Oscar Levant

Oscar Levant might have enjoyed greater recognition among those born after the 1950s had his abilities been narrower or his energies less dispersed across the many arenas in which he appeared. Working as a composer, pianist, actor, author, and public personality, he attained noticeable success in each sphere—particularly the final one after 1945—yet insufficient prominence in any to sustain attention past his death in 1972. Raised in a musical household in Pittsburgh in 1906, he displayed prodigious piano talent early; after initial instruction from an older sibling he studied with Martin Messler, a Leipzig Conservatory graduate, beginning at age seven, and his recitals from age eight featured pieces by Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. When his father died in 1922 his mother relocated the family to New York, where Levant trained under Zygmunt Stojowski and performed for the celebrated Polish pianist and statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski.

Even at sixteen, however, his musical concentration had already been diverted by the brisk allure of Broadway, the environment in which he felt most at ease. Among the actors, dancers, gamblers, and assorted dubious figures he encountered a sympathetic musical peer in George Gershwin, the New York composer then gaining recognition as a songwriter and instrumentalist. Gershwin would eventually fuse the idioms of Franz Liszt with those of Tin Pan Alley, and Levant, already moving between the two spheres, served as a link between Paderewski and Damon Runyon. He performed as a cabaret pianist, attracting notice in London during the mid-1920s, and, once sound films arrived, moved to Hollywood while still pursuing concert music; he collaborated with Robert Russell Bennett on the “March for Two Pianos and Orchestra.” He also partnered with Gershwin in a two-piano presentation of the “Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra” and launched his own catalog with the well-received “Sonatina for Piano” of 1932.

In Hollywood he became an established contributor to film scores, supplying material—including the opera Carnival—that appeared in numerous dramatic pictures of the decade. His reputation as a ready source of quotable remarks grew as well; after viewing the 1933 release King Kong with its score by Max Steiner, he remarked that the picture amounted to “a concert accompanied by a movie.” He pursued further studies in composition and harmony with Joseph Schillinger and later Arnold Schoenberg, and his “Sinfonietta” received its premiere in 1934 at New York’s Town Hall under Bernard Herrmann.

By the close of the 1930s his works shared programs with those of Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern even while he continued scoring films and giving recitals; the most prominent of these was a 1937 Hollywood Bowl memorial concert for Gershwin, who had died suddenly that summer, at which Levant played the “Concerto in F.” He kept composing for both concert and screen, and extended his activities to the Broadway productions of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. In the early 1940s his profile shifted: he gained greater visibility as a radio figure, largely ceased concert-hall composition after 1942, began an extended recording association with Columbia Records, and portrayed himself in the Warner Bros. biography Rhapsody in Blue, with Robert Alda as George Gershwin and Herbert Rudley as Ira Gershwin. Film roles multiplied while concert appearances, including his 1949 Carnegie Hall debut featuring works by Gershwin, Honegger, and Khachaturian, grew rarer.

By the early 1950s Levant had attained a distinctive celebrity that reached well beyond regular concert audiences through radio and motion pictures. He functioned essentially as co-star, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951), portraying a blend of himself and composer David Diamond, and proved a reliable box-office attraction. In Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953) he took a straight acting part as a fictionalized stand-in for Adolph Green. Yet an unsettled, even disquieting quality accompanied these achievements, evident in canceled engagements and a neurotic tension that limited him to supporting screen roles and occasional television guest spots.

A mix of neuroses, unsuccessful treatment and medication, and additional private difficulties undermined Levant beneath the surface of his strongest public showings. He also appeared older than his forty or fifty years, perhaps from the strain of maintaining so many concurrent pursuits. Amid this activity he produced a sequence of incisive, witty autobiographical volumes that remain compelling decades later: A Smattering of Ignorance (1940), The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965), and The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968). One of his most inadvertently revealing performances came in Minnelli’s The Cobweb, in which he portrayed a patient in a mental institution.

His recording work concluded in the late 1950s, shortly after his final concerts, and he largely withdrew from public view in the early 1960s, hampered by excessive therapy and repeated attempts to medicate his conditions. Aside from the appearance of his last two books he remained virtually unseen during the latter half of the decade. He passed his final years in near-total seclusion and died in 1972, recalled chiefly not as a concert pianist, composer, raconteur, or actor, but simply as the singular figure Oscar Levant.