P a r t   2

Music Connection Part 2: More Austrian and German film music composers.

C o m p o s e r s

Austrian and German Film Composers (2)

Hans Julius Salter (1896-1994)
Salter was a prolific Austrian film music composer and music director. Born in Vienna, Salter studied music there and became a respected director of the city's famous Volksoper, later moving to the State Opera in Berlin. After 17 years working for the German film studio Ufa, Salter came to the US in 1937 and eventually composed scores for some 150 Hollywood movies, with several Academy Award nominations. In the 1950s Salter also began working in television, composing music for series such as “Laramie” and “The Virginian.” Salter retired in 1966 after Beau Geste. (See more Salter films.)

   WEB LINK > Hans Salter - IMDb

Max Steiner (1888-1971)
The Austrian Maximilian Raoul Steiner was the film music composer for some of history's greatest films, including Gone With the Wind, Casablanca and The Caine Mutiny. In all, Steiner won three Academy Awards and 22 Oscar nominations for his musical work on over 300 films. Steiner was only 26 when he began working as the orchestra director for the Ziegfield Follies in New York in 1914, but then the child prodigy had only been 16 when he staged his first vaudeville production in Vienna. He came from a well-to-do musical family whose friends included people like Richard Strauss and Jacques Offenbach. Steiner studied at the Vienna Imperial Academy of Music, graduating at the young age of 13.

He had worked briefly in London and Paris before going to the U.S. After 15 years in New York, Steiner was drawn to Hollywood by the dawning of the sound era. His film career began in 1929 at RKO. Breaking away from the common practices of the day (that reflected the old silent-movie days), Steiner saw the need for a cohesive film score that was not just a patchwork of compositions, sometimes not even from the same composer. He became a pioneer in developing musical elements and leitmotivs that were linked to characters and settings in a movie. Those elements were then cleverly woven into a complete musical tapestry – a unified film score. Following this new formula, Steiner's music played an important role in the success of early sound films such as the special-effects hit King Kong in 1933. Steiner also liked to use indigenous folkloric music to reflect the locale of a film. A good example is the Irish flavor of the memorable score he did for John Ford's The Informer (1935).

Steiner also served as the musical director for many films, most notably five of the nine Fred Astaire-Ginger Roger musicals that appeared between 1933 and 1939 – which would be Steiner's last projects for RKO before he switched to Warner Brothers. Working with fellow Austrian Erich Korngold, Steiner put his brand on the “Warner sound” and composed the classic Warner Brothers opening fanfare music.

As is often the case, Steiner won no Oscar for his best-known and longest film score (Gone With the Wind), nor did he get one for the now-classic Casablanca. But he did win Academy Awards for his scores for The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944). He was nominated 22 other times. The Max Steiner Collection is held in the Brigham Young University Film Music Archives. (See link below.)

   WEB LINK > Max Steiner - IMDb
   WEB LINK > The Max Steiner Collection

Ernst Toch (1887-1954)
Austrian composer. Toch came to America in 1934 after a year in England, where he composed music for three films. In the US Toch taught at the University of Southern California and composed film music for Columbia, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox until 1945 – often anonymously, which was not uncommon in those days. In 1949 Toch returned to Europe to live, practically unknown and contemptuous of the film industry. Despite his obscurity, much of Toch's work is equal to that of other more famous film music composers. Toch's film music includes: Heidi (1937), The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), The Ghost Breakers (1940), Address Unknown (1944, with the Austrian Mady Christians; Acad. Award nomination for Toch) and The Unseen (1945).

   WEB LINK > Ernst Toch - IMDb

Franz Waxman (Wachsmann, 1906-1967)
German film music composer who won Oscars for his scores for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). He also composed music for Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and several Billy Wilder movies, among many other classic films from 1930 to 1966.

In 1930 the piano-playing Waxman went to work at Berlin's Ufa studios where he wrote several film scores. The Jewish Waxman left Germany in 1934 after being beaten up by a gang of thugs. Following a brief exile in Paris he moved on to Hollywood where the talented musician had no trouble finding work in the film industry. - See the Waxman filmography on the next page.

   WEB LINK > Franz Waxman Bio - A biographical memoir by John W. Waxman

Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Although Weill worked almost exclusively on Broadway during the American part of his career, some of his music done in collaboration with fellow German Bertolt Brecht (1989-1956) was heard in the film The Threepenny Opera/Die Dreigroschenoper (1931). “Mack the Knife” (“Mackiemesser”) is probably the best known Weill song from that production. Two films of Weill-Maxwell Anderson musicals were also produced: Knickerbocker Holiday (1944; orig., 1938) – featuring Nelson Eddy and the popular “September Song” — and Lost in the Stars (1974), a film version of the 1949 musical. Weill, born in Dessau, Germany, became a US citizen in 1943.

Eric Zeisl (1905-1959)
Zeisl was born in Vienna on May 18, 1905. As a child, he demonstrated a desire to compose music. Against his family's wishes, he entered the Vienna State Academy at the age of fourteen. He went to Hollywood, but was a late-comer to the movies. He worked on a number of well-known films, but never received screen credit. He soon gave up film music and returned to other composition. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1959. For more on Zeisl, see the Eric Zeisl Web Page and the Eric Zeisl Archive below. (The archives contain nearly all of Zeisl's music manuscripts, as well as a vast correspondence which has been indexed and computerized for research on-line.)

   WEB LINK > Eric Zeisl Archive at UCLA
   WEB LINK > Eric Zeisl Web Page
   WEB LINK > Eric Zeisl - IMDb

Hans Zimmer (1958- )
Zimmer is the German film music composer for Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King (Academy Award, 1994), The Rock and Gladiator. For more about Zimmer and his music, see our Hans Zimmer page.

Other Austrian and German Film Music Composers

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962)
Born in Leipzig, Germany. Film scores: Hangmen Also Die (1943), None But the Lonely Heart (1944). After the HUAC hearings in 1947, Eisler was deported from the US. He later composed the East German national anthem.

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)
Born in New York City. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein, was German. Teamed with Richard Rogers, Hammerstein composed the music for many Broadway musicals that were later filmed: Show Boat (1950), Oklahoma! (1955), South Pacific (1958), The Sound of Music (1960). (See our The Sound of Music page for more.)

Werner R. Heymann (1896-1961)
Born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). In the US from 1933 to about 1950. Film scores: Ninotchka (1939), One Million B.C.* (1940), That Uncertain Feeling* (1941), To Be or Not to Be* (1942), Knickerbocker Holiday* (1945), It's In the Bag (1945).  *Academy Award nomination

Michael Hoenig (1952- )
Born in Hamburg, Germany. Film scores: Koyaanisqatsi (1983), The Blob (1988), I, Madman (1989).

Anton Karas (1906-1985)
Born in Vienna, Austria. Karas' haunting zither theme for The Third Man (1949) is a vital element of this classic British-American film.

Tangerine Dream
A German group whose electronic music was used in the films Thief (1981) and Risky Business (1983).

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