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Max Steiner

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner
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(born May 10, 1888, Vienna, Austria — died Dec. 28, 1971, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) Austrian-born U.S. composer and conductor. A prodigy, he wrote an operetta at age 14 that ran in Vienna for a year. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1914 and worked in New York City as a theatre conductor and arranger, and then he moved to Hollywood in 1929. He became one of the first and finest (if not subtlest) movie composers, establishing many techniques that became standard, with his scores for King Kong (1933), The Informer (1935, Academy Award), Gone with the Wind (1939), Now, Voyager (1942, Academy Award), Since You Went Away (1944, Academy Award), The Big Sleep (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), and many others.

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Artist: Max Steiner
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Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Pop Artists

Similar Artists:

Hans J. Salter, Alfred Newman, David Raksin, Erich Korngold

Followers:

Bruce Broughton, Ernest Gold

Formal Connection With:

Roy Webb, Kim Gannon
  • Born: May 10, 1888, Vienna, Austria
  • Died: December 28, 1971, Hollywood, CA
  • Active: '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s
  • Genres: Soundtrack
  • Instrument: Arranger, Vocals, Engineer
  • Representative Albums: "Gone with the Wind," "King Kong," "Casablanca"
  • Representative Songs: "Main Title" "Tara's Theme"

Biography

Austrian-born film composer Max Steiner was the grandson of the musical impresario who discovered Strauss and brought Offenbach to Vienna. Growing up with a rich heritage of opera and symphony all about him, Steiner developed into a musical prodigy; at the age of thirteen he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Music, completing the course in one year and winning the Gold Medal of the Emperor. Already a composer at 14 and conductor at 16, Steiner moved from Austria to England in 1905, remaining there to conduct at His Majesty's Theatre until 1914. With the outbreak of the war, Steiner emigrated to America, where he kept busy with Broadway musicals and operettas. One of his most beneficial American jobs was to compose the music to be conducted during screenings of the silent film The Bondman (1915); he became a friend of William Fox, the film's producer, giving Steiner early entree into the Hollywood that would so gainfully employ him in later years. In 1929, he was brought to fledgling RKO Radio Studios to orchestrate the film adaptation of Ziegfeld's Rio Rita (1929). Always confident in his talents, Steiner was realistic enough to understand that he was hired by RKO because he cost a tenth of what someone like Stowkowski would charge. While at RKO, Steiner developed his theory that music should be a function of the dramatic content of a film, and not merely background filling. His scores for such films as Symphony of Six Million (1932), The Informer (1935), and, especially, King Kong (1933) are carefully integrated works, commenting upon the visual images, augmenting the action, and heightening the dramatic impact. While Steiner's detractors would characterize his spell-it-out technique as "Mickey Mousing" (in reference to the music heard in animated cartoons), producers, directors, and stars came to rely upon Steiner to make a good film better, and a great film superb. After 111 pictures at RKO, Steiner was hired by David O. Selznick, who assigned the composer to write the score for Gone with the Wind (1939). Virtually 75 percent of this 221-minute epic required music of some sort, and Steiner rose to the occasion with what many consider his finest work. One concept refined in Gone with the Wind was to give each important character his or her own separate musical motif -- quite an undertaking when one realizes how many speaking parts there were in the film. Around that time Steiner began working at Warner Bros, where he penned the studio's famous "opening logo" fanfare and also provided evocative scores for such classics as Now Voyager (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). A proud, vain man, Steiner frequently found himself the butt of good-natured practical jokes from his fellow composers, but at Oscar time it was usually Steiner who had the last laugh. Steiner remained active until 1965, contributing scores to The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Searchers (1955), A Summer Place (1959) and many other films. It was only at the very end of his career, with such retrogressive scores as Youngblood Hawke (1964), that Max Steiner's once-revolutionary technique began to sound old hat. ~ Hal Erickson, All Music Guide
Wikipedia: Max Steiner
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For the pornographic actor and producer who is sometimes known as Max Steiner, see Max Hardcore.
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Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian American composer of music for theatre productions and films. He probably is known best for the score he composed for Gone with the Wind and for the score and theme song for the film A Summer Place.

Steiner was born Maximilian Raoul Steiner in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Steiner later claimed that he was given, and rejected, the name Walter, but there is no evidence of this in his birth register, held at the Jewish community of Vienna. Later on in his life he found out he had a half brother named James Owen, with whom he co-wrote the song Theme from A Summer Place. His paternal grandfather was Maximilian Steiner (1830-1880), the influential manager of Vienna's Theater an der Wien; his father was Gabor Steiner (1858-1944), Viennese impresario and carnival and exposition manager, responsible for the Ferris wheel in the Prater that would become the setting for a key scene of the film The Third Man (1949); his godfather was the composer Richard Strauss. A child prodigy in composing, Steiner received piano instruction from Johannes Brahms and, at the age of sixteen, enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Music (now known as the University of Music and Performing Arts), where he was taught by Gustav Mahler among others. His musical aptitudes enabled him to complete the school's four-year program in only two.

At the age of 16 Steiner wrote and conducted the operetta The Beautiful Greek Girl. At the start of World War I, he was working in London and was classified as an enemy alien but was befriended by the Duke of Westminster and given exit papers. He arrived in New York City in December 1914 with $32 to his name.

Steiner worked in New York for eleven years as a musical director, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of Broadway operettas and musicals written by Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, and George Gershwin, among others. His credits included George White's Scandals (1922), Lady, Be Good (1924), and Rosalie (1928).

In 1929, Steiner went to Hollywood to orchestrate the European film version of the Florenz Ziegfield show Rio Rita for RKO. The score for King Kong (1933) made Steiner's reputation; it was one of the first American films to have an extensive musical score. He conducted the scores for several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, including Top Hat (1935) and Roberta (1935).

Steiner scored hundreds of Hollywood films, and was the most prominent composer in the music department at Warner Bros., where he wrote the famous fanfare that introduced most of the studio's films from 1937 until the early 1950s and was used most recently in 1984. It was also used as the fanfare for Warner Home Video from 1986 to 1997. Steiner continued to score Warner films until the mid 1960s. Until approximately 1943 he worked with noted orchestrator and composer Hugo Friedhofer; thereafter it was Murray Cutter. After his final contract with Warners ended in 1953, Steiner began to freelance, working for other studios, though he continued to return to Warners on a regular basis. His final original film score was the 1965 film Two on a Guillotine. He also wrote music for several of the television series produced by Warner Brothers.

In 1954, RCA Victor asked Steiner to prepare and conduct an orchestral suite of music from Gone with the Wind for a special LP, which was later issued on CD.

In 1963, Max Steiner began writing his autobiography, which, although completed, was never published, and is the source of a few biographical errors concerning this composer. A copy of the manuscript resides with the rest of the Max Steiner Collection at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Max Steiner received 26 Academy Award nominations for his work and won three Oscars, for The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944).

Steiner died of congestive heart failure in Hollywood. He is entombed in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

After his death, Charles Gerhardt conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra in an RCA Victor album of highlights from Steiner's career, titled Now Voyager. Additional selections of Steiner scores were included on other RCA classic film albums during the early 1970s. The quadraphonic recordings were later digitally remastered for Dolby surround sound and released on CD.

In 1995, Steiner was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He has a star located at 1551 Vine Street on the Walk of Fame for his contribution to motion pictures.

Additional filmography

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