Ernest Gold

When Ernest Gold passed away in early 1999, he stood out in memory as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished screen composers and among the most active creators of television scores throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Had circumstances in 1930s Europe unfolded differently, he might instead have joined the final generation of post-Romantic voices on the Continent, composing tuneful works against the rising tide of atonality and abrasive non-melodic styles. Hitler’s ascent rendered that path impossible and, like his older contemporaries Miklós Rozsa and Franz Waxman, drove Gold from his native Austria to the United States. Arriving as Ernst Gold, he took the professional name Ernest Gold and became one of the last European Romantic figures to establish a lasting reputation in film music.

Born on July 13, 1921, into a Viennese household with deep musical roots, Gold counted among his maternal ancestors a student of Anton Bruckner who later presided over the Society of Friends of Music, the organization originally founded by Johannes Brahms. His mother sang professionally while his father, an amateur violinist, had studied with the operetta composer Richard Heuberger. The family encouraged wide-ranging musical interests; even at age ten, when sound films were beginning to feature ambitious scores, the boy declared his intention to compose for Hollywood pictures, and as a teenager he frequently attended movies solely to study their music. Among the composers who impressed him was fellow Viennese Max Steiner, a member of another prominent musical family roughly forty years his senior, who had already secured a solid place in the American film industry.

Gold began piano and violin lessons at six and started writing songs by eight. Under different conditions he might have rivaled the prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who three decades earlier had composed a full-length opera at thirteen and later also reached Hollywood. Yet the Vienna of the mid-1930s offered little safety for a gifted youth from a Jewish family. The tolerant atmosphere of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that had allowed Korngold to flourish as a latter-day Mozart had vanished; after Hitler’s 1933 takeover in Germany, danger loomed across a porous border protected only by fragile diplomacy left from the First World War. That border collapsed when German troops entered Austria in 1938.

Gold studied at the State Academy of Music in Vienna until early 1938, when he and his family escaped Europe. They reached New York that same year; at seventeen the young musician presented a piano concerto performed at Carnegie Hall. The NBC orchestra also played one of his symphonies, suggesting the start of a concert career. Critics, however, dismissed his style as “movie music,” an epithet they intended as disparagement. Gold took the comparison as praise and, drawn to the film scores he admired, ultimately relocated to Hollywood in 1945.

Although the major studios anticipated a postwar slump that year, Gold’s abilities secured him initial work as an arranger and orchestrator, chiefly on B-movies and low-budget genre pictures. Arriving later than composers such as Hans J. Salter, he missed the chance for a staff position at a major studio like Universal. Instead he moved between Columbia Pictures and Republic Pictures, scoring Westerns, melodramas, and occasional crime films such as Universal’s Smooth as Silk. For Lippert Pictures he composed the science-fiction adventure Unknown World, which later retained a following among genre collectors, yet most of his first decade in Hollywood involved steady but modest assignments. During this period he also married vocalist Marni Nixon. His most visible early credits came as orchestrator for two Nicholas Ray productions at Columbia, Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place, both scored by George Antheil.

Having studied with Antheil, Gold orchestrated the older composer’s music for various films, including the hour-long thriller Daughter of Horror (later famous as the picture playing in the theater during the attack sequence in The Blob). When Stanley Kramer hired Antheil for the melodrama Not as a Stranger, Antheil in turn engaged Gold as orchestrator; further Kramer projects followed, among them The Pride and the Passion in 1957. In 1958 Kramer assigned Gold his first original score, The Defiant Ones, which earned multiple Academy Award nominations and lifted him beyond B-movie work. That same year, when Antheil fell ill and could not complete the music for Kramer’s On the Beach, Gold received the assignment. The high-profile production, dealing with nuclear annihilation and featuring a star-studded cast, carried the stipulation that the Australian anthem “Waltzing Matilda” appear frequently in the underscore. Gold nevertheless fashioned an eloquent score and became Kramer’s favored composer for the next two decades.

Gold’s first major popular success arrived in 1960 with Otto Preminger’s Exodus rather than a Kramer film, although he also scored the well-received Inherit the Wind that year. Preminger had brought Gold onto Exodus during pre-production, allowing the composer to remain throughout shooting—an arrangement that consumed nearly a year, comparable to the extended involvement Miklós Rozsa enjoyed on Ben-Hur. The resulting film about the founding of Israel proved a box-office triumph, yet Gold’s main theme became even more pervasive: a sweeping, Strauss-inflected melody recorded by hundreds of artists in every conceivable arrangement, most memorably as a piano duet by Ferrante & Teicher.

Thereafter Gold’s reputation in both film and popular music circles was secure. Kramer continued to employ him on major releases such as Judgment at Nuremberg and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. United Artists, distributor of Exodus, did not control the original soundtrack; RCA Victor issued a re-recording and subsequently retained rights to Gold’s scores for any UA releases. Throughout the remainder of the 1960s Gold concentrated on high-profile Kramer productions including A Child Is Waiting, Ship of Fools, and The Secret of Santa Vittoria, demonstrating equal facility with comedy, drama, and period idioms. In the late 1960s he composed the Broadway musical I’m Solomon; as Kramer’s theatrical output diminished in the 1970s, Gold increasingly scored for television while still accepting occasional features such as Cross of Iron and Fun with Dick and Jane. By the late 1970s his son Andrew Gold had begun achieving pop success with “Lonely Boy” and “Thank You for Being a Friend.” When not writing for the screen, Gold conducted the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Senior Citizen’s Orchestra, which he founded in the 1980s. His final screen score was for the 1988 television adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln.