Franz Waxman, one of Hollywood’s most distinguished composers, was born in Königshütte, Germany (later Chorzow, Poland), on December 24, 1906. While a student at the Music Academy in Dresden and later at the Conservatory of Music in Berlin, he supported his education by playing the piano in bars and restaurants. At the age of 24, he began to orchestrate and compose film music. His first major assignment was orchestrating and conducting Frederick Hollander’s score for the film The Blue Angel in 1930.
In the early 1930s, Waxman moved to Paris because of the increasingly anti-Semitic climate in Germany, and here wrote the score for Fritz Lang’s film Liliom (1933). In 1935, Waxman moved to Hollywood, as Lang had done shortly before him.
In America, he became a member of the group of European composers who migrated to Hollywood at this time to escape oppression in Europe. They included Max STEINER, Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Korngold, Alfred NEWMAN, Miklós Rózsa, and Hugo Friedhofer. Most of them were classically trained, but proved comfortable with lighter forms, especially operetta and music for the theatre. They had in common a post-Romantic musical vocabulary involving large orchestras, an adherence to tonality, and a strong sense of melody. Their music was highly programmatic, often making use of the Wagnerian leitmotiv, in which each character, place and dramatic situation is given its own particular musical idea, such as a melodic strand.
The music of these composers was often sentimental, at a time when giants such as Igor STRAVINSKY, Arnold SCHOENBERG, and Charles IVES were moving in the opposite direction. For this reason, the musical establishment found it hard to accept their work as anything more than a commercial rehash of late 19th-century models. Nevertheless, these composers did succeed in establishing the manner of writing for film that became the foundation for succeeding generations to emulate and build on. As younger composers started to explore later contemporary styles of musical composition, they never totally abandoned the basic principles laid down by Waxman and his generation.
Waxman’s first Hollywood score was for The Bnde of Frankenstein (1935), after which he was given a two-year contract with Universal Studios, followed by a seven-year contract with MGM. He composed the music for the third film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Spencer Tracy. In a very different vein, Waxman scored two classic comedies featuring Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Woman of the Year (1942). Waxman left MGM in 1943 and began working for Warner Bros. Waxman won Academy Awards for his scores for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951), as well as receiving numerous other Oscar nominations.
Waxman collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on four movies: Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), The Paradine Case (1948), and Rear Window (1954). His score for Rebecca is a good example of his typical style. It is 19th-century in inspiration, is based on a rich orchestration, makes use of leitmotiv, and although it may seem very sentimental at times, it is invariably skillful in its support of the drama.
In 1947, Waxman founded the Los Angeles Music Festival, dedicated to popularising contemporary classical music, and he remained its director until 1966. His non-film compositions included Elegy for Strings. Waxman died on February 24, 1967.
Richard Trombley
SEE ALSO: FILM MUSIC; LATE ROMANTICISM.
FURTHER READING
Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994);
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987);
Prendergast, Roy. Film Music, A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Legends of Hollywood: Franz Waxman, Vols. 1–3; Rebecca, The Silver Chalice.