ExclusiveMax Steiner: The Father of Film Music

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans While classical radio stations will often play film scores as part of the regular programming, one could argue that film music isn't quite the same as a symphony or concerto or some other piece that was specifically composed just for listening. Nevertheless, in the early days of sound films, the few composers who really shaped cinematic scoring were trained classical composers and musicians, meaning that classical music and film music actually have a lot in common. Perhaps no one deserves more credit for the development of the film score than Max Steiner. When motion pictures transitioned from silent films to talking pictures in the late 1920s and early 30s, there were many little challenges. Some of them were very obvious, like strong accents among actors, microphones, synchronized soundtrack. Others were something you wouldn't immediately assume, such as the soundtrack. Now, silent films always had some kind of musical accompaniment that was played live, whether by a piano, an organ, or an orchestra of some size. Once the music had to be synchronized to the talking picture itself, though, filmmakers struggled with how valuable and integrated music was and should be. They thought that audiences would find it strange if there was just this random music playing that had no visible on-screen source. There had to be a band in the nightclub, a radio in a room, a phonograph, even a wandering minstrel playing the guitar, even if that music was a 40-piece orchestra rather than just a guitar. It took a few successful films, really a few films whose success was largely attributed to their soundtrack, to convince Hollywood that it was worth the hassle, the time, and the expense to have original scoring. One man has been called the father of film music, although many composers could be given credit. Max Steiner, in particular, really showed the cynical, penny-pinching producers that it was worth the extra hundreds or thousands of dollars to have original scores. Max Steiner had his roots in the great classical music of old Europe. He was born in Vienna in 1888 to a family which had a long history in the theater. He was named after his grandfather, Maximilian Steiner, who was a theatrical producer and is credited with encouraging Johann Strauss II, that's right, the waltz king, to write stage works like operettas in the style of Frenchman Jacques Offenbach. He brought those works to Vienna and played them in his theaters and just really helped to develop that fun-loving theatrical scene of the operetta world. Max Steiner's mother was a showgirl being a singer and a dancer. As a young man, even as a boy, Max Steiner showed that he had great musical inclination and he was deeply entrenched in the musical roots of his family. He studied piano with Johannes Brahms. Richard Strauss was his godfather. As he ended up going to the music academy, he studied with Gustav Mahler. All these greats were close friends of the family, as well as his teachers and mentors. He would take three to four lessons a week with Brahms and he found he got kind of bored with it, but he liked to improvise and make up his own things. When he was at the age of just 12, he had his conducting debut conducting an operetta at his family's theater. At the age of 15, he wrote his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl, and he presented it to his father. But his father said it wasn't good enough to be performed, so he then presented it to the rival theatrical producer who performed it. And his composing and producing career was on its way. He began traveling throughout Europe, composing, conducting, producing, and eventually he made his way to England. This was in the early 1910s. He worked with many theatrical reviews and was building a name for himself on the stage there when World War I broke out. Since he was of German descent, he was considered an enemy alien, so he was going to be interned in a camp. But he had a friend who was a nobleman and respected his music, who helped him get an exit visa to America. But he wasn't able to take any of his money, so he ended up arriving in the United States with only $32 to his name, and he had to take menial jobs as a music copyist. But this led to his doing some orchestrating and eventually composing for the stage on the East Coast. Now, although this was years before there would be sound in films, he actually did his first movie work in the year 1915, when he composed an original score for a movie and arranged to have this huge orchestra play it on an East Coast performance. Because that that would be a big deal back then. Somebody had to write the music that would go along with silent films. A lot of times it would be the discretion of the organist or the pianist to use some existing classical work or some popular turn of the day. But sometimes there was actually a score that would be shipped around the different, at least, major theaters. So he did a bit of that work in the early days, as well as writing and conducting and arranging shows on Broadway, working with greats like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and just establishing himself in that theatrical world of America. Eventually, this led him to Hollywood in around the year 1929. He began working as the music director for RKO Radio Pictures. Not necessarily composing in those early days, but arranging, overseeing, selecting the works, the existing classical works, which would be used as background music. As talking pictures were gaining steam, he began writing the music for opening and closing credits and gradually trying to convince producers that they needed to slip a little more music in there. He would at the same time be doing stage works, but he always would turn down these offers that would take him far away, like to teach composition in Moscow or something like that, because he wanted to stick around close to Hollywood. He liked the scene that was emerging there, and I think he saw the eventual potential for music in movies. After all, Broadway was using scoring, and it was only a matter of time until Hollywood would at least begin producing more talking picture musicals. So when David Selznick of Gone with the Wind fame took over as the head of RKO Radio Pictures, he began giving a little more freedom to Max Steiner, and especially when a few films would allow him to do more scoring and that helped the movies. The big break of his career came with the movie King Kong in 1933, a very famous film about the giant ape, which used a lot of special effects, fantasy, and science fiction. There weren't many sci-fi movies at this time, so it really stood out. The producers weren't happy with the footage. They thought it looked really cheesy, and it just looked contrived and over people wouldn't like all these strange special effects. So they essentially asked Max Steiner to save the movie with some scoring. There was a bit of a battle of the wills. On the one hand, the studio said, just we're already losing money, please just reuse some things you already have, some scores you've written. And he said, well, what would you like me to use, Little Women? Because he'd recently written the score to the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women. And he was being sarcastic, of course, but referring to the fact that there was nothing he or really anyone else had written up to that point that would fit this movie about a giant ape. Nothing would work. So the producer, who really believed in him, gave him carte blanche. He said, I will pay for the score. Please write something original, hire all the musicians. He ended up spending $50,000 to record this original score. That's a huge amount of money then. But he saved the picture and he was given credit with at least 25% of the worth of the overall film. He later said that the score he wrote was one of his favorite scores that he ever wrote in his Hollywood career, which is impressive considering that he wrote hundreds of scores during his whole career. But because of the exotic nature of it, he integrated some more dissonant elements. He'd always been fascinated with newer styles of music like Claude Debussy back in Europe when he was a He always wanted to experiment with sort of different things as well as leitmotifs. The opera composer Richard Wagner is given credit for really the invention of leitmotifs, a German term meaning a theme which particularly relates to one character, one idea, or one repeated incident. Rather than just having a theme song that goes throughout, each character has his own little theme song. And Max Steiner perfected the use of the leitmotif in films. He had the theme for King Kong, the theme for Fay Wray's character. He wove them together to show the beauty and the beast's love story between them. And as he did throughout his career, he said things in his music that weren't said in the dialogue. And because of that, the movie was an unexpected hit and his career was taking off. He continued working for RKO Radio Pictures for the next few years and for David Selznick until 1937, when then he began working for Warner Brothers. And he scored hundreds of movies for them over the next couple of decades, including some of their biggest hits with Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, lots of Bette Davis films. Bette Davis credited him as her favorite film composer. And she, in one notable scene in Dark Victory, she asked the director, is Max Steiner writing the score? And he said, well, why do you want to know? She said, well, either I'm going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is, because she knew that she almost didn't have to act as much. He would complement what she needed to do with his dramatic scoring. We don't often think of pitch with people's voices as being important related to background music, but Max Steiner considered all those things. He said if an actor had a very high voice, like when he worked with child actors like Freddie Bartholomew, he would use low strings. If a man had a low booming voice, he would use higher instruments, because he said if you have instruments or tones that are too close to the speaking voice, it'll get muddy on the soundtrack and we won't be able to hear what they're saying. So you need to have contrast. Also, in one film, he thought an actress was a little too harsh for the part, so he softened her with his music. Throughout his career, he was nominated for 24 Academy Awards. He won for three of them. The first was for a John Ford film, The Informer, in 1935. The second was a Bette Davis picture, now Voyager, in which he interestingly used some classical themes by Tchaikovsky. And the third was Since You Went Away, a David Selznick epic, for which he wrote the touching theme that would later be adapted into the very sentimental wartime Christmas tune, I'll Be Home for Christmas. You can hear that melody playing in the background, and Max Steiner wrote that. Arguably, his famous score is Gone With the Wind, which he wrote for David Selznick, because although he was technically under contract to Warner Brothers at that time, he also sort of worked for David Selznick and would work with him at other studios. Ironically, although Selznick insisted he wouldn't hire anybody but Steiner to write that, he asked him to integrate a lot of classical music or existing popular tunes, partly because he was already over budget and over schedule. And he knew that Max Steiner was writing 12 other scores that year, working 20 hours a day sometimes, and he was concerned that he wouldn't be able to get it done, so he actually hired another composer, Frantz Waxman, to write a backup score in case he didn't get it done. But Steiner argued with him and said, no, it's gonna take away from this movie if you use themes that are well known to some classical piece of music. Now, he did integrate some southern folk songs, but very tastefully, and the score he wrote ended up being over three hours long, the longest score ever written for a movie. It didn't win, though. It was nominated for best score, but it didn't win. It was beat out by The Wizard of Oz, but despite that, it remains number two on the American Film Institute's list of the most famous scores in cinematic history. And that theme, the Terra theme, made the movie so compelling and powerful. The way he used it at the beginning and the end, it rooted the importance of that land to Scarlett O'Hara. And that's just one example in Steiner's career where he would disagree with the filmmaker if he thought he was doing the wrong thing. He said several times throughout his career, I don't think it's effective to just use some existing piece that can seem trite, unless it's significant to the story and then it's woven throughout. Best exemplified, perhaps, by his score for Casablanca, which was, again, nominated for Academy Award, but didn't win. But it was very compelling in the way he used some existing songs, like As Time Goes By, which he didn't write, but it was an important song used in it. And also he used the German song, Watch on the Rhine, and he wove that in to be the theme of the Nazis. But he didn't just play the song, he used it like a leitmotif. And that's what he would do, which is very different from the early days of cinema, where you just hear, oh, they're just playing some song. He took that melody and then used it as a theme, much as Wagner would have. He said that, well, people say I'm like the one who invented leitmotifs and I'm the greatest film composer, but Richard Wagner was the one who invented the leitmotif. And if he had been in the time of film scoring, he would have been the number one film composer because of the way he used his powerful themes. And Max Steiner truly used the brilliance of all his classical training in everything he wrote, as well as his Broadway background and his operetta experience. He used all that classical training. He also very successfully conducted a lot of film scores, even when he didn't write them himself. For instance, he conducted the score to Lost Horizon by Frank Capra in 1937, which was fellow film composer Dimitri Chomkin's breakout film. And another example of a filmmaker kind of having a backup plan, they weren't sure Chomkin would be able to write a good score. So they had Max Steiner on retainer in case Chomkin didn't come through, he could compose as well. But Dimitri Chomkin also said that he wouldn't have wanted anyone but Steiner to conduct that work because they were allies and close friends. And those two composers, along with Alfred Newman, are considered the three godfathers of film music because each one contributed so much to the style and everything that's done now. Composers like John Williams wouldn't have been able to do anything that they do if not for composers like Max Steiner. All you have to do is watch a few of his movies to see the true brilliance of the man and to also hear his original classical works in movies like Four Daughters in 1938. He wrote Symphonie Moderne, which is considered the first classical piece of music written for a film. And it was then reprised in Four Wives, that time with orchestral scoring. Looking at the list of all the films for which he was nominated for Academy Awards is indeed an impressive lineup of films spanning many decades. And throughout his long career, he indeed earned his place as an American immigrant, among other classical composers, of being an American legend. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.