Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Franz Waxman

  • Novels of the Gilded Age on “Picture Perfect”

    Novels of the Gilded Age on “Picture Perfect”

    When I first assembled this week’s “Picture Perfect,” the Gilded Age was a period of American history most people would have been relieved to have receded into the distant past. Now everything old is new again.

    “The Gilded Age” was a term coined by none other than Mark Twain to describe the era spanning, roughly, from the end of Reconstruction (after the Civil War) to the turn of the 20th century. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. A gilded age is one that conceals serious social problems beneath a veneer of gold. On this week’s program, we look past the dazzle to focus on music from films inspired by novels from, or about, the period.

    “The Heiress” (1949) was adapted from a play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which in turn was based on the book “Washington Square,” by Henry James. Olivia De Havilland plays the “plain Jane” heiress of the title, Ralph Richardson her overbearing father, and Montgomery Clift, the adventurer who may or may not be out for her fortune. De Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal, as did the music, by Aaron Copland.

    “The Age of Innocence” (1993) was written by one-time James correspondent, his close friend, Edith Wharton. The book was published in 1920, but looks back to the 1870s, its story dealing with the impending marriage of an upper class couple and the appearance of a disreputable interloper who threatens their happiness. The title is an ironic play on the contrast between the outward manners of New York society and its inward machinations. The novel earned Wharton a Pulitzer Prize, the first ever to be awarded to a woman. The film was something of a curve ball from director Martin Scorsese, who made his reputation on arguably meaner streets. Veteran composer Elmer Bernstein provided the lovely, Brahmsian score.

    “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) is based on another Pulitzer Prize winner, this time by Booth Tarkington, from 1918. The novel is part of trilogy that traces the declining fortunes of three generations of an aristocratic Midwestern family. With industrialism on the rise, the Ambersons’ “old money” wealth and prestige wane.

    “Ambersons” was only the second film directed by Orson Welles. Sadly, the financial failure of “Citizen Kane” and Welles’ uncompromising artistic vision caused the project to be removed from his control and re-cut by the studio, shaving a full hour off the original running time. It says something about the strength of Welles’ material that what survives yet remains a magnificent achievement.

    The score was by Bernard Herrmann, CBS staff composer from Welles’ radio days. Herrmann had followed Welles to Hollywood to supply the music for “Kane.” With the trimming of “Ambersons,” his score was drastically edited and half the music removed. The famously irascible Herrmann, who had just written his Academy Award winning music for “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” was so angry that he threatened legal action if his name was not removed from the credits. (The studio complied.)

    The action of “Mr. Skeffington” (1944), based on a 1940 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, begins at a point some consider to be the twilight of the Gilded Age, the eve of World War I. Bette Davis stars as a woman so enamored with her own beauty, and the suitors it attracts, that she fails to value the affections of the man who eventually becomes her husband. Mr. Skeffington, played by Claude Rains, is a Jewish financier, riding high in the ‘teens, but his fortunes change when he’s caught in Europe during the rise of the Nazis.

    Davis and Rains both earned Academy Award nominations for their work. The vivid score is by Franz Waxman. Davis was going through a period of emotional turmoil during the filming, so that she was allegedly insufferable to be around throughout the entire shoot. Someone finally poisoned her eyewash. When the police questioned the director, Vincent Sherman, he wished them good luck with their investigation. “If you asked everyone on the set who would have committed such a thing, everyone would raise their hand!”

    Certainly all that glitters is not gold. We peel back the veneer of prosperity, this week, with “Novels of the Gilded Age,” on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!

    ———-

    Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

    PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

    SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT (***now with a repeat Sunday at 9:00 PM EDT/6:00 PM PDT***)

    THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

    Stream them, wherever you are, at the link

    !https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

  • Old World Composers Go West on “Picture Perfect”

    Old World Composers Go West on “Picture Perfect”

    Before American composers like Jerome Moross and Elmer Bernstein made the western distinctly their own, the task of scoring the genre fell largely to European émigrés. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll take a look at some outside perspectives on how the West was won.

    Literally the godson of Richard Strauss, Max Steiner came from Vienna, where he studied with Johannes Brahms and Robert Fuchs. In Hollywood, he wound up scoring such classics as “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”

    Among his over 300 film projects were a number of westerns. One of these was “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941), which starred Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer and Olivia de Havilland as Libby, the woman who becomes his wife. Steiner’s score features familiar folk material, some old-fashioned faux “Indian” music, and one of his characteristically lush love themes.

    Born in Ukraine in 1894, Dimitri Tiomkin was a pupil of Alexander Glazunov. He came to revolutionize the sound of the American West, when he wrote the music for “High Noon,” the first of his “ballad” scores. Advance word, based on an early screening for the press, was that the picture would be a failure. However, Tiomkin had such faith in the theme song, sung in the film by Tex Ritter, that he hired Frankie Laine to record it, and the record became a world-wide hit. In fact, his score is largely credited with having saved the film.

    Tiomkin was recognized with two Academy Awards: one for Best Original Song, and one for the score itself. It was the first time a composer won two Oscars for his work on the same movie. It also changed the way western scores were done. In the 1950s, Tiomkin became THE western composer of choice. He produced a number of subsequent ballad scores, including that for “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957). Asked how it was that a composer from Ukraine could write so convincingly for the American West, Tiomkin quipped, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”

    Another unexpected source of classic western music, Franz Waxman was born in Upper Silesia. He arrived in the U.S. by way of Germany. Nonetheless, as part of the composer’s varied and prolific output, he did indeed score a number of films in the genre, including “The Furies” (1950), a peculiar noir-western hybrid. Walter Huston, in his final film, plays a cattle baron who remarries and throws his empire into jeopardy. Barbara Stanwyck is his strong-willed daughter.

    Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa scored many films with historical settings – “Quo Vadis,” “Ben-Hur,” and “King of Kings,” among them. However, to my knowledge, his only western was “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956). James Cagney stars as a rancher who doles out some frontier justice.

    Finally, we’ll hear music by Ennio Morricone, from arguably the most operatic of all spaghetti westerns, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). As a reaction to Tiomkin’s ballad scores and the neo-Coplandisms of Elmer Bernstein and the rest, Morricone brings his own quirky sensibility to bear on the classic western iconography. Get ready for indelible motifs for harmonica and banjo, but also an unexpectedly moving elegiac arioso, underscoring the close of the American West with the arrival of the railroad.

    Doublecheck your train tables and wind your pocket watches. Old World composers go west this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!

    ——-

    Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

    PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

    SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

    THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

    Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

    https://kwax.uoregon.edu

  • Waxman and Heifetz Toast the New Year

    Waxman and Heifetz Toast the New Year

    Franz Waxman, of course, was one of the great film composers. His music can be heard in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Rebecca,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Rear Window,” “Peyton Place,” “The Spirit of St. Louis,” and dozens of others.

    It was customary that Waxman and his family would get together with their neighbors, the Jascha Heifetzes, to welcome the new year with an evening of chamber music. Other guests on these occasions would include violist William Primrose and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

    Mainstream classical fare would dominate the festivities until the countdown to midnight. With the turn of the year, the musical selections would become a bit more frivolous.

    Waxman composed his “Auld Lang Syne Variations” in 1947, for one such gathering. This party piece sends up the traditional New Year’s anthem in the styles of several well-known composers.

    Feel free to play along and test your musical knowledge. You’ll find further clues in the work’s subtitles, listed below the video on YouTube. One can only imagine Heifetz stepping out in “Chaconne à Son Gout.”

    Happy New Year!

  • Hitchcock’s Other Composers Beyond Herrmann

    Hitchcock’s Other Composers Beyond Herrmann

    Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated musical collaborator was Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann scored just about every one of Hitch’s films over the span of a decade, enhancing the impact and memorability of such classics as “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho.” But Hitchcock also worked with a number of other notable composers.

    This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll cast some light into Herrmann’s shadow with selections from “Rebecca” (Franz Waxman), “Strangers on a Train” (Dimitri Tiomkin), “Spellbound” (Miklós Rózsa), and “Family Plot” (John Williams).

    Herrmann goes on hiatus, and the suspense is killing us, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

    Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

    PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

    SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

    THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

    Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

    https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

  • Sweetness & Light Solo Instrument Showcase

    Sweetness & Light Solo Instrument Showcase

    This week on “Sweetness and Light,” musicians step out to strut their stuff in a collection of lighter works for solo instrument and orchestra.

    Some of the pieces will be well-known, some perhaps not. We’ll enjoy a trumpet overture derived from a film score by Franz Waxman, a scherzo by the swashbuckling pianist and composer Henry Charles Litolff, a polka for bassoon and orchestra evocative of a grumpy old bear by Julius Fučík, and more.

    A highlight will surely be a cello concerto by Arthur Sullivan, later of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, that was destroyed by fire but reconstructed decades later, largely from memory, by Sir Charles Mackerras.

    One is the loneliest number, as the old song goes. So put your hands together for soloists stepping into the “light music” spotlight, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

    Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:

    https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

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