I’d like to introduce you to one of the great composers of Hollywood’s “Golden Age”: Franz Waxman. If you aren’t familiar with his name, he wrote scores for some of the most famous movies of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Nevertheless, I feel that his music is often overlooked in favor of more prolific composers like Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and Miklós Rózsa.

Born Franz Wachsmann in 1906 to a Jewish family in eastern Germany, he studied composition and conducting in Dresden. In the 1920’s he moved to Berlin and supported himself working as a pianist and arranger in a popular dance band called the Weintraub Syncopaters. One of his bandmates helped him get a job as an orchestrator in the German film industry where he worked on the film The Blue Angel, which was the smash hit of 1930, and led to the opportunity to start composing his own music for films. It was at this point that Waxman’s life followed the fate of many artists who emigrated from Europe in the 1930’s. Walking home one evening in 1934 he was beaten by Nazi sympathizers and decided to move with his wife to Paris and then to Hollywood the next year.

On his arrival in Hollywood, Waxman met director James Whale who invited him to work on his next film at Universal Pictures, Bride of Frankenstein – the smash hit of 1935 – for which Waxman wrote one of the great film scores of the early sound era. Most film scores at this time merely accompanied the action on screen, whereas Waxman used the orchestra in a more impressionistic fashion to accentuate the emotions of the characters or underlying motivations of a scene – a practice that would become more standard in the coming years. Waxman employed a similar approach to the psychological gothic horror of Rebecca in 1940 for Alfred Hitchcock and Sunset Boulevard in 1950, for which he won an Academy Award.

Listen for the music of Franz Waxman on Morning Matinee (Weekdays at 9am) where, in the coming weeks, I’ll feature selections from Rebecca and Sunset Boulevard.