There are only so many days in a year, so it should come as little surprise that two giants in a particular field would share a birthday anniversary. Hence, we have Heifetz and Kreisler on February 2, Rachmaninoff and Busoni on April 1, and of course Brahms and Tchaikovsky on May 7. May 10 marks the birthdays of twinned titans of the Golden Age of film-scoring, Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin.
Steiner (1888-1971), the literal godson of Richard Strauss, helped transplant the sound of fin de siècle Vienna to the realm of cinematic dreams. He composed over 300 film scores for RKO and Warner Brothers, earning 24 Academy Award nominations and winning three – for “The Informer,” “Now, Voyager” and “Since You Went Away” – though he is unquestionably better remembered today for his work on “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”
Tiomkin (1894-1979), a pupil of Alexander Glazunov, was born in Ukraine. He settled in the United States, where he composed music for films in all genres, though in the 1950s he enjoyed particular success writing for Westerns, including the Academy Award-winning “High Noon.” When asked why this would be the case, that a composer born half a world away would have such a command of this distinctly American idiom, Tiomkin replied, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”
Tiomkin was honored with four Academy Awards – three for Best Original Score (for “High Noon,” “The High and the Mighty” and “The Old Man and the Sea”) and one for Best Original Song (“The Ballad of High Noon”).
Here’s a transcript of his acceptance speech, when winning the Oscar for “The High and the Mighty” in 1955:
“Lady and gentlemen, because I working in this town for twenty-five years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor what make me successful to lots of my colleagues in this town. I’d like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. Thank you.”
You can watch here:
Steiner’s “Now, Voyager”:
Tiomkin’s “Land of the Pharoahs”:
PHOTOS: Steiner conducts (top); Tiomkin composes
