Max Steiner

Austrian-born film composer Max Steiner descended from the impresario who first presented Strauss and introduced Offenbach to Viennese audiences. Surrounded from childhood by opera and symphonic traditions, he emerged as a prodigy, finishing the full curriculum at the Imperial Academy of Music in a single year at age thirteen and receiving the Emperor’s Gold Medal. By fourteen he was already composing; by sixteen he was conducting. In 1905 he left Austria for England, where he led the orchestra at His Majesty’s Theatre until the outbreak of war in 1914 prompted his emigration to the United States. There he worked steadily on Broadway musicals and operettas. One formative assignment was scoring the silent feature The Bondman (1915); the project introduced him to producer William Fox and provided an early foothold in Hollywood. In 1929 RKO Radio Studios engaged him to orchestrate the screen version of Ziegfeld’s Rio Rita (1929). Aware that his services cost roughly one-tenth those of a conductor such as Stokowski, Steiner nevertheless insisted that film music must serve the drama rather than merely fill silence. His subsequent scores for Symphony of Six Million (1932), The Informer (1935), and especially King Kong (1933) wove motifs tightly into the images, underscoring action and amplifying emotional force. Although critics sometimes dismissed this explicit synchronization as “Mickey Mousing,” directors and producers came to depend on Steiner to elevate ordinary pictures and perfect exceptional ones. After completing 111 films for RKO, he was recruited by David O. Selznick to score Gone with the Wind (1939). Roughly three-quarters of the 221-minute epic required music, and Steiner responded with what many regard as his masterpiece, assigning a distinct leitmotif to each major character. Around the same period he joined Warner Bros., where he composed the studio’s signature opening-logo fanfare and created atmospheric scores for Now, Voyager (1942), Casablanca (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). A proud and occasionally vain man, Steiner was often the target of playful pranks from his colleagues, yet at Academy Award season he frequently had the final satisfaction. He remained active until 1965, furnishing music for The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Searchers (1955), A Summer Place (1959), and numerous other productions. Only in late works such as Youngblood Hawke (1964) did his once-innovative approach begin to seem dated.