This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’re on the quest for Gold – Ernest Gold, that is.
Gold, who won an Academy Award for his work on “Exodus” in 1960, wrote nearly 100 film scores, including those for “The Defiant Ones,” “Inherit the Wind,” and “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” He was perhaps Hollywood’s last major musical link with Old Vienna.
Though from the start his ambition was to write for film like his hero, Max Steiner, he eked out a livelihood in New York, where he had settled in the wake of the Anschluss in 1938. There, he found work as a piano accompanist and a writer of popular songs. He used the income to formally study harmony and orchestration. He wrote a symphony in 1941. It was never performed in his lifetime, though his Piano Concerto made it to Carnegie Hall. It was damned by the critics as sounding like movie music, but Gold embraced the endorsement, packed his bags, and struck out for the West Coast. He would eventually secure a foothold at Columbia Studios, where he worked with directors like Stanley Kramer and Otto Preminger.
Despite his love of film, he never lost his enthusiasm for composing absolute music. The result was a piano sonata, a Symphony for Five Instruments, and one of the works we’ll hear, his String Quartet No. 1 from 1948. It was Gold’s intention that it would be a very serious piece, of an uncompromising, modernist bent. But he soon hit up against a mental block and realized that the only way to go was to write from the heart.
For 19 years, Gold was married to Marni Nixon, the second of his three wives. If you’re a fan of screen musicals of the 1950s and ‘60s, you probably know that Nixon dubbed the singing voices of the lead actresses in films like “The King and I,” “West Side Story,” and “My Fair Lady.”
Gold wrote his “Songs of Love and Parting” expressly for Nixon in 1963. The texts were drawn from a variety of sources, the better to convey the universality of love and the heartache of separation, including poetry by James Thomson, William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In the few minutes remaining at the end of the hour, we’ll have time for a couple of Gold’s classic film themes. I hope you’ll join me for “Unalloyed Gold,” this Sunday night at 10 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
