Rachmaninoff and the Hollywood Sound - March 19, 2022
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Max Steiner
Casablanca Suite
Austrian-born Maximilian Raoul Steiner was a child prodigy who became a professional composer, conductor and arranger at fifteen. After a stint in Britain, he moved to the US in 1914, first working on Broadway. In 1929, he was hired by RKO and moved to Hollywood, one of the first composers to compose scores for film. By his retirement he had scored over 300 of them, a who-is-who list of Hollywood's best.
Casablanca, the story of love, life and death in Nazi-occupied French North Africa, is considered one of filmdom's greats. Steiner's score was nominated for an Academy Award,
but lost out to The Song of Bernadette. Ironically, Casablanca's
theme
song, "As Time Goes By", was not by Steiner, but circumstances forced him to use it and he made it the
centerpiece of his score.
Other themes in the film act as Leitmotifs representing ethnic North African music
and the warring jaunty French and threatening German using their respective national anthems.
Bernard Herrmann
Suite from Psycho
The film music scene in Hollywood of the 1930s and early 40s was dominated by German and Austrian émigrés who had escaped Nazism. But by the late 1940s, American-born composers began taking over.
Born in New York to Russian émigré parents, Bernard Herrmann graduated from Juilliard and by mid-century became one of the most sought-after composers of radio, movie and TV music. He is best known for his collaboration with Orson Welles (The War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane); Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone); and most of all, Alfred Hitchcock. His last score was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
In his music for Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho, Herrmann created an eerie and relentless soundtrack. It is still regarded by movie buffs as the ultimate scary movie - and scary soundtrack. In the suite, the constant drive of the opening scene is followed by the murder scene in the shower with its screeching violin accompaniment, and ends with the closing scene.
Nino Rota
Suite from The Godfather
All but devoted movie fans pay scant attention to the credits beyond the stars and director. But great film music insinuates itself into the soul even if the composer's name doesn't have quite the cachet of Mozart or Stravinsky. But such titles as The Godfather, Romeo and Juliet, Eight and 1/2 or La Dolce Vita bring to mind melodies and lush, romantic, sometimes witty sound world of Nino Rota.
Giovanni Rota was a child prodigy who composed his first oratorio, The Childhood of John the Baptist, at 11 and at 13 a lyrical comedy, Il principe porcaro (The Swineherd Prince), based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen. Encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Rota spent two years in the United States studying at the Curtis Institute but returned to Italy to complete his musical studies in Milan and with composers Ildibrando Pizzetti and Alfredo Casella. He remained in Italy teaching at the Liceo Musical of Bari in Southern Italy.
Rota was a prolific composer, churning out over 30 film scores during the 1940s and a total of 150 over the course of his life. After World War II, he became particularly close to Federico Fellini, for whom he supplied nearly all of the Italian director's film scores. But Rota also had a substantial catalogue of compositions in other genres: works for piano, chamber music, choral works, 11 operas and 5 ballets. For his symphonic output, he had a particular affinity for the concerto, with concerti for cello (3), harp, piano, trombone, bassoon and horn, plus a concerto for orchestra.
Despite great admiration and friendship for Igor Stravinsky, Rota eschewed the atonal and dissonant languages of his own century. In this regard, he most resembles fellow composer Erich Korngold, who virtually invented the musical conventions of the mid-twentieth-century Hollywood film score. Of his philosophy as a composer, Rota said: “I feel happy [when writing music]...to give everyone a moment of happiness is what is at the heart of my music.”
The Godfather, the 1972 blockbuster film of the Mafia underbelly of Italian society, was the most profitable film to that date. Rota's music developed a life of its own, giving rise to suites with varying number of sections, all starting with the Love Theme. Some of them include sections from The Godfather II.
Joe Hisaishi
Symphonic Variations "Merry-Go-Round"
From Howl's Moving Castle
Joe Hisaishi (birth name Mamuro Fujisawa) is one of the best known and most prolific Japanese composers of film and TV scores, often called Japan's John Williams. His style is eclectic, blending European and Japanese Classical styles, and experiments with minimalism and electronic music.
Hisaishi discovered his passion for music and started playing the violin at age five. As a student at the conservatory, he worked as typesetter for minimalist composers. He wrote his first film music in 1974, and by now has composed more than 100 soundtracks.
The animated fantasy film Howl's Moving Castle was produced in 2004, with Hisaishi composing and conducting the music. The film is a strong anti-war statement and was a great success in Japan.
Hisaishi prepared a symphonic suite from the score, containing ten pieces from the soundtrack. In 2005 he arranged the Variations "Merry-Go-Round" as a symphonic concert version of the original film score.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Finale to the Robin Hood Suite
Erich Wolfgang Korngold represented the last gasp of late romanticism in Vienna. Never putting his toe in the water of modernistic experiments, he doggedly immersed himself in this established idiom. Korngold was a child prodigy whose works were performed in public in Vienna by the time he was 11 (the fact that his father was the music critic of Vienna's most prestigious newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, may have helped).
In the early part of the 20th century Korngold was known mainly through his operas (Violanta, Die tote Stadt, Das Wunder der Heliane) but today he is primarily remembered by his pioneering film music. At the urging of the opera director Max Reinhardt, with whom he had staged Die Fledermaus in Berlin in the 1920s, he came to Hollywood in 1934 where he wholeheartedly embraced the new medium. Soon the film music scene in Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s was dominated by German and Austrian émigrés who had escaped Nazism.
By the time Korngold came to Hollywood, his "classical" compositions were regarded as superficial and irrelevant to the proponents of mainstream of 20th-century atonality in general, and serialism in particular. But Hollywood and Korngold, who saw film as the successor to the operatic stage, formed a mutual admiration society. Two of his film scores, Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) won Oscars.
The music for The Adventures of Robin Hood is considered Korngold's finest, helping to propel the swashbuckling stage action of the all-star cast.
Korngold put together a 7-section suite from the movie score, considered the official Robin Hood Suite (There exist numerous others). The last section is the "Victory/Finale".
Sergey Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Sergey Rachmaninov grew up in a middle-class musical family, but under strained economic conditions. His father, a gambler and an alcoholic, squandered the family's fortune to the point that eventually his mother and father separated, and she had to sell what remained of the family's assets and move into a small apartment in St. Petersburg. Sergey - whose care in better times would have been entrusted to a nanny - consequently grew up with little supervision.
His schooling suffered as a result. Although he showed early promise as a pianist and obtained a scholarship to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the administration threatened to expel him for failing to attend classes. He subsequently transferred to the Moscow Conservatory where his mentor, Nikolay Zverev, discouraged his initial attempts at composing. Nevertheless, Rachmaninov continued to march to his own drummer, defying his teacher and transferring to classes in counterpoint and composition.
Clearly, his sense of his own worth was more accurate than that of his professors. While still a student, he produced a string of successful works, including the tone poem Prince Rostislav, his First Piano Trio , and a flood songs and piano pieces. For his graduation in 1892 he composed the opera Aleko, which won him the highest distinction, the Great Gold Medal. The same year he also composed the Prelude in C-sharp minor, a work whose inordinate fame haunted him all his life because audiences always expected - and demanded - it as an encore at his performances as one of history's greatest pianists.
By 1895 Rachmaninov felt confident enough to compose a symphony. The premiere took place in St. Petersburg in 1897 but was a dismal failure, in large part because to the shoddy conducting of Alexander Glazunov who was under "the influence". Whereas earlier defeats had produced in the young composer creative defiance, the failure of his Symphony No. 1 brought on a severe depression. For three years he was unable to do any significant composing. After consulting numerous physicians and advisors, even asking old Leo Tolstoy for help, he finally went for therapy and hypnosis in 1900 to Dr. Nikolay Dahl, an internist who had studied hypnosis and rudimentary psychiatry in Paris. The result was one of the first well-known successes of modern psychotherapy. Although the composer was able to return to creative work, relapses into depression dogged him for the rest of his life. Significantly, all his large instrumental compositions are in minor keys, and one of the melodic themes recurring in many of his compositions is the Dies irae from the Catholic mass for the dead reminding mourners of the terrors of the day of judgment.
Rachmaninov expressed his gratitude to Dr. Dahl by dedicating the Second Piano Concerto to him. The first performance of the complete work took place in November 1901 with the composer at the piano and was an instant success. It is Rachmaninov's most frequently performed and recorded orchestral work and its popularity has never waned. It even found its way into Hollywood as background music to the World War II movie Brief Encounter.
The first movement, moderato, opens with dark unaccompanied chords on the piano, which increase in intensity and are gradually joined by the orchestra, leading to the first theme.
The effect is like the tolling of the giant low-pitched bells common in Russian churches.
The piano introduces the sensuous second theme, one of the composer's signature melodies.
About halfway through the movement as the development continues, a new rhythmic figure makes its appearance
, first as a barely audible accompaniment figure in the flute,
then taken up in the piano and timpani as an accompaniment to the second theme.
Increasingly, it crops up all over the orchestra until the piano pounds it out, letting the rest of
the orchestra carry the recapitulation of the main theme.
A long rhapsodic coda concludes the movement with a final dramatic burst of energy.
The second movement opens with muted strings, following with hesitant piano arpeggios in left hand.
As the piano remains in the background joined by a solo flute the clarinet
finally brings out the
theme
in its entirety.
The middle section of this
ABA
form centers on a second theme, which is built on the first and belongs to the piano.
Typically of the middle sections of slow movements, it is more intense and passionate than the A section. It builds in speed and energy in a brief cadenza, after which the gentle
atmosphere of the beginning return with variations of the first theme.
The brilliant third movement is characterized by abrupt changes in mood, all based on two themes. It opens deceptively quietly in the lower range of the orchestra, breaking into a
sudden sparkling, drivingly rhythmic piano cadenza and finally the main theme.
The second theme, introduced by the violas and oboes, is intensely passionate, and another of the melodies that have made this Concerto so popular.
To conform to this new romantic mood, Rachmaninov rhythmically transforms his first theme.
Suddenly, the tempo increases to presto and we're in a whirlwind development of the first theme, including a little truncated fugue.
Then it's back to romantic second theme, more mood swings until after a short cadenza the second romantic theme is taken up by the highest instruments in the orchestra,
culminating in a glittering climax.
