Maximilian Raoul Steiner, “the father of Hollywood film music,” was born in Vienna on May 10, 1888, and proved to be a musical prodigy. He graduated from the Academy of Music in Vienna with high honours at the age of 13, and wrote his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl, in 1902. He studied with Gustav MAHLER and Robert Fuchs, and launched a career as a conductor before leaving for America in 1914, at the invitation of Florenz Ziegfeld. While working for Ziegfeld, Steiner also conducted Broadway operettas for George White and Victor HERBERT.
Steiner left New York for Hollywood in 1929 when sound films were beginning to be introduced. There at the start, he stands out among the film composers whose style dominated Hollywood cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, a group which includes Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred NEWMAN, and Miklós Rózsa.
Steiner’s compositional style was post-Romantic, with strong leanings toward a light, sentimental treatment. From his earliest scores he used music in the service of the film, helping to establish time, place, and mood. He treated film as if it were operetta. Music was used throughout the drama, not just at salient points, and related very closely to what was being shown on the screen. In doing so, he was following the style of music written to accompany silent films in the 1920s, and established this approach as the norm for Hollywood’s sound era. Steiner was also one of the first composers to use the click-track to ensure that the film’s action and music were precisely co-ordinated.
For more than two decades Steiner’s style, and that of people who followed immediately in his wake, was imitated in Hollywood. In this style, music had considerable prominence in helping the action of a film to unfold, and it was fully incorporated into the medium. It became so natural to expect music to take great prominence in a film that when, as late as 1963, Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence was made without any music, the result seemed startling and unsettling.
During the course of his illustrious career, Steiner’s film scores won him three Academy Awards, for The Informer (1935), Now Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944). The second of these scores produced a hit record for singer Dick HAYMES with the theme song “It Can’t Be Wrong.” Steiner was also nominated for a further 23 Oscars, among others for the scores of two of the most celebrated motion pictures in cinema history, Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1943). Steiner’s score for Casablanca is an effective demonstration of his characteristically emotive sound. Its rich, 19th-century orchestration adds a shimmering, dream-like quality to the film, beautifully complementing the tense and romantic action.
The lushly memorable central tune from Gone with the Wind, known as “Tara’s Theme,” was a hit twice over, firstly as an instrumental by Leroy Holmes and his orchestra, and then with lyrics by Mack David for singer Johnny Desmond, called “My Own True Love.” His 1959 score for A Summer Place produced another massive hit, when Percy Faith and his orchestra recorded the theme song.
Steiner also worked in television, where one of his most familiar themes was for the long-running courtroom drama Perry Mason. He died in Hollywood on December 28, 1971.
Richard Trombley
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSIC; OPERETTA.
FURTHER READING
Darby, W., and J. Dubois. American Film Music:
Major Composers, Techniques, and Trends 1915–90
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1997);
Marmorstein, Gary. A Hollywood Rhapsody:
Movie Music and Its Makers 1900–75
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1997);
Prendergast, Roy. Film Music: A Neglected Art
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Casablanca; Gone with the Wind;
Now Voyager:
The Film Scores of Max Steiner.