CHAPTER 7
While so much attention has been given to the experiments of the early twentieth century, something else happened during the World War II period that inadvertently kept the continuum of thousands of years of musical development alive, even as a small group of composers were working hard to break with it.
Hitler was making it impossible for Jewish composers and musicians to work in Germany in 1933, and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was organizing new ways to promulgate “good German music”—with Wagner as a prime source of inspiration. The doors were closing fast for Jewish composers in Germany and its ever-expanding Third Reich precisely as they were opening for a new medium that immediately needed composers to write great dramatic orchestral music on a Wagnerian scale: the talking pictures of Hollywood.
JEWISH COMPOSERS—AND WAGNER’S THEORIES—TRIUMPH
Wagner’s nineteenth-century dream of music drama that was both intimate and epic in scale, would transcend the limitations of theatrical design, and achieve the absolute synchronization of music with gesture was becoming a reality in Los Angeles, California. Motion pictures would of course shift Wagner’s balance between music and image, but by 1933 American engineers would solve the challenge of talking pictures with an orchestral accompaniment and make Wagner’s most complicated stage requirements possible.
On the one hand, Wagner’s stage descriptions appear to be an intimate play of emotions—something like a screenplay—as in this short section at the end of the second scene in Act I of Die Walküre:
Sieglinde stands awhile, undecided and thoughtful. [8 bars of music] She turns slowly and with hesitating steps towards the storeroom. [8 bars of music] There she again pauses and remains standing, lost in thought, with half averted face. [12 bars of music] With quiet resolution she opens the cupboard, fills a drinking horn, and shakes some spices into it from a box. [6 bars of music] She then turns her eyes on Siegmund so as to meet his gaze, which he keeps unceasingly fixed on her. [4 bars of music] She perceives Hunding watching them and turns immediately to the bedchamber. [2 bars of music] On the steps she turns once more, looks yearningly at Siegmund and indicates with her eyes, persistently and with eloquent earnestness, a particular spot on the ash-tree’s trunk. [12 bars of music] Hunding starts and drives her from the room with a violent gesture. [2 bars of music] With a last look at Siegmund, she goes into the bed chamber, and closes the door after her. [4 bars of music]
Significantly, the musical elements that underscore this scene are specific motifs associated with woe, love, the magic sword, and Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding. And while Wagner’s stage descriptions can tell his singers precisely what the composer expected when they were not singing—where to look, how to stand, how to listen—he also created stage requirements that would be impossible to achieve more than 150 years after he imagined them—except in the movies—as he does here in the transition into the last scene of Act III of Siegfried:
With one stroke he hews the spear in two pieces from which a flash of lightning shoots up towards the rocky heights, where the ever-brightening flames become visible. A loud thunderclap, which quickly dies away, accompanies the stroke. The pieces of the spear fall at the Wanderer’s feet. He quietly picks them up. The growing brightness of the clouds, which continually sink lower, meets Siegfried’s sight. He puts his horn to his lips and plunges into the waving fire which, flowing down from the heights, spreads over the foreground. Siegfried, who is soon out of sight, seems to be ascending the mountain . . .
Although motion pictures were invented in the last years of the nineteenth century, technological developments in the early twentieth century transformed a curiosity into an art form that proved to be revolutionary. Music was always part of the experience with silent movies. It masked the sound of the projector and had the curious ability to make the visual storytelling seem organic. It made the constant use of editing and cutting from various points of view within a scene appear to be seamless.
During World War I, the American phone company AT&T, and its manufacturing subsidiary Western Electric, developed a system of recording and sound reproduction that used amplifiers made from vacuum tubes and electronic, horn-shaped loudspeakers. With this technology, recorded music and sound could be heard in large theaters for the first time. After the war various companies made other technological improvements, so that by 1930 every film company was making talking pictures, and by 1933, with the release of King Kong, composer Max Steiner (1888–1971) demonstrated to even the most resistant film producer that a full symphonic score could turn a silly movie that starred a very fake-looking miniature monkey puppet into a terrifying fantasy that could entertain millions of people and make a lot of money. The new horn loudspeaker would also be an important component for large political rallies throughout the world, where thousands could hear the voices of those seeking and demanding power.
For many young composers, this was an alternative avant-garde, based not on style but on technology. They could write music that would be eternally fixed in its performance and its functionality, something that had never happened before. Music had always depended on performers to interpret it. And while some people thought the experiments with tonality and rhythm were the cutting edge of new music, others saw a brand-new way of creating music and drama in sound film as even more exciting. According to Helen Korngold, it was also about control. Referring to her father-in-law in 2020, she recalled, “He was a maestro and controlled everything in the house, including re-organizing every object in his music room after the maid had moved them. With movies, his music and its performance were under his direct supervision.”
At the same time, Steiner, the son of a wealthy Jewish Viennese family, would also prove that the compositional techniques Wagner had perfected in The Ring of the Nibelung would continue to be developed by Austro-German-trained composers and their American students, all of whom—with hardly an exception—were defined as Jews by the Third Reich, though most were non-religious and some grew up in homes that had converted to Christianity in earlier years. “We saw ourselves as Germans,” goes the oft-quoted phrase. “It was Hitler who made us Jews.” The first generation to compose for Hollywood sound films were “degenerates,” their names entered on Hitler’s list of dangerous composers of illegal music.
Composing for the cinema was not considered to be a second-tier job for a composer, though it could be an entry-level one. The film studio was just another commissioning agent for new music. In the Soviet Union, for example, it was not considered a mark of lowering one’s standards, as Prokofiev and Shostakovich persuasively demonstrated. In Great Britain, composers like Arthur Bliss and William Walton were fully accepted for their film music as well as symphonies and concertos. Bliss was appointed Master of the Queen’s Musick in 1953, and Walton composed the coronation marches for both King George VI in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. As we shall see, only the World War II refugee composers who succeeded in Hollywood would find their “serious” reputations destroyed by their association with—and their enormous success in—the new medium once, in the post-war years, it was determined that writing music for Hollywood was intrinsically bad (while composing music for Soviet, British, Italian, and French films was good).
MOVIES AND MUSIC
It was during the twentieth century that movies became a worldwide phenomenon—the ultimate collaborative medium for storytelling, one that made use of historical models as well as emerging technologies: visual, aural, and, ultimately, immersive. Just as earlier composers had found a life in the church, the theater, and subsequently in the concert halls and grand opera houses of the ever-growing urban centers, movies became a new source of music in the twentieth century. It is no wonder that so much young, creative energy turned away from the traditional classical music venues to write for and co-create movies. Equally important was the fact that everyone went to the movies: classical music aficionados as well as those who never went to a concert or to the opera.
Motion pictures became a reality during the 1890s through the genius of a number of photographers, chemists, and inventors, though two French brothers with an apt last name, Auguste and Louis Lumière, brought the new invention to a large public beginning with the screening of ten short films in Paris on December 28, 1895. Once it was determined that movies could tell stories, music was added, played on a piano, an organ, or sometimes by an orchestra. By the late 1920s, music was recorded and synchronized onto the film—and there it has remained ever since.
At first, the music was improvised. Then books of classical music themes as well as new ones, categorized according to emotions, were sold to the pianists and organists who found jobs in this new market. And soon enough, full original scores were being composed specifically for important “silent” films.
While a living theatrical tradition was proceeding in the great theaters in the cities of Europe and America, this new medium, which had vast potential for unprecedented intimacy and grandeur, could also tell its stories anywhere there was a darkened room, a screen, and electricity. Not surprisingly, a number of famous composers who wrote for the new medium, among them Camille Saint-Saëns, Pietro Mascagni, and Richard Strauss, were opera composers.
It was new and it was exciting. As already noted, writing for this new medium must have carried with it the same frisson that attracted young composers to the possibility of writing experimental music during more or less the same period. Writing music for the cinema, however, opened up tremendous challenges and possibilities for composers with talent, and instead of a private club with a few hundred members to hear your new music, there was the potential of an enormous, worldwide audience for your work.
One of the crucial pieces in the puzzle of twentieth-century classical music is the place assigned to movie music, or, if one wants to be careful and avoid fake pejoratives associated with the word “movie,” music for the cinema. Once the technology advanced so that music, image, and the singing and speaking voice could be synchronized—in the early 1930s—the music was composed by those trained in the most demanding and prestigious conservatories of Europe and, to a lesser extent, America. It was the greatest emerging platform for young composers.
What interests us is not what makes movie music different, but what connects it to the very heart of all music. It is not particularly useful to describe movie music as a genre because film is simply a delivery system for music, and the music it delivers is as varied as music itself. However, if one wants to categorize music in terms of where it was originally meant to be heard—a concert hall, an opera house, a theater—then can we talk about movie music as a separate entity. The problem with that line of categorization inevitably gets us into arguments such as whether Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is an opera or a musical, whether Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps is ballet music, or whether Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was ever meant to be heard in a concert hall.
One of the results of the twentieth century’s preoccupation with strict requirements of modernity in new classical music was that many composers preferred to find artistic freedom in the unlikeliest place in the arts: commercial cinema. In spite of the requirements of timings and of multiple bosses (and the total lack of job security), it was/is in the movies that many found a home. And a composer never had to worry about a bad review because usually he would be ignored in the press by serious music critics. It was only at the annual Oscar ceremony that there was honor and notoriety to be found, the composers’ names proclaimed for all to hear. Otherwise, they worked in relative anonymity—which was quite different from contemporary classical composers, whose names were promulgated on their scores and in concert programs and recordings.
What is often described as “movie music” or “Hollywood” music is a certain style of orchestral music that was being written at the time that sound films were invented, that is, the classical music of the late 1920s and 1930s. Strauss, as already noted, was very much alive and writing tuneful and complex tonal operas, as were many Italian, Russian, German, and Austrian composers of symphonic and operatic music, such as Korngold, Rachmaninoff, Puccini, Prokofiev, and Respighi. It is a style of music brought directly to the Hollywood studios by Europeans. To those who attended concerts, it was simply music. It was what was taught in the conservatories of Europe, Russia, and America, and there is nothing particularly remarkable or separate about it as a style. As with any style, what should be remarkable is what an artist does within it: how it is tweaked, balanced, made unique in some way, transcending its implicit limitations and doing whatever job it is meant to do.
Equally important to this narrative is that with the aging of the first generation of European-trained Hollywood composers, their hugely Romantic music morphed into a much leaner style of movie music, composed primarily by the American-born-and-trained musicians who were, nevertheless, mentored by their European idols. These include Elmer Bernstein (studied with Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Juilliard’s Henrietta Michelson), Jerry Goldsmith (studied at the University of Southern California with Miklós Rózsa, and with refugee master teacher Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco), Bernard Herrmann (studied at New York University and Juilliard), Leonard Rosenman (studied with Schoenberg, Sessions, and Luigi Dallapiccola), and Alex North (studied at the Curtis Institute, Juilliard, and the Moscow Conservatory). Meanwhile, the elder statesmen of film scoring were themselves evolving in the normal way, adapting to their new environment and responding to music they were hearing through recordings, broadcasts, and from their colleagues—world music (“ethnic” music), popular music, jazz, concert music, and the avant-garde.
During the twentieth century, some composers accepted the concept of separate styles for concert music and film music. John Williams’s DNA is difficult to find in his concertos, much to the surprise of many of his fans. Williams embraces an amorphous non-tonal language free of the exuberant melodic gift he shows in his beloved film scores. Ennio Morricone had the same view. When he began conducting concerts of his music, the first half was devoted to his experimental avant-garde compositions. The second half of the program was excerpts from his film scores. The public soon knew what to expect and started showing up after the intermission. When I asked Morricone why he composed in two styles, he responded “out of respect for the genres.” In other words, concert music (or “absolute” music, that is, music that is not “about” anything) was non-tonal and film music was still based on big melodies and dramatic development that help tell a story and describe place and time.
The overall question regarding the viability of any dramatic music is whether the style (or musical language itself) has enough variety and flexibility to tell many kinds of stories or set the listener on complex emotional journeys. Music that developed in Europe has shown a remarkable capacity to represent things to its listeners. It describes emotional states. Around 1600, for example, books of new musical compositions inevitably began with a foreword containing passionate arguments by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Giulio Caccini as to how best to express emotion through music and poetry. European music was never a neutral aural canvas. Centuries after the Greeks first wrote about this essential aspect of music, audiences in Europe responded to a new symphony by Haydn by naming it after what they “saw” as a result of what they heard. And so there are symphonies by Haydn with nicknames like “The Hen” or “The Clock.”
As instrumental music became more descriptive, composers began openly “telling stories” and giving their works specific titles—not the nicknames audiences appended to their works. In the nineteenth century, Hector Berlioz created dramatic symphonies, and Franz Liszt invented a new term for stand-alone musical works (with a title) that told a story in one movement. His “symphonic poems” were a clear demonstration of the ability of music to tell a story without words, scenery, or, indeed, a theater. The theater was in the audience’s mind.
In addition to symphonic works, operas, and ballets, there was a significant classical music tradition, beginning as far back as Haydn, to accompany spoken plays. These productions, like operas, began with an overture to set the tale in motion. There was music to accompany scenic changes and to create the mood, and there was music played beneath spoken dialogue. These sections were called melodramas.
Music for straight plays—comic, tragic, epic, and intimate—was composed by just about every major classical composer we all know, including Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Korngold, Prokofiev, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Debussy, and, in 1948, Pierre Boulez, who wrote music for a radio play by René Char. Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Beethoven’s Egmont, and Schubert’s Rosamunde were never intended to be played in a concert hall, where we hear them today (usually merely their overtures).
What made dramatic music for a movie different from all of the above was that the music and its performance were one entity, like so-called electronic music, which was also developing in the first half of the twentieth century. A composer could use his genius for sculpting emotion at precisely the moment when a visual action took place. This was not in and of itself unique to movies. After all, dramatic ballets had choreography and music synchronized from start to finish. And, as said previously, the singers in a Wagner opera moved precisely with certain musical gestures that were described in the music—music and action were one and the same. However, with film there would be total control, achieving an optimal and repeatable result—a collaboration of action and music in an ideal visual setting.
Each year brought improved technologies and greater challenges, but also greater rewards. Composers who had mathematical ability, such as Korngold, could enjoy determining exactly how many bars of music would be needed at a certain tempo to achieve an accompaniment to a section of film passing through a projector at twenty-four frames per second. And just like other composers who were attracted to the arithmetical and mathematical applications used in twelve-tone composition, film composers could also enjoy the sheer fun—and daunting challenge—of writing to a strict template of time and intention. The great composers fulfill the requirements and transcend them—and make their music sound organic and inevitable.1
In the early days of synchronization (1927–32), Hollywood’s executives and directors thought that the only use for music would be for films in which there were songs and dances. The studios raided Broadway for composers, lyricists, and arrangers. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, Harold Arlen, and Irving Berlin were all called to the West Coast.
However, the idea of playing music under dialogue in a dramatic scene—known as underscoring—was not a consideration for most filmmakers. Indeed, it was thought that orchestral music would compete with the spoken scene and confuse the audience. Why was there an orchestra playing just off camera in the desert or on the ocean? Whether any of the Hollywood executives had ever experienced a spoken play with an orchestra in the pit is unknown, but even if they had, the “realism” of the screen would lead them to conclude that music would only add confusion to a dramatic scene in a movie.
In 1932, composer Max Steiner, the music director of RKO Pictures, was asked by producer David O. Selznick to perform the experiment of underscoring a dramatic film, based on a story by the then-famous American author Fannie Hurst called Night Bell. Steiner knew well from his youth in Vienna about the power of music to impart a larger meaning to spoken text. He also knew how music worked in the epic operas of Wagner. And he knew how Wagner’s theories of memory and musical motifs worked to tell stories over long periods of time. He had grown up in the world of epic dramas, great symphonies, and brilliant performances of the music of his time, including the operettas of Johann Strauss, Jr. that his grandfather had produced. The young Steiner, like Korngold, was familiar with both “kinds” of Strausses: Richard and Johann, Jr. (who were not related). He had tried unsuccessfully to persuade his bosses at RKO to let him underscore dramatic films, and not limit music to the “All singing! All dancing!” musicals.
With the arrival of David O. Selznick in November 1931 as RKO’s new studio chief, Steiner found a kindred spirit. According to Steven C. Smith, author of Music by Max Steiner,2 Selznick loved attending silent movies accompanied by orchestral music as a child, and the first film he greenlit was the Hurst film. Significantly, it was renamed Symphony of Six Million and its script states upfront that “the entire film is to be accompanied by a symphonic underscoring.” Throughout the script, indications of musical underscoring specified an imagined and historically unprecedented cinematic collaboration of spoken text, visual image, and music. “Felix is in the sunlight . . . as he raises his eyes to the light, the very picture of a man reborn, the underscoring music rises to a climactic finale.”
Steiner began composing as the daily rushes came in and before the film was anywhere near finished. The experience would change his life and, arguably, the course of symphonic music forevermore. Symphony of Six Million is a melodramatic potboiler about a young Jewish surgeon who abandons his family and ghetto neighborhood in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a successful doctor for the rich and famous on Park Avenue. When his father requires emergency surgery on a brain tumor, his mother begs him to perform the operation (“Don’t ask me to do it, Ma!”). He relents (“God will guide your fingers, my son!”), and his father dies on the operating table. The death scene of Gregory Ratoff, with its close-ups of scalpels, blood pressure machines, and furtive glances, made the greatest point for the use of music. No one thought twice about hearing an orchestra play during scenes in a hospital. Music and silence held the audience’s attention and the world noticed.3
Released a few months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Symphony of Six Million was an enormous critical success, with Steiner’s underscoring noted in the reviews. For his next film, Bird of Paradise, Selznick wrote to Steiner, “For my money, you can start on the first frame and finish on the last.” Author Smith did the math. “Only two of the film’s 82 minutes are without score.”
Soon, every Hollywood studio was busy creating and expanding their music departments—each of which employed its own symphony orchestra. By 1940, Warner Bros. was releasing fifty motion pictures in a fifty-two-week period—all of which had new music. A war raged in Europe and Hollywood’s composers were desperately working to get their European families out, while in a new country and in a city filled with sunlight and the scent of orange groves, the refugee composers wrote music—German music.
Steiner went on to compose over 300 orchestral film scores, some lasting only a few minutes (main title, a few transitions, and end title) and some lasting well over an hour (with Gone with the Wind from 1939 lasting three hours—longer than Das Rheingold). Steiner absolutely knew the source of his art. “The idea originated with Wagner. If Wagner had lived in this century he would have been the Number One film composer.”
Just as Wagner had composed a theme for Siegfried and another for his sword, Steiner composed unique motives for Tara, Mammie, and Melanie. He knew exactly how to use the audience’s memories to create a sense of time, recollection, and pathos, just as Wagner did in the myriad musical quotations in his funeral music for Siegfried in Götterdämmerung.
Steiner, for example, first announces “Tara’s Theme” at the very start of the main title to Gone with the Wind. The words “Gone with the Wind” pass from right to left, and the melody, which is based on the rhythm of those words, is implanted in the viewer’s mind. Approximately ten minutes later, the melody is linked to the plantation, Tara, and the land, when Scarlett O’Hara’s father tells her of its importance. The melody, returning for the first time in the drama and played on the English horn, underscores his speech. When he has finished, the full orchestra plays the heroic melody for a mere twenty seconds as the camera pulls back to reveal a father and daughter in silhouette, beside a mighty oak tree and surrounded by the verdant land. The music has continued the father’s emotions much as Wagner makes his greatest statements after a character has stopped singing.
The Tara theme is not heard again for over an hour, when Scarlett returns to her home after the devastation of the Civil War. Little snippets of the theme, again linked to the plangent sound of an English horn, are interspersed with melodic memories of the happier pre-war days, while the basic musical palette is of complex and morose Wagnerian chromaticism. Scarlett’s mother is dead, Tara has been pillaged, and her father has gone quietly mad. Only when she turns her sadness into a determination to do whatever it takes (“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”) does the theme return to its first iteration heard in the main title an hour and half before. The effect of Steiner’s use of Wagner’s principles is electric and seals the heroic conclusion of the first half of the film.
Other film composers created unique themes for Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, for Gregory Peck’s psychological condition in Spellbound, for Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster and his bride (Elsa Lanchester), as well as for Gloria Swanson’s fading silent screen star in Sunset Boulevard. Steiner and his European contemporaries had experienced firsthand the effectiveness of Wagner’s synchronization technique in aligning music to gesture in the opera house and applied it to their scoring—even though their characters were speaking and not singing. Korngold, who had composed five operas in Vienna, referred to his film scores for Warner Bros. as “operas without singing” and called Puccini’s Tosca “the greatest film score ever written.”
In this sense, Wagner’s great achievement in creating coherence in dramatic music can be seen as the direct antecedent of writing film music. This is what Steiner meant: it can set a mood, define a character, and illuminate the structure of a narrative that is told over a significant period of emotional and actual time, with every physical gesture and scenic demand in a synchrony of sound and image to tell its story.
Thus, beginning in 1933—and because of the immense success of Steiner’s use of German orchestral traditions of underscoring dramas and operas—an entire industry that required new symphonic music beckoned. European-trained Jewish wunderkinds heard the call and took a chance at survival for themselves and their immediate families in a new country, thousands of miles away from their homes:
—From Hungary, a child prodigy who could read music before he could read words, Miklós Rózsa, who was a straight-A student at Leipzig’s demanding conservatory, would emigrate and compose ninety-eight film scores, including Spellbound, Double Indemnity, Ben-Hur, and El Cid, along with orchestral and chamber works for the concert hall.
—From Germany, the twenty-seven-year-old Franz Waxman—rigorously trained in Dresden, who earned money upon graduation by working in a bank while moonlighting as a jazz musician in Berlin—came to America with his friend Billy Wilder and composed The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Waxman was immediately appointed head of music at Universal Studios. He would go on to compose 150 scores for the movies, including his two back-to-back Oscar winners for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun. It was Waxman’s ability to mix jazz with the harmonic world of Mahler and Strauss that made him the perfect composer to portray Grace Kelly (Rear Window), Katherine Hepburn (Philadelphia Story), and Elizabeth Taylor (A Place in the Sun).
—In St. Petersburg, the brilliant Dimitri Tiomkin was studying piano with Felix Blumenfeld—who was also Vladimir Horowitz’s teacher—and composition with Russia’s greatest professor of composition, Alexander Glazunov—who also taught Shostakovich and mentored Prokofiev—when he discovered American popular music. One night at a student hangout just off campus, the seventeen-year-old Tiomkin came across a page of a contemporary American song printed in a magazine—the 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He knew he had to find a way out of Russia, toward the source of this new and vital music. He could not have known at that time about Irving Berlin, who was born in Siberia, came to New York City as a five-year-old in 1893, and assumed an invented name because his real one, Israel Baline, was misheard on the telephone by a music publisher. Tiomkin spent time in Berlin, where he studied with its greatest composition teacher, the Italian futurist Ferruccio Busoni, and went to Paris, where he played the solo part in the European premiere of George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto (with Gershwin in the audience) at the Opéra in 1928.
Tiomkin’s first significant Hollywood film score was for Alice in Wonderland (1933). He would win four Academy Awards for his scores and his songs (along with 22 nominations). It is perhaps a little-known irony that while another Slavic-American Jew, Aaron Copland (whose parents came from Lithuania) was composing “fake” cowboy ballets in New York (Rodeo, Billy the Kid), the Russian Jew Tiomkin was composing “fake” cowboy music for John Wayne movies such as Red River, along with High Noon and the theme from Rawhide, on the West Coast. (Asked why he was so good at invoking the vast spaces of the American West since he had no experience with it as a Russian, he famously said, “A steppe is a steppe.”)
—From Poland came another wunderkind: Bronisław Kaper, who studied composition at the Warsaw Conservatory. In Berlin he befriended the Austrian Walter Jurmann, and together they journeyed to America, where they wrote songs such as “San Francisco (Open Your Golden Gate)” and the songs for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. Kaper would win an Academy Award for Lili and compose the music for Mutiny on the Bounty and Auntie Mame.
—From Vienna came Erich Wolfgang Korngold, perhaps the most lauded of all. Fascinated by the new medium of sound pictures, Korngold at first spent half of the year in Vienna, composing his concert and theater works—even as his music was being banned in Germany—and winters in Hollywood, which also improved the health of his younger son, George, who suffered from recurring lung ailments. In 1938, when he was in Los Angeles, he learned that Hitler had commanded Austria’s chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, to visit him. Schuschnigg was presented with an ultimatum, to hand over power to Austrian Nazis, and informed that the annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) was an inevitability. The Korngolds could not return home, and the challenge was to get his parents and their older son, Ernst, out before the borders closed. Ernst and his grandparents got the last train out of Vienna, which was so crowded the teenager had to sit on the lap of a Nazi soldier. Once in Los Angeles, Ernst attended North Hollywood High School, where he graduated as valedictorian and subsequently joined the Marines.
These Jewish composers, who rose to the very top of their classes in the greatest conservatories of Europe, would all make use of Wagner’s leitmotif technique and the Wagnerian discovery of the power of memory in telling long-form music dramas and comedies. The greatest irony is that they not only brought Wagnerian aesthetics to the non-opera-going public, they also “taught” the world classical European music—its symbols and its lexicon—while expanding it in their individual ways. No one ever objected to the fact that Steiner’s score to Gone with the Wind is a Wagnerian tone poem that occasionally quotes a few famous popular melodies from the American South. It is simply heard as music. As Leonard Bernstein once said, “Millions more people heard their music than ever would have, had they composed chamber music, a symphony or an opera.”4
THE THEATER OF THE MIND
Wagner and Wagnerism did not emerge in a vacuum, of course. Given the writings of our Greek forefathers, music has always had a narrative propensity and an ability to link itself to physical objects, emotions, and other senses. Did composers in the pre-cinema era who were not specifically writing for the stage expect the listener to provide a narrative understanding when experiencing their music? If so, was there an interpretation that was generally understood or was it a personal translation . . . or both? The German musicologist Anno Mungen is a leading academic investigating “pre-film music” in Europe and the United States. Mungen’s research has discovered enlightening information in the books and newspaper advertisements of the nineteenth century linking instrumental music to visual imagery.5
For example, in February 1812, the Vienna premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto (the “Emperor”) was performed in the Hoftheater accompanied by two tableaux vivants.6 (Or is it the other way around: two tableaux vivants were seen accompanied by Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto?) Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny was the soloist, and Beethoven was very much alive and certainly present. For the first movement, a tableau vivant of Raphael’s Queen of Sheba Paying Homage to Solomon was depicted by living actors, frozen in position.
Later, Poussin’s Swooning of Esther was presented. We cannot be sure that the music and the images were performed simultaneously, but the fact that the music was framed by visual art is important to our understanding of the affect of Beethoven’s music in his own time. The Beethoven concerto has only one break in it, and the second and third movements are played without interruption. This could lead to the possibility that the two paintings were seen during the performance, with the pause used to re-set the stage.
By 1870 there had been several attempts to illustrate Beethoven’s symphonies in Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, and London. (Remember that Walt Disney did much the same the thing—and to general derision by “purists”—seventy years later with Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony in Fantasia.) Original music for tableaux vivants was composed by Otto Nicolai, Fanny Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Leoš Janáček, Jean Sibelius, and Richard Strauss. Strauss’s four pieces composed for the 1892 wedding of Grand Duke Carl Alexander to accompany tableaux vivants were subsequently played in the concert hall (1897), thereby demonstrating Strauss’s opinion that the music could work with or without the images. Some of this music was then recycled for scenes in his 1925 silent film score to Der Rosenkavalier, all of which shows a fluidity in function and purpose by the composer himself.
In the early nineteenth century, a popular form of visual entertainment in the great cities and courts were dioramas, with a cinema-like screen in a dark room showing an imaginary place accompanied by sounds and music, like grating glaciers in a view of the Alps, or an interior of a basilica accompanied by organ music. “Pleoramas” were moving panoramas. Here, the changing imagery might be of a trip down the Rhine, in which the audience sat in a stationary boat while painted, moving scenes on either side—unrolled by synchronized operators—gave the impression of a journey. This was accompanied by horn calls. Wagner would certainly have been aware of this audiovisual entertainment when he composed Siegfried’s “Rhine Journey” for his Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
It should be noted that this kind of entertainment can still be experienced today in Disneyland’s “Star Tours—The Adventures Continue” and in Laguna Beach, California—just south of the original Disneyland Park—at the annual Pageant of the Masters, which presents a series of tableaux vivants accompanied by a live, original orchestral accompaniment. This old European tradition, transplanted to southern California in 1933, probably goes unnoticed by those who disdain Disney theme parks and think of the pageant as merely an example of southern California kitsch. If it is kitsch, then it is old European kitsch, otherwise known as its traditional culture.
Even more important is how Europeans defined the word picture in the nineteenth century. First of all, it was not just an optical phenomenon. It was a product of one’s imagination that was the result of certain means, such as color and perspective, but also sounds and smells. Thus it is possible to consider the possibility that people heard pictures when they experienced a Beethoven symphony and that, equally important, Beethoven intended them to.
His “Pastoral” Symphony (1808) is an overt declaration of his visual intension. (Vivaldi had done much the same thing in his Four Seasons, composed around 1717.) Beethoven breaks open the symphonic form by giving visual descriptions of each movement—much as he did in terms of musical structure with his Fifth Symphony, which used a rhythmic motif that runs through its score and thereby breaks the wall between movements, and his Ninth Symphony, which added voices to affix explicit poetic images to reinforce its implicit meaning.
We know that there are descriptions of Schumann’s Second Symphony from the mid-nineteenth century that describe it as a novel, but one based on feelings rather than words (the German word being Gefühlsnovelle). And so it is just possible that musicologists, led by Mungen’s important work, will come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as non-descriptive or non-narrative music in Western culture because there was always a series of images, emotional and pictorial, going on in people’s minds when they heard symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets. The retired great opera coach/accompanist Susanna Lemberskaya was instructed by the faculty at the conservatory in Kyiv (Kiev) to “make up your own story” for every piano sonata you learned so that when you played it, it was a personal narrative you were “telling.”
Perhaps, then, movies can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people’s minds, rather than movie music being a musical response to or description of the visual and dramatic elements of a film. Anyone who has had the privilege of conducting Mahler’s Third Symphony cannot but “see” things when a team of snare drums plays a military marching rhythm that fades away, as if into the distance, and suddenly, in a totally different tempo, eight French horns surprisingly intone the recapitulation of the opening heroic theme, played fortissimo. It is what the movies call a cross-fade, but it could not have been achieved in movies in 1895 when Mahler imagined and composed it, because movies had only just been invented.
With this understanding of the meaning of picture, we can better comprehend the genius of Puccini in his choice of words to describe the four acts of the opera La Bohème (1896). Based on a book of short “scenes from the bohemian [that is, poor student] life,” each act of the opera is called a quadro, or picture. At the end of Quadro Terzo (Act III), Puccini indicates that the curtain begins to fall slowly during the last forty-five seconds (typically, a curtain falls in five to seven seconds). Mimì and Rodolfo are alone as the snow begins to fall. Mimì sings, “Vorrei che eterno durasse il verno!” (If only winter would last forever), and the curtain begins to fall slowly, as the two reunited lovers continue to sing. A curtain in a nineteenth-century opera house did not fall from above, like a guillotine. It closed from above and the sides, creating an ever-reduced frame through which the audience could view the stage. In other words, it was the closest thing to a close-up. Two stagehands would walk upstage of the curtain, guiding the edges of the enormously heavy curtains that were being operated by other stagehands in the wings, and with the final two chords of the act, Ta-DAH, they closed the tabs precisely with the music.7
Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini, and Strauss—theirs was the contemporary music being created during the era when the Lumière brothers took their Cinématographe Lumière on tour to Bombay (now Mumbai), London, Montreal, New York, and Buenos Aires. Classical music and the resultant moving images created in the minds of its listeners would soon be linked in the new visual medium that would carry the language of Europe’s classical music out of the concert halls and opera houses and into every corner of the world.
A generation later, the world was proceeding inexorably toward a second world war. The newly appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, would soon install the latest sound film projection equipment in his Berlin office and at his residence in Berchtesgaden, where he could show the latest movies from Hollywood. America and Germany were not yet at war, and Hollywood’s studios had thousands of European employees who oversaw the promulgation of its films. While Hitler was enjoying late-night screenings of King Kong, with its score by the Jew Max Steiner,8 Stalin had Prokofiev to score the Soviets’ greatest films, and in 1937 Mussolini was producing movies in the largest film studio in Europe, the newly created “Cinema City” (Cinecittà) in Rome.