MAX STEINER #1 (HISTORY OF FILM COMPOSERS)

This is James Spencer from Spencer Music and Artist Development. This course is the History of Film Music for London College of Music and these little episodes are going to be overviews of various famous composers that we will be looking at in the class. This is also up on YouTube for those that might be interested in specific composers. So today we're going to look at one of my favorite composers, Max Steiner. Maximilian Raul Steiner was born May 10, 1888 in Vienna, Austria. He later died December 28, 1971 in Hollywood, California. He was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta at the age of 12 and had a full-blown professional career as a composer, arranger, and conductor already by age 15. Steiner worked in England, then Broadway, and then in 1929 he moved to Hollywood where he would have a very prolific period of scoring for some of the most famous movies of all time. And Steiner enters the tradition of writing music as other famous composers at that time, which would include other people we're going to talk about in this class. And that would be people like Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngoldt, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, and Miklos Rocha. In his career, Max Steiner composed over 300 films for specifically these two studios, RKO Pictures and Warner Brothers. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards, winning three Best Oscars for The Informer, 1935, Now Voyager, one of my favorites, with Bette Davis, 1942, and Since You Went Away, 1944. Besides his Oscar-winning scores, Steiner scored several popular works in American culture. Some of his scores include King Kong, 1933, Little Women, 1933, Jezebel with Bette Davis, 1938, one of the most famous movies of all time, Casablanca, 1942, The Searchers, 1956, and A Summer Place, 1959. His most famous score that we associate with Max Steiner is, of course, Gone with the Wind, 1939. He also received the Golden Globe Award, actually the very first Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, for the work Life with Father. He frequently collaborated with many famous directors and, of course, many famous actors and actresses. Now, let's take a look at his early years, his childhood. Steiner, again, was born May 10, 1888 in Austria. He was the only child of a very wealthy and theatrical family of Jewish heritage. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Maximilian Steiner, who was credited with first persuading the composer Johann Strauss to write for the theater and was influentially the manager of the Viennese Historical Theater Unterwiede, the Viennese Theater. For those who might forget, Johann Strauss was the waltz king. He was the famous composer who wrote the Blue Dadu, but also wrote the most famous operetta, Die Fledermaus. Max Steiner, from his grandfather, starts learning about operetta. It's interesting to also note that Max Steiner's actual godfather was the composer Richard Strauss, one of the most famous composers in the 20th century. When he was young, his parents sent Max Steiner to the Vienna University of Technology, but he expressed, obviously, that he didn't care for business and technical. He wanted to go into music. He enrolled in 1904 in the Imperial Academy of Music. He was a bit precocious. One of his private tutors was both Robert Hooks and the most famous composer of the day, Gustav Mahler. He completed a four-year course for college in only one year, and studied all of the following—piano, organ, violin, bass, trumpet, harmony, counterpoint, and composition. He received many prestigious awards, including all kinds of gold medals from that school very early on. Like I said, in his early years, Max Steiner was a virtuoso. He was a prodigy. Beginning his early career, Steiner first entered the professional world at age 15, where he wrote and conducted his first operetta, which was called The Beautiful Greek Girl. The opera did very well running in many cities, including making it all the way to Moscow. He then was invited into London to conduct Lehar's famous operetta, The Merry Widow. He stayed in London conducting there for many of the famous operetta houses, including the Adelphi, the Hippodrome, the London Pavilion, and the Blackpool Winter Gardens. In England, Steiner wrote and conducted theater productions, as well as wrote his own symphonies. But in 1914, World War I started, and he was interned as an enemy alien. Luckily, what happened is the Duke of Westminster befriended and kept him out of the detainment camps and got him exit papers to move to America, although what happened is his money was impounded. It took a little while, and literally, with only $32 to his full name, he was able to finally get into New York and get out of Europe during World War I. It's a pretty scary story, but that brings him to Broadway, and this opens up a lot of new opportunities for Steiner. Steiner soon inquires employment in New York, where he stayed for almost 15 years as a music director, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of Broadway musicals, operettas, and so forth. He actually conducted works by many famous American composers, including Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Vincent Eumann, and even George Gershwin, working as the conductor on two really big Gershwin works, the George White Scandals and then Lady Be Good. He worked as conductor and orchestrator of those works, so that's pretty amazing that he just fell in right away on Broadway with some of the greatest composers of the day of the 1920s. Steiner, in 1927, comes to Hollywood, and this starts to begin his famous career as a film composer. The one piece that brings him over is a movie called Rio Rita, which was for RKO in 1927, and he comes over to be the orchestrator and conductor of that score. Okay, now we get to Hollywood. In the early 30s, Steiner accepts a contract from RKO to become, you know, a featured film composer for that studio, and after Rio Rita and another smaller work called Dixiana, he does his first major score, which was called the Symphony of Six Million, which was in 1932 for, of course, David O. Selznick, and Steiner composed a short segment for Selznick that he liked so much that, you know, he started to put his music into the movies, and so that underscoring for Symphony of Six Million really starts to get Steiner going in Hollywood. Okay, so now we get to 1933 and his first big score that we want to take notice of, and that is King Kong, which became, you know, the epic horror movie, and this is a breakthrough score for, you know, for Steiner, and the studio bosses were initially skeptical about even having a score for King Kong, since they disliked the film's contrived special effects that were they were developing at the time, so they thought a musical score might, you know, overpower the horror in King Kong, but, you know, what happened is the producer of King Kong, Marion Cooper, really liked Steiner's score and left it in, and of course it really sets the tone for that movie, and the film quickly really establishes RKO as a great studio and Steiner as a great composer, and he goes on to score for RKO, oh my gosh, like I think about another 55 movies, including some very important ones, one being of Human Bondage, which starred Leslie Howard and Betty Davis, and that was 1934, and another movie for John Ford, the director, called The Lost Patrol. In 1935, John Ford hired Steiner to write the music for The Informer, and the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Steiner's, you know, for best score. Okay, let's move ahead. So now, around the late 30s, Steiner also gets asked to compose for Warner Brothers, and he moves over to Warner Brothers for a while, and he scores The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936, and also does another 140 films for Warner Brothers. Okay, so let's now skip ahead to, you know, what is considered his most famous score, and that would be Gone with the Wind, 1939, and in 39, Steiner was borrowed from Warner Brothers by David O. Selznick to compose Gone with the Wind, which became one of Steiner's most notable successes. Steiner was the only composer Selznick even considered to write Gone with the Wind, and Steiner was given only three months to complete the whole score for Gone with the Wind, and as you know, Gone with the Wind is an epic movie, and this led to literally Steiner working day and night to complete the score, and the composition consisted of 16 main themes, as well as over 300 musical segments, and due to this, Steiner worked literally 20-hour days to complete this, even being administered Benzedrine by a doctor to stay awake. So it became almost a dangerous affair for Steiner working on that score, because he literally, you know, worked And Steiner, you know, had to work with pre-existing scenes that were specific lengths, and Steiner kind of ignored Selznick's wishes to just use all the traditional Civil War themes to compose an actual new score. Now, in Gone with the Wind, Max Steiner does quote a few Civil War pieces like Dixie, but overall it's a completely original score, okay? And the score worked so well, it established Gone with the Wind as, you know, ranking as number two as, you know, number two movie of all time, so that's pretty amazing. So that score is a must to look at for those in this class, to look at Max Steiner's score for that. Alas, Gone with the Wind came out the same year as The Wizard of Oz, which had a musical score by the, you know, composer Harold Arlen and lyrics by Yip Harburg, and that was the score that won for best, you know, musical score of that year. So, you know, that was unfortunate because Steiner really should have received an Oscar for Gone with the Wind. We already talked about some other nominated scores for Oscars, like The Letter, 1940, Sergeant York, 41, Casablanca, 42, now Voyager, 42. Off-genre, Max Steiner did score a few Western movies that are worth looking at. One is Dodge City, 1939, Oklahoma Kid, 1939, and The Adventures of Mark Twain, 1944, and They Died with Their Boots, 1941, and The Searchers, 1956. His most notable later work was A Summer Place, and the theme to A Summer Place became a big pop hit of the 1950s, mostly noted to be orchestrated in a cover version by Percy Faith. So that's a work that you would want to know. A little bit about his method of composing. Steiner explained that in early days of sound, producers avoided underscoring music behind dialogue, feeling that the audience would wonder where the music was coming from. As a result, he noted that they began to add a little music here and there to support love scenes or silent sequences. But in scenes where music might be expected, such as the nightclub, ballroom, or theater, the orchestra fit in more naturally and was used more often. However, because half of the music was recorded on the set, Steiner said it led to a great deal of inconvenience and cost when scenes were later edited because the scores would often be ruined. As recording technology improved during this period, he was able to record the music and sync it to the film and can change the score after the film was edited. Steiner explained his own typical method of scoring this way. So this is Steiner's words. When a picture is finished and finally edited, it is turned over to me. Then I time it, not by a stopwatch, however, as many do. I have the film put through a special measuring machine and then a cue sheet created, which gives me the exact time to do a split second in which an action takes place or a word is spoken. While these cues sheets are being made, I begin to work on the themes for the different characters and scenes, but without regard for the required time. During this period, I also digest what I have seen and try to plan the music for this picture. There might be scenes that is played a shade too slow or a shade too fast, and then I can adjust that at a later time. Perhaps the music can clarify a character's emotions, such as intense suffering or a romantic longing. Steiner often publishes instincts in his own reasoning in creating film scores. For example, the sweeping theme we hear as the main theme for Gone with the Wind and so forth. So there's a little bit about Steiner. Steiner loved to think also in terms of the character development and how the music would affect the feeling we get from a character. For example, he did a score for Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, 1950. For the physically crippled heroine, Laura, Steiner had wanted to capture the vulnerability of her fragileness, but also her obsession with these delicate little glass pieces. So the music actually does have a glassy quality. He uses things like vibraphone, celeste, and triangle to get this kind of glassy, icy effect that reflects not only the scene with the menagerie, but also the character of Laura. So these are kind of things that we hear in Steiner is using themes that reflect the character. For example, Laura's brother in that movie is sort of a soldier, kind of big, you know, macho guy type. And so then Steiner uses sort of this bluesy, burlesque music that is more good-hearted and good-natured and a little sexy for Laura's brother. So we see these contrasts in the musical scoring for characters, and that's something Matt Steiner was known for. We also see underscoring for specific scenes. Like, here's some examples. In King Kong, you know, King Kong is in love with Fei Rei's character, and we see through the music this idea of both terrorism of the King Kong character, but also tenderness, and the music kind of draws us into both of that. For example, in the murder scene at the beginning of the movie The Letter with Bette Davis, we see the music crescendo to, you know, a pitch at the murder. These are just different things we see in music. In, for example, The Big Sleep, which is a movie he scored, which is, of course, the vehicle for Bogart and McCall, you know, we get sort of a claustrophobic feeling in that, and we have dense strings and a lot of brass for that movie, for example. You know, so these are just kind of things that Steiner was known for. Okay, a little bit about his personal life. Matt Steiner married a couple of times. He married Audrey von Lue April 27, 1927, but they divorced in December of 33. Then he married the concert harpist Louise Kloss in 1936, and they had a son named Ron, but they divorced in 1946. In 47, Max married Lynette Blair, and by the way, then Ron died in 62, and Matt Steiner died of congestive heart failure in Hollywood at age 83. And Matt Steiner, for those who are interested, is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. Okay, great. So there's just a little bit of background on Matt Steiner. For those in my film course here, what you're going to want to do is watch, as you start this class, at least two, if not three, films by every composer I'm lecturing on. So I will expect students for Matt Steiner here to look at specifically Gone with the Wind needs to be one of them, and the other two I would suggest would be King Kong and maybe one of the Bette Davis movies like Now Voyage or would be a good one to look at. Okay, thank you for joining us. This is James Spencer for History of Film Scores LCM. Thanks again.