Franz Waxman

Composer

• Born: December 24, 1906
• Birthplace: Königshütte, Upper Silesia, Germany (now Chorzów, Poland)
• Died: February 24, 1967
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

German film-score composer

A creative and prolific composer of Hollywood film scores, Waxman used his extensive knowledge of art music and popular idioms to create music that effectively mirrored a film’s dramatic structure and supplied added information about the story line.

The Life

Franz Waxman was the last of seven children born to Otto and Rosalie Wachsmann. Waxman’s father worked in the steel business, providing the family with a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle. Waxman studied piano as a child, exhibiting a talent for playing both classical and popular music. Discouraging him from seriously pursuing music, his father acquired the sixteen-year-old Waxman a job as a bank teller. Waxman’s work in the bank was short-lived, and he began his musical studies in Dresden in 1923. Soon, he transferred to the Berlin Music Conservatory. While in Berlin, Waxman worked as a pianist in cafés to support himself, eventually obtaining a job as the pianist for the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular jazz orchestra in Europe. The connections he established in that group led to a job in the music department at Universum Film AG, Germany’s internationally acclaimed film company. In 1934, after being brutalized by Nazis in Berlin, Waxman emigrated to Los Angeles (via Paris), where he prospered as a film composer, earning twelve Academy Award nominations. Waxman was also a successful composer and conductor of concert music, and he founded the Los Angeles Music Festival in 1947, a venture in which he displayed a commitment to programming the music of avant-garde twentieth century composers. In 1967 Waxman died of cancer at age sixty in Los Angeles.

The Music

Waxman’s film scores established a precedent for film music composers to integrate sophisticated and up-to-date musical procedures into their scores. Many of his film scores, such as Humoresque and Possessed, creatively transform the themes of famous composers, such as Georges Bizet and Robert Schumann. When using this technique Waxman put the quoted theme in a diegetic context, but it continually resurfaces and mutates in ways that ultimately capture the film’s overriding thematic ideas.

Bride of Frankenstein.Waxman made his mark in Hollywood with his first American film score, for James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. The score became a huge asset to Universal Pictures’ music library, and portions of it were reused for years in numerous second-rate productions, leading it to be recognized as archetypal horror film music. The score displays Waxman’s creative use of distinctive leitmotifs to characterize the Bride, the Monster, and Dr. Praetorius, which appear immediately in the opening cue and are increasingly developed and combined contrapuntally as the film progresses. When ritualistic activities are depicted, Waxman often mimics the conventional musical codes of European art music. For example, a funeral march plays for the premature funeral procession of Baron Frankenstein, and an idyllic pastoral passage, denoted by harp arpeggios and a languid flute melody, accompanies the Monster’s journey into the countryside. In technological and frightening, Waxman adopts common devices—harmonic ambiguity, agitated ostinati, and eerie trills and tremolos—reminiscent of the dissonant Expressionistic music of the Second Viennese School.

Sunset Boulevard.Waxman’s score for Sunset Boulevard, the story of the downfall of an aging Hollywood starlet, is one of his great masterpieces, and it is his first to be honored with an Academy Award. The three prominent themes of Sunset Boulevard’s score subtly enact the emergence of a love triangle among Norma, Joe Gillis (her scriptwriter lover), and Betty (a younger woman who captivates Gillis). The score reaches explosive heights when the delusional Norma greets the media after murdering Gillis. Believing they are there to document her comeback, she descends a winding staircase, playing the role of Salome (the seductive biblical dancer and the subject of Richard Strauss’s controversial 1905 opera). Waxman accentuates the exotic trill that pervades Strauss’s opera, and he infuses the final incantation of Norma’s theme with dark instrumentation, low registers, and aggressive syncopation to convey the protagonist’s misfortune.

The Song of Terezín.The Song of Terezín, a dramatic orchestral song cycle scored for mezzo-soprano, mixed chorus, and children’s chorus, is a poignant statement on the repercussions of fascism and genocide. The music is set to poetry written by children who spent the final days of their lives in the Theresienstadt concentration camp (often called Terezín). Waxman selected eight songs from the collection entitled I Never Saw Another Butterfly, alternating between settings for solo voice and for choir in the seven movements preceding the finale, “Fear,” where all of the voices recognize that death is near, and they join together in a reflective lament. Waxman thought of the mezzo-soprano as a mother separated from her child. The score assembles stylistic and technical devices endemic to the Austro-Germanic tradition: the use of a passacaglia structure and a twelve-tone row in the first song, a fleeting and playful melodic flurry invoking a symphonic scherzo in the third song, and jarring Expressionistic textures and ostinati in the fifth song. Waxman hauntingly quotes Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (1801) in the sixth song, as the text describes a deserted piano and the excision of music from daily life. With The Song of Terezín Waxman attests that music can serve as a vehicle to combat injustice in the world and to act as a living tribute to victims who succumbed to political and moral corruption.

Musical Legacy

Waxman was one of the first composers in Hollywood to regard film scoring as a serious art form, affirming that film music could be aesthetically equivalent to concert music. Although his income came primarily from composing music for motion pictures, Waxman’s interests in film composition were always second to his interests in European art music, as he immersed himself in the intensive study of both canonic and contemporary concert music. He admirably composed and conducted concert scores, encouraging other film composers, such as Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Rosenman, and John Williams, to uphold this duality.

Principal Works

film scores:Einbrecher, 1930 (Murder for Sale); Bride of Frankenstein, 1935; Fury, 1936; Sutter’s Gold, 1936; The Bride Wore Red, 1937; Captains Courageous, 1937; A Christmas Carol, 1938; The Young in Heart, 1938; The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Rebecca, 1940; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1941; Suspicion, 1941; God Is My Co-Pilot, 1945; Objective, Burma!, 1945; Humoresque, 1946; Possessed, 1947; Dark City, 1950; The Furies, 1950; Sunset Boulevard, 1950; Ann of the Indies, 1951; He Ran All the Way, 1951; A Place in the Sun, 1951; Come Back, Little Sheba, 1952; Phone Call from a Stranger, 1952; I, the Jury, 1953; Rear Window, 1954; The Silver Chalice, 1954; Mister Roberts, 1955; Peyton Place, 1957; Run Silent, Run Deep, 1958; The Nun’s Story, 1959; Return to Peyton Place, 1961; Taras Bulba, 1962.

vocal work:The Song of Terezin, 1965.

Bibliography

Cook, Page. “Franz Waxman Was One of the Composers Who Thought Film Music Could Be an Art.” Films in Review 19, no. 7 (August/September, 1968): 415-430. Cook commemorated Waxman’s death with a biographical and artistic sketch in a popular periodical.

Darby, William, and Jack Du Bois. American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915-1990. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990. This presents an overview of Waxman’s film scores, and it is particularly noteworthy for commentary on Waxman’s inspired scores in critically bashed films such as Taras Bulba.

Palmer, Christopher. The Composer in Hollywood. London: Marion Boyars, 1990. A film composer offers firsthand knowledge of legendary Hollywood film composers and their musical output. Palmer’s discussion includes stylistic and technical analyses of several of Waxman’s scores.

Thomas, Tony. Music for the Movies. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997. Features a chapter on Waxman’s life and works by one of the most highly regarded experts on the history of film music.

Waxman, Franz. “Interview on Music from the Films: A CBC Broadcast.” Hollywood Quarterly 5, no. 2 (Winter, 1950): 132-137. Typescript of Lawrence Morton’s interview with Waxman recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s series Music from the Films.