The music behind Hollywood's golden age

It’s impossible to imagine Hollywood’s golden age without the gifts of the Jewish émigrés who fled Europe in the Thirties. First of all, there were the directors: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder. But there were also the composers, who made an indelible mark on the art of film scoring – and in many ways brought it to a zenith. This was music designed to fill the movie palaces of old – and the films – with the bursting emotional impact the studios demanded. This year’s 59th Prom will prove it can also fill the Albert Hall.

At this same venue, Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, had an on-camera role in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), conducting the orchestra that will cue the shooting of an ambassador. Herrmann was the American-born son of Russian Jews, but the credits for Hitchcock’s pre-Fifties work are a roll-call of other key musical talent from that era, many of them émigrés.

The German Franz Waxman (1906-1967), with his gift for the ominous, worked with Hitchcock four times: on his breakthrough score for Rebecca (1940), and then Suspicion (1941), The Paradine Case (1947) and Rear Window (1954). The last opens with jazzy inconsequence – it’s light, summer’s day music, lulling us into letting our guard down. But Waxman knew how to send chills down your spine too – listen to his immortal score for James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), with the famous three-note motif for the Bride, rising an octave and then descending a minor second.

^{A young Franz Waxman in the Thirties. Photo: Rex}

Hungary’s Miklós Rózsa (1907-1995) composed the main theme for Spellbound (1945), his sole Hitchcock score but a highly strung marvel, worthy of its own Academy Award. He’d nab two more for George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947) and William Wyler’s remake of Ben-Hur (1959), for which he supplied two-and-a-half hours of fanfare, heroism, thrills and pathos – a marathon to put even Mahler to shame. Through his career, Rózsa insisted on maintaining what he called his own “double life” by continuing to write pure concert music too. He was the epitome of the distinguished European composer at large in Hollywood. Where his contemporaries adapted to the tasks at hand, often producing music as American-sounding as the Americans, the sound of Hungary in Rózsa’s work never quite went away. As late as The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), he was incorporating elements of his marvellously forlorn violin concerto, originally composed for Jascha Heifetz.

^{Alfred Hitchcock making a cameo appearance in Strangers on a Train with (left) Farley Granger.}

The Russian Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979), though not featured in this Prom, was another key Hitchcock collaborator, on Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953) and Dial M for Murder (1954), before Herrmann became Hitchcock’s default choice from The Trouble with Harry (1955) onwards. Meanwhile the adventurous spirit of Austrian-born Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was clearly better deployed elsewhere – specifically, in the swashbucklers of Errol Flynn, eight of which Korngold scored. Brassy and bright, his music for the likes of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940) gave the movies a giddy edge of daring. Hounded out of Europe by anti-Semitism, Korngold had an unhappy time in the United States, struggling to regain his pedigree as a classical composer once he was deemed to have polluted it with film assignments. He died neglected on both fronts, but posthumous appreciation of his work won a final battle: he became the first great standard-bearer for bringing film music into the concert halls.

^{Max Steiner composed the scores for 300 feature films. Photo: Redferns.}

For prestige romanticism, it was hard to beat another Austrian, Max Steiner (1888-1971), whose statistics are pretty remarkable. Between 1939 and 1942, he scored Gone With the Wind (1939), The Letter (1940), Sergeant York (1941), Now, Voyager (1942) and Casablanca (1942), among dozens of others. These alone would have added up to a distinguished career, but Steiner is credited on an astonishing 300 features, some 140 of these for Warner Bros, where he remained as in-house composer for 30 years. He received 24 Oscar nominations, winning three.

Eighteen of Steiner’s scores were for Bette Davis pictures, placing him at the melodic heart of what were called “women’s pictures”, but he’s often referred to more generally as the father of film music, thanks to his pioneering work on early Thirties pictures such as Symphony of Six Million (1932) and King Kong (1933). A champion of restraint as well as a lavish melodist, he famously resisted Selznick’s pressure to fill Gone With the Wind with a greatest hits classical repertoire, arguing that only a fully tailored score would extract emotional nuance from every scene. In getting his way, he won a landmark victory for the medium.

Prom 59: the Hollywood Rhapsody Prom is at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday 26 August at 7.30pm. It will be broadcast live on Radio 3.