ExclusiveFranz Waxman: Hollywood’s Master of Suspense

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans One of the great mysteries of the motion picture business is how flat gray images filmed 80 or 90 years ago can continue to thrill and give us chills today. A big part of that magic is the soundtrack. Without that dramatic, intense, or sweeping background music, movies wouldn't have the dramatic effect that they do. Although thousands of movies were made during the golden era of Hollywood, comparatively few composers are responsible for all the remarkable music which accompanied them. Most of these composers were either immigrants themselves or the sons of immigrants, usually from Germanic or Eastern European countries and of Jewish descent. One great composer who is responsible for some of the most suspenseful, thrilling music of Hollywood's golden age is Franz Waxman. Franz Waxman was born in 1906 in Upper Silesia, an area of the German Empire, then the Prussian Empire, which is modern-day Poland. His name was originally spelled Waxman, C-H-S, but later he anglicized it to Waxman. He was one of six children and his father was an industrialist. At age seven, Franz began studying the piano, and he loved music. He wanted to have a career in music, but since no one else in the family was musical, his father was concerned that it wouldn't be a very stable profession for him. Instead, he wanted him to go into banking. Appeasing his father, he took the job as a bank teller, which he helped him acquire at the age of 16, and he worked in that job for about two and a half years, meanwhile funding his musical studies in piano, harmony, and composition with his salary from being a bank teller. In 1923, he quit the job at the bank and moved to Dresden, where he began his studies, before transferring to the Berlin Music Conservatory. There, he perfected his musical talents, both as a pianist and as a budding arranger and composer, while supporting himself by playing the He eventually became the pianist for the Weintraub Syncopators, which was a popular jazz orchestra in Europe at the time. He played the piano for them and did many of their arrangements. Acting as their arranger was what would lead him to the most important chapter of his musical career, working in the film industry. Frederick Hollander was another composer in Germany at the time. His name may be familiar because he eventually also made his way to Hollywood and became a film composer. In the 1920s, however, he worked in the German film industry. When he wrote a couple of songs for the Weintraub Syncopators, he got to know Waxman, and he was very impressed by the young man's arranging skills. So, he hired him to work as an arranger for a score he had written, The Blue Angel. This was a very popular Marlene Dietrich film before she went to America and was directed by Joseph Sternberg. Because of this film's success, Waxman had his in with the German film industry. In the next few years, he worked on about 15 European pictures, often orchestrating, conducting, or sometimes writing a bit of background music for them. The producer of The Blue Angel was Erich Palmer, who was at that time one of the most influential filmmakers in Germany. He was the head of the studio UFA, which was one of the main studios in Berlin. He was very impressed with Waxman's work in several of these films. By 1934, Berlin was no longer a comfortable place for Jewish Germans like Palmer and Waxman to be living. So, Waxman and his wife went with Palmer to Paris, where they made Lilium. This was often credited as a French film, even though many of the people who worked on it were German, but it was filmed in Paris. It was based on the play which would inspire the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. The film was the first time that Waxman wrote a dramatic score all by himself. Before that, he usually would just arrange something, but he got full credit as the composer for that movie. And this dramatic score got a lot of people's attention. The next year, Erich Palmer had the opportunity to go to Hollywood to produce a Jerome Kern musical, Music in the Air. Now, this wasn't Palmer's first time in the United States. In the earlier 20s, he had worked in Hollywood on multiple films, and he'd also worked for the European units of a couple of different American film studios like MGM and Paramount. However, now because of the growing power of the Nazi party, he was eager to go back to the United States. He took his good friend Franz Waxman with him, who also was eager for an opportunity to get out of Europe. Once in Hollywood, Waxman got an opportunity to write an original score for an American film. British director James Whale had seen Lilium, and he was very impressed with that score. Whale is perhaps best known for being the director of Frankenstein, the 1931 Boris Karloff horror classic. So when he wanted to make the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935, he needed a composer who could help him capture the eerie but psychologically nuanced aspects of the story. You see, film styles have changed a lot since 1931. In the early 30s, they were just beginning to experiment with background music, since that was the beginning of the sound film era. By 1935, techniques had changed, and more cohesive scores were wanted. Waxman turned out to be the perfect person for this job, since he had a rich classical background and deep European roots. He frequently would draw on classical music, both original things he'd written himself, re-scoring great classical works by famous composers, or just hinting at other themes. For instance, in The Bride of Frankenstein, he used themes that sounded like funeral marches or church music anytime there was something that was ritualistic, alternating between such beautiful strains and more chilling aspects. The score for The Bride of Frankenstein was so well received that Frantz Waxman was appointed head of the music department at Universal Pictures. Waxman would also achieve success in another chilling genre of film, suspense. In 1940, he wrote the score for British director Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, Rebecca. He was hired to work on this picture by David O. Selznick, who was the producer for it. In 1937, Waxman was hired by MGM with a seven-year contract. He worked for them from 1937 to 1943. During this time, he scored a lot of their most successful films, including some more chilling movies like another horror film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Spencer Tracy, as well as a romantic comedy starring Spencer Tracy, Woman of the Year. He also would do occasional films on loan to David Selznick. In 1943, he left MGM and went to work for Warner Brothers, for whom he worked from 1943 to 1947. During that time, he worked alongside other and better-renowned composers like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Kornbold. But the three composers did have a lot in common, since they all were of German-Jewish descent with a rich classical background in Europe. After Rebecca, Waxman would write three more scores for Hitchcock, including Suspicion in 1941, The Paradine Case in 1947, and Rear Window in 1954. Rear Window was a bit of an unusual score for him, since instead of being strictly classical or relying heavily on high strings, he integrated some jazz elements to make it feel very contemporary and very American. Throughout the course of his career, Waxman was nominated for 12 Academy Awards. He won his first Academy Award in 1950. By this point, he was a freelancer, having left Warner Brothers in 1947. For the next 20 years of his career, he would accept whatever film projects interested him. By this point, he no longer wanted to work for a studio, because he had other interests, most notably classical music. He wanted to foster, quote, European cultural standards in Los Angeles, and he did so by founding the Los Angeles Music Festival, of which he was the director and conductor for the last 20 years of his life. Through this festival, he would play orchestral versions of his own music, symphonic works written by fellow film composers like Miklos Rosa, as well as the great classics by the masters of old, like Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky. He also made many recordings. The film for which he won his first Academy Award was Sunset Boulevard. In this work, he drew on all his different talents. He captured the early film styles, which he had experienced back in Europe, with the silent film influence. He used the chilling strings, such as he had evoked in horror films or suspense movies over the years, but he also drew on classical music. Most notably, rich, evocative classical themes to capture the different exotic stories that silent film star Norma Desmond captures in her storytelling and in the film she wants to write. Most notably, she wants to play the character of Salome, and he drew on the controversial opera Salome by Richard Strauss, a fellow German composer. Most notably, in the climax of the film, as she is imagining that she's in that scene, he hinted at themes from that opera while making the melodies and score totally his. He also won a Golden Globe for that score, which is ranked as number 16 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years of Film Scores list. The next year, he won his second Academy Award for A Place in the Sun, making him the only composer for about 50 years to win for best score two years in a row. He wrote less for the screen in the 1960s, although he did still write an occasional film score during that decade. He also wrote for the television series Gunsmoke in 1966. It was in 1962 that he wrote what many people consider to be one of his finest scores, Taurus Bulba. Max Steiner referred to this as the score of a lifetime, and he received his last Academy Award nomination for that score. Although best known for his motion picture work, Frantz Waxman also wrote a few very interesting works specifically for the concert stage. In 1959, he wrote an oratorio called Joshua, based on the Old Testament character. In 1964 to 65, he wrote a work called Song of Terazin, which was for orchestra, chorus, and children's chorus. This was based on poems written by children in a concentration camp, and he intended it as a very deep, moving tribute and memorial to the people, but particularly the children who had lost their lives in the German concentration camps during World War II, a message that was very close to his heart as he had lost friends and family during the Holocaust. Waxman was renowned for his ability to integrate the grand European styles of classical music into the highly American art form of cinema. Whereas other European composers adapted more to the American styles of music, Waxman never lost touch with his European roots and his classical background. Whether he was writing his own very classical sounding pieces, hinting at leitmotifs from famous works, or actually arranging famous classical works, he always kept that style, and as a result, producers would call on him when they wanted a more classical style. For instance, he worked on the Warner Brothers film Humoresque, which stars Joan Crawford and John Garfield, and is about a classical violinist. So Waxman was chosen for this job because he was able to integrate the famous classical piece, Humoresque, using that as the basic leitmotif for the film, and then arranging it cleverly to be woven throughout the movie. Another work which he did quite famously with that was the Carmen Suite. His arrangement of Georges Bizet's Music from Carmen is one of the best known suites from that opera, which he wrote for film, but then later conducted and performed extensively in concert. Although perhaps not the best known name of all classic film composers, Waxman deserves a lot of credit as a very creative genius who brought very deep melody and inspiring creativity to the motion picture screen, making movies more dramatic and passionate because of the music he wrote. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.