns was publicly vilified as “a party member hack,” “brother of the notorious atom spy,” and “red composer-in-chief.” But the furor that surrounded him had been years in the making. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had started a file on Eisler when he entered the U.S. for the first time in 1935, tagging him as a potential “security risk.” The photocopies in Eisler’s file (available online thanks to the Freedom of Information Act) provide fascinating—if frightening—reading. Included in the file are personal correspondence, phone logs, bank account statements, surveillance memos, and the addresses and phone numbers of Eisler’s friends and acquaintances, many of whom were now suspect.

According to Albrecht Betz, “Artists in Hollywood saw Fischer as a ‘monster’ with psychopathic traits.” But the effect of her testimony effectively brought Eisler’s film career to a swift and immediate end. In the Los Angeles Daily Examiner, Eisler remarked that he was “not surprised” that the committee used “my former sister, Miss Fischer, for their activities.” When his good friend Charlie Chaplin heard about Fischer’s actions, he told Eisler, “It’s like Shakespeare in your family.” But the Shakespearean drama was only beginning.

These men…represent the ignorance and barbarism which could lead to a new war.

The U.S. House of Representatives originally established the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938 to investigate “the extent, character and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States.” Within two years, the committee closed many of Roosevelt’s New Deal projects and waged vehement attacks against other liberal organizations before focusing on Hollywood’s trade unions and anti-fascist groups. However, repudiation from the Hollywood left and the country’s new alliance with the Soviet Union diminished the Committee’s power during World War II.

In January 1945, a move by Representative John Rankin stopped the hemorrhaging of the committee’s reputation by proposing an amendment authorizing a permanent standing committee, which was approved with the votes of 137 Republicans and 70 Democrats. The nine-member committee was comprised of six Democrats and three Republicans, including California’s newly elected representative, Richard M. Nixon.

Auspicious Beginnings: Richard Nixon, on the HUAC team.

In “Cry for Shame,” her blistering essay in The New Republic, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn described Eisler’s second hearing as “quite a show, and free too: the Un-Americans putting on a flawless travesty of justice.” Eisler was not allowed to cross-examine witnesses or read a statement (though it was later printed in New Masses as “Fantasia in G-Men”).

When chief investigator Robert Stripling posed the dreaded question—“Mr. Eisler, are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?”—“the four Un-Americans…woke up, moved, leaned forward,” wrote Gellhorn. “For now we had the clue, the thing the plot hung on, the horrid syllables that gave everyone his fame and position and power and his swelling sense of virtue. We had, in short, the delicious smell of blood.”

Eisler replied that in 1926 he had “made application” to the Communist Party in Germany, but had never followed up on the application or participated in any Communist Party activities. “I found out very quick that I couldn’t combine my artistic activities with the demand of any political party,” he explained, “so I dropped out.” The committee further pointed to Eisler’s inclusion as a communist in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1933 and clippings from The Daily Worker in the 1930s—long before he was living in the U.S.—as evidence of his current affiliation. They also questioned him on his role as chairman of the International Music Bureau, an organization formed in Moscow for the purpose of “spreading revolutionary consciousness among composers and professional musicians.” The organization, however, was “apparently a dream on paper,” wrote Gellhorn, “which got its letterhead (and never went farther) in Moscow when Eisler was not there to consent or advise.”

Eisler’s original FBI file contained examples of music scores not available for viewing online, but it is evident that much of HUAC’s and the FBI’s musical focus concerned the kampflieder (“songs for the struggle”) that Eisler wrote in the 1920s for agitprop troupes, workers’ theaters, and proletarian choirs, and not his Hollywood film music. One of the most famous kampflieder,  ”Solidarity Song,” became an instant hit after it was introduced in the 1932 German film KUHLE WAMPE. The movie was promptly banned by the Prussian government, but the song was popularized in demonstrations and cabarets.

“Mr. Eisler, haven’t you on a number of occasions said, in effect, that music is one of the most powerful weapons for the bringing about of the revolution?” asked Stripling. “I think in music I can enlighten and help people in distress in their fight for their rights,” Eisler replied. “In Germany we didn’t do so well…The truth is, songs cannot destroy Fascism, but they are necessary…It’s a matter of musical taste whether you like them…If you don’t like them, I am sorry; you can listen to ‘Open the Door, Richard.’”

“If the Un-Americans were realists, instead of a hunting pack,” wrote Gellhorn, “they would recognize that to be a ‘real member’ of the Communist Party, you have to earn your C by Communist standards, which no one has ever denied are both long and tough and highly unsuited to men who are chiefly interested in sonatas, cantatas and the theory of counterpoint.” But Eisler had no illusions about his chances: “The struggle is one-sided. I feel like a native who is trying to defend himself against an atom bomb with a bow and arrow.”

American democracy is wonderful if it works.
In my case it didn’t work.

After the second interrogation, the case was referred to the Justice Department, which shelved it. The FBI’s own wiretaps of Eisler’s telephone in Malibu had not revealed a single conversation that could be described as “Communist,” and the deportation proceedings against the composer were running out of steam. Neither the INS nor HUAC had been successful in proving that Eisler actually had been a member of the Communist Party of Germany—the only legal basis for revoking his status as an immigrant. Since there wasn’t enough evidence for a punishable offense and an acquittal would cause a “loss of face,” a compromise was reached: ”technical extradition,” a “voluntary” exit visa to any country properly issuing a passport, with the exception of the border countries of Canada and Mexico.

Eisler’s friends and colleagues rallied in support. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Roger Sessions formed a defense committee. The Composers Guild of Great Britain wrote a strongly worded letter to the U.S. Ambassador in London comparing the interrogations to the Nazi civil trials. At the instigation of Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso put together a committee of French artists whose public letter to the U.S. embassy in Paris was published in Les lettres françaises. Signed by Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Georges Auric, and many others, the letter stated that Eisler’s extradition to the “American zone” in Germany would mean he would be incarcerated as a Nazi together with other Nazis.

On December 14, a Hanns Eisler solidarity concert was held in Los Angeles with Igor Stravinsky and Ernst Toch in attendance. The next day, 14 artists and scientists—including Copland, Bernstein, Sessions, Toch, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Dmitri Mitropoulos, George Antheil and Pierre Monteux—presented U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark with a petition demanding that the extradition order against Eisler be canceled.

Thanks to these protests, Eisler’s lawyers were finally able to arrange a hearing with the INS on February 6, 1948. But without the resources to fight the legal system, Eisler had no choice but to agree to the “technical extradition” solution. It was all over in 30 minutes.

Three weeks later, the defense committee staged a farewell concert in New York’s Town Hall. The program included the premiere of Eisler’s twelve-tone piece, Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain, based on his score to Ivens’ 1929 silent film, RAIN, that had been dedicated to Arnold Schoenberg and first performed at his 70th birthday in 1944. The Septet No. 2 was based on an uncompleted score Eisler had been writing for an upcoming re-release of Chaplin’s THE CIRCUS. In his review of the concert, composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “We hope that [Eisler’s] case will be reconsidered and he will be permitted to return.”

On that final, chilly March morning at LaGuardia, Eisler read one final statement to the press: “I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud of being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way…Now I am forced to leave. But I take with me the image of the real American people whom I love.”

HUAC Wins: Hanns (left) and his wife board a plane to exile.

After saying good-bye to Gerhart and wife, Hilde, Eisler and wife, Louise, boarded a flight bound for Prague. The INS issued a notice to border posts to prevent the composer’s return, and Eisler officially became a political and artistic “unperson” in the U.S.

In 1949, the Eislers settled in East Berlin, the capital of the new German Democratic Republic (GDR), and Eisler quickly wrote the country’s national anthem—”Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Risen From the Ruins,” text by Johannes Becher). Eisler continued to write political, if more moderate, music to the end of his life. Hanns Eisler died on September 6, 1962.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

Virgil Thomson expressed the hope of many in the musical community when he wrote of the hope that Eisler’s works “will reach us regularly from Europe.” But that was not meant to be. Eisler’s ignominious departure kept his music from being performed in the U.S. until 1970.

Toward the end of the 20th century, Eisler’s songs, which had always “straddled the domains of both popular and high art,” found a new audience. Numerous CDs explore Eisler’s songs, whether written for Brecht plays, factory works or the concert hall. British folk star Billy Bragg set Woody Guthrie’s 1948 ballad, “Eisler on the Go,” to music in 1998. And Sting recorded the melody for Eisler’s “To My Little Radio” with new lyrics, “The Secret Marriage,” for his 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun. A 1997 documentary, SOLIDARITY SONG: THE HANNS EISLER STORY, brought Eisler’s life to a new generation who had never heard of him.

In 1998, on the centennial of his birth, Eisler’s bust, dismantled after the disintegration of the GDR in 1990, was restored to the entrance of the Berlin music conservatory that continues to bear his name.

I hope the American people will soon place these men
where they belong—on the garbage heap of history.

Richard Nixon said the Eisler case was “perhaps the most important to have come before this committee.” If it is not as famous as many of the other Hollywood hearings, it did set a dangerous precedent of fear, silence and ruin that continued throughout the 1950s. After the downfall of Joseph McCarthy in the late ’50s, HUAC lost prestige but remained a standing committee until 1975.

The hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities remain a black mark on American political and cultural history with wounds that fester to this day. From the sidelines of Eisler’s “show,” in words that still seem all-too frighteningly relevant, Martha Gellhorn wrote, “If you can ruin a musician’s livelihood, before a court has determined whether he is indeed a law-breaker or not, pretty soon you can ruin a painter and a teacher and a writer and a lawyer and an actor and a scientist; and presently you have made a silent place. If these things should come to pass, America is going to look very strange to Americans and they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep.”

Baaaah…

—FSMO

Red Composer-In-Chief: Hanns Eisler is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!

Before there was Lukas, Bob, or Doug, before there was Silva Screen, Chandos, or Naxos, one man was responsible for excavating classic film scores from obscurity—Charles Gerhardt. With his series of Classic Film Scores recordings for RCA in the 1970s, Gerhardt (1927-1999) introduced a whole new generation to music from the Golden Age.

As a 14-year-old band nerd growing up in Grand Prairie, Texas (’nuff said), my first two score purchases—THE OMEN and STAR WARS—won Oscars. As a result, I used the Academy Awards as a crash course in film music, figuring that every nominated score was sure to be of equal caliber. (No comment.)

Even with Oscar as my guide, there were scant opportunities to hear older scores outside, or even inside, their respective films. In the pre-Blockbuster, pre-Netflix days, the only way to get a copy of most of this music was to peruse TV Guide, make sure you had control of the television at the appointed hour, demand silence from other family members, and place the tape recorder at just the right angle to the speakers to grab a less-than-pristine copy of the music, complete with dialogue, sound effects, and family life in the background. With only the afternoon and primetime movies, and the Late, Late Show to choose from, the odds of recording a particular score were slim.

Enter Charles Gerhardt and his Classic Film Scores. Not only did the series of 14 albums contain tracks from many of my sought-after Oscar scores, Gerhardt introduced me to composers and films I had never heard of. So who was Charles Gerhardt and why did he inspire such devotion from this geeky new film score nut?

Gerhardt began his career in classical music, working at RCA Records transferring 78-rpm recordings of Enrico Caruso to tape in preparation for LP pressings. He assisted at recordings for artists such as soprano Kirsten Flagstad and pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and worked with conductors like Leopold Stokowski and Charles Munch. Serving as the RCA liaison with Arturo Toscanini in the conductor’s last years, he took Toscanini’s advice and studied conducting.

In 1960, Gerhardt began to produce records for RCA and Reader’s Digest in London. He partnered with recording engineer Kenneth Wilkinson of Decca Records (RCA’s affiliate in Europe), recording 4,000 sessions over a span of 30 years. The Reader’s Digest recordings created so much work that another orchestra and conductor were needed. In January 1964, Gerhardt and orchestra leader Sidney Sax formed a group of top London orchestral and freelance musicians for use in the recording sessions. Later incorporated into the National Philharmonic Orchestra, the group recorded numerous soundtracks, including Jerry Goldsmith’s THE OMEN, ALIEN, and THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL.

Peter Munves, head of RCA’s classical division, approached Gerhardt with the idea of recording an album of music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Munves had been impressed with Gerhardt’s recordings of Korngold’s music for the Reader’s Digest series. “Korngold was one of my gods,” said Gerhardt. Another coup was securing producer George Korngold, the composer’s son, who had his own personal copies of his father’s music.

The Sea Hawk: Classic Films Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold featured tracks from 10 different Korngold scores. Recorded in London’s acoustically generous Kingsway Hall, the album set a high standard for its pristine analog recording. The brilliant SEA HAWK brass fanfare that launched the album heralded something special. In track after track, Gerhardt elicited rousing playing from the National Philharmonic. The album was a sensation, with favorable reviews from Royal S. Brown in High Fidelity and even the stodgy New York Times. The album charted on Billboard for the first time in December, 1972, at #37 and built until November, 1973, when it became the best-selling classical album in the country. In one year alone, the album sold 38,000 copies and became the fifth-best-selling classical album of 1973. With a surprising hit record on their hands, it was only natural that more volumes would follow. Further albums showcased the work of Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Dimtri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa and Franz Waxman. Later volumes revolved around music associated with particular movie stars.

The albums contained suites and isolated cues, rather than recordings of full scores, all meticulously prepared for optimal listening pleasure. Gerhardt said he wanted “to restore neglected symphonic film scores to the kind of musical status which years of bowdlerization had been responsible for diminishing, even destroying.”

I wanted to go back…and systematically explore the substance of the great movie scores of the late ’30s and ’40s, in direct relation to the picture, as dramatic entities. The tunes we know, of course, but what of the contexts in which they were originally employed? I determined to re-create these scores or selections from them in the original orchestrations, and this could only be done by going back to the ultimate sources—the composers and their music as they originally wrote it.

Gerhardt either consulted with them beforehand as to how to assemble suites from their works, or when this was not possible, composed the suites himself and submitted them to the composer for his approval.

There’s…a school of thought, [he continued], which maintains that each cue should be played note-for-note as the composer wrote it and not tacked on to any other—in other words that the whole concept of suites as such is perverse. I don’t feel that reproducing each cue literally shows up film music in its best possible light, because you’re bound to get a certain amount of meaningless repetition—meaningless without the film, that is—and effects such as ‘sting’ chords which similarly make little sense without their visual support. Some critics have also complained that my suites are too short and attempt to accomplish too much too quickly. My aim in the case of each album is to present a well-rounded ‘portrait’ of the composer or star representing each of his many facets; an eye may make fascinating study in close up, but it doesn’t give you much idea of the physiognomy as a whole.

Though Korngold, Newman and Steiner were no longer around to lend their expertise to their volumes, Gerhardt was fortunate to collaborate with Herrmann, Rózsa and Tiomkin, who often showed up at the recording studio to lend a hand. Herrmann quickly composed six new bars of segue music in full score in between the CITIZEN KANE main title and the snow scene. Rózsa took The Four Feathers score in hand, “revising, improving, Rózsafying.” And Dimitri Tiomkin attended every recording session for LOST HORIZON, “[making] few comments, but those he did make showed that after nearly 40 years he still knew every note of his music.”

Gerhardt came up with the idea to build albums around a single movie star. Three volumes were dedicated to music for Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Though these albums occasionally suffer from a “mixed-tape” quality, they offer a chance to hear composers that were not featured with albums of their own. Nestled among the tracks by the usual suspects sit gems like Frederick Hollander’s lilting SABRINA main title waltz, Victor Young’s heartbreaking love theme from THE LEFT HAND OF GOD, and a rare Hugo Friedhofer cue from THE SUN ALSO RISES.

The most successful of these star-driven albums centers around the music for Bette Davis films. Gerhardt received a great deal of help and encouragement from the legendary star in preparation for the recording. Bette was “very musical and very aware of the important role played by music in her pictures.” The album is obviously skewed toward Max Steiner, given his role scoring many of Davis’ pictures at Warner Bros. Of all the Steiner treasures on this album, my favorite is the Oscar-nominated BEYOND THE FOREST. Though largely forgotten today, the score features one of Steiner’s loveliest themes, while much of the music conveys the dark, menacing quality of Davis’ trashy Rosa Moline. Davis was so pleased with the album that she promoted it while out on tour.

In 1978, Gerhardt released the last two albums in the series. It must have come as shock to fans when, following a two-year hiatus after Lost Horizon, the first album contained contemporary suites from STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. The album smacks of a quick and easy way for RCA to cash in on the current craze for the films, excellent performances notwithstanding. Just as John Williams’ music ushered in a renewed interest in film music, RCA’s support for the Classic Film Scores was waning.

The final album in the series, Spectacular World of Classic Film Scores, featured a disappointing compilation of previously released tracks from earlier LPs. Though it begins with an entertaining array of fanfares from five of the major studios, the only substantial new contributions come from the premiere recording of music from Tiomkin’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, and the final track, Daniele Amfitheatrof’s rarely heard “Dance of the Seven Veils” from SALOME.

With that one last rush of lustful abandon, the Classic Film Scores series came to an end. Without RCA’s support, Gerhardt had to scrap plans for future albums, including The Women (Great Hollywood Actresses), Dodge City (Westerns by Max Steiner), Frankenstein (Horror Films), and Things to Come (Sci-Fi Films), as well as separate LPs for music of Victor Young, Elmer Bernstein and William Walton.

When the CD format began to take hold in the early ’80s, RCA execs commissioned Gerhardt to remaster the entire Classic Film Scores series for the new medium. Gerhardt took advantage of the longer CD running time by including music from the original recording sessions that wouldn’t fit on the original LPs. For later remasters, Gerhardt compiled cues that had previously been issued on separate discs into lengthier suites and rearranged the track order on certain releases. The first of these remastered discs—Sunset Boulevard: Classic Films Scores of Franz Waxman—was released with no promotion or publicity.

Never content to leave well enough alone, RCA execs decided to go back and release the entire series remastered in Dolby Surround Sound, with some releases even reverting back to the original LP running time. Though Dolby does not completely mar the performances, it muddies the analog acoustics prized on the original LPs. Compare the Dolby-ized version of Waxman’s classic “The Ride to Dubno” from TARAS BULBA with the original engineering, which displays the pristine acoustics of Kingsway Hall and a superb performance by Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic. Though the Classic Film Scores CDs are long out of print, ArkivMusic.com has released the entire series on CD-R with complete artwork and liner notes.

Gerhardt retired from RCA in 1986 but continued to work as a freelance producer until 1997. He never appeared in public as a conductor, refusing all invitations due to his desire to remain private. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in late November, 1998, and died from complications of brain surgery on February 22, 1999.

In an interview, Gerhardt paraphrased an anecdote attributed to Bernard Herrmann: “‘Since the movies will probably survive longer than any other art-form, the music composed for them will survive along with them, and will promote interest in the composers’ other compositions.’ In the last analysis, then, composing for films, far from being the kiss of death as far as the composers are concerned, is actually a pledge of immortality.” Charles Gerhardt saved Golden Age film music from the “kiss of death” by breathing life into a moribund art form. And that 14-year-old band geek deep inside me will forever owe him my undying gratitude.

—FSMO

Charles In Charge is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!

The name Alfred E. Neuman was picked up from Alfred Newman, the music arranger from back in the 1950s and 1940s. Actually, we borrowed the name indirectly through The Henry Morgan Show. He was using the name Alfred Newman for an innocuous character that you’d forget in five minutes. So we started using the name Alfred Neuman. The readers insisted on putting the name and the face together, and they would call the “What, Me Worry?” face Alfred Neuman.

If that little tidbit doesn’t cause some raised eyebrows at your next cocktail party, start spouting the information below to show off your knowledge of one of the all-time Golden Age greats!

You Can Call Me Al

Published in Film Score Monthly Online
August 2008

For 20 years Alfred Newman ruled over the 20th Century Fox music department. Today, he rules over my tiny New York apartment. In my entryway, a framed, bronze, first-day-issue Newman stamp welcomes those few intrepid visitors who are willing to venture to the wrong side of the tracks to visit me.

The eldest of 10 children, Newman (1900-1970) was a musical prodigy on piano and supplemented his poor family’s income by playing in theaters and restaurants. Later, he traveled the vaudeville circuit billed as “The Marvelous Boy Pianist.” By the age of 20, he was conducting musicals on Broadway for the likes of George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern—training that put him in good stead when he accompanied Irving Berlin to Hollywood in 1930. Newman’s conducting became legendary, and he is still considered to be the finest conductor in the history of film.

Oscar began its love affair with Newman early on. He conducted ONE NIGHT OF LOVE, the first winner for Best Score in 1934. With 45 Academy Award nominations, he is tied with John Williams as the second-most-nominated person in the history of the awards, behind Walt Disney. With nine statues, Newman is the most honored composer in Oscar history, and between 1938 and 1957, he was nominated an incredible 20 years in a row.

So what makes an Alfred Newman score so special? For me, it is his choice of material and the lack of “cheap sentiment” in his music, combined with Edward Powell’s superb orchestrations and Newman’s baton skills. More than anything, it is a rich, romantic, lush string sound—the legendary “Newman strings”—that defines Newman’s music.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Everything about ALL ABOUT EVE—from Bette Davis’ career high as aging actress Margo Channing to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s peerless script—has brought me years of joy ever since I first saw it as a college undergrad. Newman steered clear of the witty barbs that ricochet from one character to the next, letting the orchestra soar during the transitions, pauses, and wordless interludes. Newman rings down the curtain on a young actress (Barbara Bates) standing in front of a wardrobe mirror wearing Eve’s (Anne Baxter) coat and holding Eve’s newly won acting trophy. Eve’s theme and the opening fanfare crash (and clash) side by side, book-ending the film and continuing the ruthless machinations begun by Eve at the start of the film that are now her downfall. Like everything else in this my favorite film, Newman’s score deserves a standing ovation.

ANASTASIA (1956)

Some of my earliest memories of film music come from playing piano arrangements of famous themes like THE APARTMENT and EXODUS as a young boy, long before I ever saw the films. One of my favorites was the theme from ANASTASIA. The film was an adaptation of a 1954 play by Marcelle Maurette, loosely based on the true story of “Anna Anderson,” a former inmate in a German asylum who claimed she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest surviving member of Russia’s Romanov royal family, massacred in 1918. As the eldest of 10 children of immigrant Russian Jews, Newman was the perfect composer to score ANASTASIA. He composed a monothematic work in which the memorable main theme was “simple and heartfelt, Russian in character, and lent itself to development and variation.” In this cue, the theme accompanies a distraught and confused Anastasia (Ingrid Bergman) as she wanders the streets of Paris. Seeing her reflection in the Seine, the strings seesaw in despair as the main theme strains upward until Bounine (Yul Brynner) pulls her back from the brink of suicide.

THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (1959)

For his final score at Fox, Newman composed a rare title song, a popular practice that began with Dimitri Tiomkin’s highly successful HIGH NOON in 1952. Newman was not primarily known as a songwriter, but “The Best of Everything” is a gem. I first fell in love with this beautiful melody on the Charles Gerhardt compilation, Captain From Castile: The Classic Films of Alfred Newman. Newman’s haunting tune, choral oo-oo-oo’s, Sammy Cahn’s poignant lyrics, and Johnny Mathis’ trademark vibrato give this sudsy soaper a touch of late 1950s class. Astute listeners of this instrumental track may notice a slight timbre change in the string sound, no doubt in part to Earle Hagen’s orchestrations. This was the first picture not orchestrated by Newman’s longtime right hand, Edward Powell, after a falling-out on THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. And though Hagen’s orchestrations fit the glossy tone of the film, they demonstrate how integral Powell’s talent had been to Newman’s sound.

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA (1951)

For being a self-proclaimed non-religious man, Newman was particularly adept at scoring religious films. DAVID AND BATHSHEBA is the Biblical telling of King David (Gregory Peck) and his illicit love for the beautiful Bathsheba (Susan Hayward). Newman’s love theme for strings ascends chromatically from the very depths of the heart. To hear just how valuable Newman was on the podium, compare Newman’s original track with the excellent re-recording by Richard Kaufman conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on the Wuthering Heights: A Tribute to Alfred Newman CD. Though Kaufman uses the same original Edward Powell orchestrations and has far cleaner sound quality, it is missing the passion that Newman’s conducting brings to the earlier version.

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959)

In 1956, playwrights Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett turned Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl into a Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, which they later adapted for George Stevens’ 1959 film version. Like the sun pouring through the attic’s broken skylight, Newman’s beautiful score shines a ray of light into the Franks’ shattered lives. According to Newman, “George decided that our film shouldn’t be one of doom and gloom but we should concentrate on the love and humor of these people…the music would be motivated by high ideals, the tenderness and the spiritual qualities inherent in their family life and their special badge of courage…I attempted to evoke the memory of a happier past, the hope for a happier future, the longings of oppressed people and the love of family, one for the other, and most of all, the great dignity and courage of the Frank family and their friends in the face of disaster. For Anne, I tried to achieve in her music, her simple candor, her warmth, and her abiding and inspiring faith.” The most powerful moment in the score comes during the final moments of the film. Anne (Milly Perkins) and Peter (Richard Beymer) kiss as the strings swell to a full-blown statement of “Anne and Peter’s Theme,” and the French horns seem to cry out a heartbreaking “Peter, Peter” as approaching Nazi sirens cut off all hope of a future together. This cue moves me to tears every time.

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941)

Today, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY is unjustly derided as the film that beat CITIZEN KANE at the Academy Awards. Richard Llewellyn’s novel of a Welsh mining family was lovingly translated to the screen through Philip Dunne’s screenplay and directed with customary grace by John Ford. For the score, Newman selected many Welsh folk songs and hymns to be sung a capella, weaving the melodies throughout the score. The love theme for Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) and the local preacher (Walter Pidgeon) is based on an Irish folk song, “The Sixpence.” The orchestrations showcase a popular Newman technique in which the theme begins in a solo instrument, followed by the entire string section, and completed by a solo instrument once again. Newman was criticized for using an Irish melody in a Welsh picture, but who cares when the tune so perfectly captures “love denied.”

THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM (1945)

Based on A.J. Cronin’s novel, THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM stars Gregory Peck as a Scottish priest sent to China to establish a Catholic mission. Newman incorporated Irish and Chinese elements into the score. A memorable theme is associated with Mr. Chia (Leonard Strong), a local Chinese nobleman who deeds the Hill of the Brilliant Green Jade to Father Chisolm (Peck) for saving his son’s life. Newman later reused the melody in his Oscar-winning LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING (1955), while Richard Rodgers seems to have been borrowed (or lifted) the tune for the song “I Have Dreamed” in the musical THE KING AND I.

THE ROBE (1953)

As opposed to the pomp and grandeur that Miklós Rózsa brought to his religious scores over at M-G-M, Newman’s tended to be more personal and introspective. In THE ROBE, the love theme for Marcellus (Richard Burton) and Diana (Jean Simmons) contains religious overtones that foreshadow Burton’s acceptance of Jesus later in the film. Newman’s score became a legendary footnote in Oscar history: Franz Waxman was so incensed that Newman failed to receive a nomination that he quit the Academy in protest.

THE SNAKE PIT (1948)

Long before 1975’s ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, THE SNAKE PIT took a harsh look at life in a state mental hospital. Olivia de Havilland gives a raw performance as Virginia Cunningham, a young married woman who finds herself in a state insane asylum and can’t remember how she got there. For much of the film, Newman eschews his gorgeous string writing and treats us to a little shock treatment of his own with strings that shriek like musical inmates. At the end of the film, Newman introduces a new theme for the unspoken love Virginia imagined for Dr. Kik (Leo Genn). Newman later used the theme in 1949’s THE PRINCE OF FOXES.

THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943)

Newman’s first Oscar for Best Original Score almost didn’t happen. Author Franz Werfel originally recommended his friend Igor Stravinsky to compose the score for the film adaptation of his novel, THE SONG OF BERNADETTE. With producer Darryl Zanuck away at war and unable to veto the idea, Newman let Stravinsky compose the score. While Stravinsky is certainly no slouch as a composer, thankfully his music was rejected, allowing Newman to compose what is arguably his finest score. (Stravinsky later incorporated his own “Apparition of the Virgin” music into the middle movement of his Symphony in Three Movements.) The highlight of the score is Bernadette’s first vision. Newman originally wrote the scene with Wagner’s Grail music and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in mind, “a terrifying standard to have to approach,” he said. When he reread Werfel’s book, he found that Bernadette had never claimed to have seen anything other than a “beautiful lady.” Bernadette’s theme consists of four ascending notes, which, according to Jon Burlingame in his commentary for the DVD, is “as if she’s gazing toward heaven.” Newman stated, “The theme was fragile and yet loaded with dynamite.” “I thought the music should not be pious or austere or even mystical, or suggest that the girl was on the first step to sainthood,” said Newman. “She was at that point simply an innocent, pure-minded peasant girl, and I took my musical cues from the little gusts of wind and the rustling bushes that accompanied the vision, letting it all grow into a swelling harmony that would express the girl’s emotional reaction. And it was important that it express her reaction, not ours.” Without a doubt, this scene won Newman the Oscar.

* * *

To this heathen, Alfred Newman is God among film composers. To quote the opening title card from THE SONG OF BERNADETTE, “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”

I believe, I believe!

—FSM

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Petroleum, Politics and Prizes: Inside Virgil Thomson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Score for LOUISIANA STORY

Published in Film Score Monthly Online
April 2006

After a long winter, April showers recognition on journalists, photographers, authors, poets, playwrights and composers with the most prestigious accolade in American journalism, arts and letters—the Pulitzer Prize. In the 63 years since the first Pulitzer Prize in Music was handed out in 1943, only one film score has been accorded that honor: Virgil Thomson’s score for Robert Flaherty’s LOUISIANA STORY.

Robert Flaherty is often called “the father of documentary films,” earning the title through groundbreaking feature documentaries such as Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), Man of Aran (1934) and The Land (1942). His final film, Louisiana Story(1948), proved to be his most praised, most popular, and, in some ways, his most controversial.

Standard Oil of New Jersey commissioned Flaherty to make a film that projected its industry as progressive and environmentally humane. The company contributed over $200,000 to the project, but an embarrassed Flaherty kept the Standard Oil name off the credits to minimize the critical drubbing.

After touring locations in Texas and Oklahoma, Flaherty found the perfect isolated setting in the Petit Anse Bayou of southern Louisiana. In the past, Flaherty had been criticized for “staging” certain sequences in his films; Louisiana Story was no exception. Flaherty and his wife, Frances, constructed a slim scenario (which surprisingly netted them an Academy Award nomination for Best Motion Picture Story) concerning a young Acadian (Cajun) boy viewing the effects of the encroaching oil industry on the simple lives of his family and on the bayou inhabitants who have lived on the land for generations. Frances found Joseph Boudreaux, a 12-year-old son of a sharecropper, in a schoolroom and signed him for the lead. Other bayou natives were hired to portray the parents.

Louisiana Story had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1948. Critical praise was high, but many reviewers advised their readers to ignore the story and concentrate on the stunning black-and-white images captured by Flaherty and young cinematographer Richard Leacock. In 1994, Louisiana Story was listed on the National Film Registry. The Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive restored the film for its 50th anniversary.

Flaherty was fond of music and always brought along his violin and portable phonograph on location. So it is not surprising that he would rely heavily on music to enhance the images of Louisiana Story, turning to one of the quintessential “Americana” composers: Virgil Thomson. Thomson was born November 25, 1896, in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Harvard in 1923 and served as organist and choirmaster of King’s Chapel in Boston. Thomson was one of the first American students, along with his friend Aaron Copland, of legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

The Composer and the Critic

Thomson composed in virtually every medium, including ballet, vocal, choral, orchestra, chamber works, and other documentary film scores. Some of his most distinctive compositions are the “musical portraits,” brief works (often under two minutes), most of which were written for piano with the subject sitting in front of him as if posing for a painting. He eventually composed over 140 portraits, which included such luminaries as John Houseman, Paul Bowles, Fiorello La Guardia, Copland, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. However, it is his vocal and choral writing for which he became justly famous. Few composers could set text as naturalistically as Thomson. He composed songs and cycles for solo voice and chorus, but it is the operas, Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947), that remain landmark works. For all of Thomson’s ebullient music for these pieces, the nonsensical librettos by Gertrude Stein continue to challenge the classical music cognoscenti—perhaps one of the reasons neither has entered the regular opera repertoire.

In addition to being a well-known, if irascible, composer, Thomson became one of the most influential music critics of the 20th century. With his take-no-prisoners style, Thomson’s critical writing was lucid and articulate, though his agendas championed certain composers and made enemies of others. He wrote his first pieces of criticism for Vanity Fairand Boston Transcripts; by the time of Louisiana Story, he had written three books of criticism. But it was his position at the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1952 that cemented his role as an influential critic.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who had originally approached Thomson to write his biography, described him in The Musical Quarterly: “As a composer, Virgil Thomson is probably the most controversial figure on the American scene; as a critic and writer on the musical life of our time he is internationally read and appreciated. His music is the subject of continual controversy not because of its idiom, which is simple, direct, and free of innovation, but because of its content…and his freedom from the restrictions of a specific ‘personalized’ idiom in an age of stylists delights some while it enrages others.”

Flaherty had been impressed with Thomson’s earlier documentary film scores for director Pare Lorentz, including the groundbreaking The Plow That Broke the Plains (1937) andThe River (1938). Thomson was keen to score Louisiana Story as it reminded him of his days stationed in the region during World War I.

Thomson composed nearly 60 minutes of music for the 77-minute film, dividing the music into three categories—“scenery music,” “folk music” and “noise music.” Natural scenery is illustrated through musical devices adapted from Mendelssohn, Debussy and other “landscape composers,” as Thomson called them, also utilizing Baroque forms, such as the passacaglia and fugue. The dances and songs that Thomson found in Irene Thérèse Whitfield’s Louisiana French Folk Songs and recordings of Cajun fiddle music collected by John and Alan Lomax housed in the Library of Congress represent the people of the bayou. As Frederick W. Sternfield remarked in The Musical Quarterly: “The continuous weaving in and out of these traditional songs removes them from the category of mere quotations…They are part and parcel of the entire fabric and, as such, balance the over-all musical style and contribute to the dramatic characterization.” Thomson wisely chose not to score the scenes aboard the oil derrick, instead letting the natural “noise” of the machinery mesh into its own music.

Americana Meets the Bayou

Thomson was able to extract two orchestral suites from the score. The first suite,Louisiana Story: Suite for Orchestra, consists of the “scenery music,” while the second,Acadian Songs and Dances, preserves the various Cajun tunes used in the film. Adding to the cachet of the score, it is performed on the soundtrack by no less than Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. For the purposes of this discussion, themes will be titled as they are in the suites for easier identification (utilizing the acronyms LSS and ASAD for the first and second suites, respectively), but discussed in film order so that Thomson’s seamless mixing of the two styles will be more evident.

The film opens to shimmering strings, harp arpeggios, and an English horn solo as the boy steers his canoe among the moss-covered branches hanging over the bayou’s placid waters (LSS—I. Pastoral: The Bayou and the Marsh Buggy). Flute arpeggios blow in the wind followed by French horns and trumpets as the marsh buggy cuts a wide swath through the tall marsh grass (LSS—I. Pastoral: The Bayou and the Marsh Buggy).

As a barge floats down the river arousing the boy’s curiosity, an accordion and muted trumpet (ASAD—VII. The Squeeze Box) frame a violin two-step (ASAD—VII. The Squeeze Box). A speedboat interrupts the calm air of everyday life, but the English horn waltz accompanied by pizzicato strings (ASAD—II. Papa’s Tune) signals that it is no more than a curiosity to the land’s inhabitants.

A lively bassoon melody and oom-pah strings accompany the boy and his raccoon (ASAD—IV. The Alligator and the ’Coon) as they row along the water’s edge. But the speedboat disrupts the calm, upsetting the canoe, and the opening music becomes less bucolic (LSS—I. Pastoral) as the outside world encroaches on the boy’s idyllic life.

The boy and the raccoon play to the tune of a jaunty clarinet solo over “walking” pizzicatos in the strings (ASAD—VI. Walking Song) until the sight of an oil derrick floating above the marsh grass and moss-covered trees interrupts the fun. Thomson employs constantly shifting harmonies for a chorale (LSS—II. Chorale: The Derrick Arrives), the ecclesiastical effect of which conveys the awesome sight of the derrick and its steeple-like shape. In his definitive biography of Thomson, Anthony Tommasini calls the music “fearsome yet reassuring, unfamiliar yet uplifting. This is progress in action, the film sequence reassures us, disruptive, disconcerting, but nothing to fear.”

As the boy pries through the weeping willows and branches looking for the alligator’s nest (LSS—III. Passacaglia: Robbing the Alligator’s Nest), the ascending stepwise melody in the English horn and trumpet hovers over the descending bass line, giving the music a sense of impending danger (LSS—III. Passacaglia). The music is composed in the form of a passacaglia, a stately Baroque dance in which there is continuing repetition of the theme in the bass. The music steadily builds throughout the six-minute cue until the frightening roar of the alligator cuts off the music and the boy runs for his life.

Returning to his canoe, the boy finds that the raccoon has escaped from his leash. We see the alligator sneak up on the animal, and the music—with its minor-mode accompaniment to the “’coon theme,” additional percussion, hunter-like muted French horns (à la Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf), and half-step trumpet clusters—leads us to believe that the little rascal is a goner (ASAD—IV. The Alligator and the ’Coon). Slow-moving strings (ASAD—I. Sadness) convey the heartbreak and despair of the boy’s search for his missing pet.

Convinced the alligator has killed the animal, the boy traps it into a ferocious fight (LSS—IV. Fugue: Boy Fights Alligator) accompanied by a vicious fugue consisting of four two-measure subjects. The first subject emphasizes the interval of the tritone, the longstanding “devil in music,” conveying the alligator’s terrifying presence. The countersubject accompanies the boy straining to capture the creature. The third subject, with its jerky rhythm and chromaticism, outlines the sharp triangles of the alligator’s teeth snapping in a desperate struggle to free itself from the boy’s hook. The last subject is expressive of the father’s anxiety as he calls for his son. The fugue ends in major rather than minor, finishing with what is known as a Picardy third, trumpeting the father’s rescue of the boy.

More of the pastoral music accompanies the boy as he wanders through the empty derrick. Another Acadian tune (ASAD—V. Super-Sadness) sits heavy over the despondent boy as he peels potatoes. Each statement of the tune is in a new key and always in horn-like two-part counterpoint.

When the boy finally finds the raccoon, its theme is played on a bright clarinet. Thomson reprises many of the score’s tunes for the departure of the derrick at the end of the film, and the camera lingers on the smiling boy waving good-bye, all ending happily with a final major chord. Thomson employs one last Acadian segment contrasting two syncopated dance tunes for the end credits (ASAD—III. A Narrative).

Bringing the Score to the Fore

Flaherty saw no reason not to emphasize Thomson’s score since the film consisted of less than a hundred lines of dialogue. Thomson was pleased: “I know few films—indeed, none other recorded in America—in which orchestral color has been kept so vivid.”

Critical reception for the score was high. Thomson’s own paper, the New York Herald Tribune, gave the film a positive review and included a two-paragraph analysis of the music: “The score, which is one of [Thomson’s] finest, is orchestrated in masterly, luminous fashion… The orchestration, leaning heavily on woodwinds, has a share in revealing the material’s essence, for its accordion effects are idiomatic to Cajun music, and the sparse accompaniments, often distilled out of the material itself, ingeniously epitomize it.” Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote that the score “seems to have a greater eloquence, a closer fusion of all his musical resources than almost anything he has written.”

John Cage, who wrote the music section of Thomson’s 1959 biography, stated, “The quality of mastery moves through the music of Louisiana Story. All the notes perform the composer’s commands, never once seeming to be useless or engaged on their own independent projects… Neither a paste-up job nor a neo-romantic expression of personal feelings, Louisiana Story is a public project. The musics that go in and out of it…[appear] well behaved, well spoken, well dressed.” Bosley Crowther in The New York Times deemed the music “a great asset,” and Vogue praised it as “a triumph of movie music.” London’sNews Chronicle went so far as to call it “the loveliest score ever composed for an American film.”

With such high praise, Thomson hoped he might be nominated for an Academy Award. However, as he related in his 1966 autobiography, “the music was found unworthy of that honor, I was told, because the Philadelphia Orchestra’s sound track was ‘unprofessional.’ That term meant, I was also told, that our engineers had failed to ‘sweeten the line’—a practice long observed in Hollywood, by which the first violin part is recorded as a solo (molto vibrato, naturally) then superposed on the full ‘take,’ to add plangency.”

But Thomson took justifiable pride in his Pulitzer Prize. The music category had only been in existence since 1943, though the prizes had been awarded since 1917. Joseph Pulitzer had not made a stipulation in his will for a music prize but left it up to the Pulitzer Board to make additions and changes. The 1949 music jury consisted of conductor Chalmers Clifton, who had invited Thomson in 1923 to participate in his conducting class; Thomson’s one-time friend, composer Henry Cowell; and Beveridge Webster, a distinguished pianist teaching at Juilliard. Surprisingly, Webster proposed yet another film score, Aaron Copland’s The Red Pony. But Chalmers and Cowell outnumbered him two to one with their votes for Thomson.

And the Pulitzer Goes To…

With the prestige of a Pulitzer Prize, Thomson’s music found new life in the two concert suites. The first suite was premiered in Philadelphia in November 1949, once again with Eugene Ormandy leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it one of Thomson’s “finest, most spontaneous and refreshing scores.” Ormandy and the orchestra also gave the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall later that month, and the staid New York critics raved as well. The New York Times wrote: “It is impossible not to imagine images and actions described in the program book as the music unfolds. The evocation is almost uncanny.” John Briggs of the New York Post Home News, usually a harsh Thomson critic, ate some crow: “This reviewer, having long since pegged Mr. Thomson as an amusing but rather superficial dabbler in musical composition, was bowled over by Louisiana Story. It is a first-rate piece of work. Its solid craftsmanship was no surprise; Mr. Thomson has shown himself to be a competent technician… But inLouisiana Story there is something more—a new depth and power of musical expression. The score is no musical pot-boiler; it has weight, dignity and something that frequently approaches grandeur.” The suite quickly received further performances by other major U.S. orchestras, including those in New York, Cleveland, San Francisco and Boston.

Thomson may be the only film music composer so far to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, but there is hope for the future. Effective with the 2005 competition, the definition of the Prize was revised to “encourage greater diversity in entries while assuring even-handed evaluation of compositions.” A June 2004 statement by the Pulitzer Board declared its “strong desire to consider and honor the full range of distinguished American musical compositions—from the contemporary classical symphony to jazz, opera, choral, musical theater, movie scores and other forms of musical excellence.” Though no film scores have been submitted as of this writing, the public release of a recording can now serve as the equivalent of a public performance, a requirement for Pulitzer consideration, further helping the film score cause. (“Pulitzer Prize-winner John Williams” certainly has a nice ring to it!)

In 1952, Igor Stravinsky suggested to famed New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine that Balanchine should create a ballet out of the first suite of Louisiana Story. (Stravinsky said it had more to “get one’s teeth into.”) However, Balanchine chose the less-dramatic Acadian Songs and Dances to create Bayou in 1952. Dance critic Edwin Denby praised the choreography but lamented, “Balanchine missed the originality of the score.” In his autobiography, Thomson simply wrote, “[It] failed as a ballet.” Ruthanna Boris also chose the second suite for her ballet (titled Bayou as well), but it too was a failure. Not surprisingly, but unfortunately for Thomson’s music, neither version has stayed in the repertory.

Thomson’s voice has always been unique, if not as easily recognizable as other “Americana” composers such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. Since his music has fallen out of favor over the years, much of Thomson’s prodigious output isn’t available on CD. However, in addition to Louisiana Story (available on a CD you can order here that also features The Plow That Broke the Plains), I heartily recommend Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, the “musical portraits,” and the score to The River as a beginning. In addition, Anthony Tommasini’s authoritative biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, makes for fascinating reading. The Dallas Morning News put into words the thoughts of all Thomson fans: “Thomson’s music we would like to hear again and again.”

—FSM

What other film scores should have been considered for the Pulitzer Prize?

Petroleum, Politics and Prizes is a post from Film Score Click Track. Visit the site for more great film music!