Steiner, Max(imilian Raoul Walter)

(b Vienna, 10 May 1888; d Beverley Hills, CA, 28 Dec 1971). American composer and conductor of Austrian birth. His father was a theatrical producer and his grandfather managed the Theater an der Wien when the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss were produced there. Steiner showed exceptional musical talent at an early age, publishing his first song in 1897 and composing a one-act operetta, Die schone Griechin, in 1903. He received an academic training at the Vienna Conservatory, and a practical apprenticeship conducting and composing small works in the theatres of his father and of other contemporary Viennese impressari. From 1904 to 1914 he worked throughout Europe, most frequently in London, Ireland and Paris, acting as the musical director and conductor for a range of theatrical shows. He composed ballets for the Tiller Girls dance troupe, and worked on shows for George Dance and Ned Wayburn. At the outbreak of World War I he moved to New York, where he worked as a copyist and later as an arranger, orchestrator and conductor of musicals and revue shows, on and off Broadway. These shows included the Gershwins' Lady Be Good! (1924), Kern's Sitting Pretty (1924) and Youman's Rainbow (1928). His only Broadway show, Peaches, was composed during this period. He also worked extensively with Victor Herbert, arranging many of the composer's dance numbers, and acting as the musical director for a touring production of Oui Madame (1920). Herbert's influence can be seen in the attention to orchestration which characterizes Steiner's film scores. For musical theatre he learnt to combine small numbers of instruments to create the impression of a fuller orchestral sound, a skill which was to prove useful in the under-funded music departments of Hollywood.

Steiner's introduction to Hollywood came in 1929 when RKO Radio Pictures bought the rights to the musical Rio Rita. Harry Tierney, for whom Steiner had orchestrated and conducted the stage version, insisted that he be hired by the studio. He worked for RKO from 1929 to 1936, composing music for over 130 films, during a period when Hollywood was still judging the value of music in film. His first original score, Cimarron (1930), is striking in two ways. It was the first sound film to include non-diegetic music, the placement of which foreshadows the later widely used Hollywood technique of emphasizing emotional, unspoken elements of the narrative. Also, Steiner reuses material from the title sequence in the body of the film, establishing from the outset his thematic approach to the structuring of film scores. In his 1933 film score for King Kong, he provided the first of the full-length Hollywood film scores, and its rich orchestration and use of repeated motifs and themes show how quickly Steiner had established his technique of scoring. These features of his approach owe as much to his experience of musical theatre as they do to more conventional interpretations of symphonic and Wagnerian influences. Recording techniques and versatile orchestration created a symphonic illusion from the small studio ensembles, and the development of tunes and themes voiced characterization as clearly as song numbers. This latter feature is apparent throughout his scores across a wide range of genres: Philip Carey's physical and metaphorical limp in Of Human Bondage (1934), Gypo Nolan's traitorous deceit in the Academy Award winning score for The Informer (1935), ante-bellum Southern pride in the title theme, 'Tara' for Gone with the Wind (1939), Charlotte Vale's emotional insecurity in his Academy Award winning score for Now Voyager (1942), General Custer's military single-mindedness in They Died with their Boots on (1941).

In 1936 Steiner joined Warner Brothers from RKO, after a brief spell at Selznick International. His output of scores in the late 1930s topped ten per year as principal composer, with involvement in many more as an assistant composer, and he continued to create scores at a high rate into the 1950s when he became freelance. This rate of output was made possible by his exceptional relationship with his orchestrators, particularly Hugo Friedhofer, who later became a successful film composer in his own right. Steiner's careful and detailed construction and annotation of the four-stave short scores made the translation to full orchestral score closer to a copyist's task than a full instrumental arrangement. Among Steiner's other notable scores are Since You Went Away (1944), for which he won his third and last Academy Award, Saratoga Trunk (1946), The Fountainhead (1949) and A Summer Place (1959), the main theme of which became a popular song in the 1960s. His last score was Two on a Guillotine in 1965.

Steiner's score for Now Voyager is a fine example of the approach to narrative interpretation which typified his, and Hollywood's film music of the period, and which has come to be regarded as a classical model for film scoring. There are five central themes, expressing each of the main characters, differentiated and connected by the use of diatonic and chromatic melodies and harmonies. There are also a further seven melodies which are used to capture less prominent features of the narrative, and a number of quotations from current popular songs. This reference to music outside cinema was typical of Steiner's idiomatic anchorage of his score to contemporary popular taste, and though it has been criticized for its lack of subtlety, it reflects the Hollywood goal of making all aspects of a film accessible to the audience. The score also employs the technique of 'mickey-mousing', the catching of physical movements on the screen in the movement of musical language in the score. Such a feature seems unsophisticated to modern audiences, but it is a further example of Steiner's belief in the power of music to emphasize and support all elements of the dramatic film narrative. A substantial collection of Steiner's film score manuscripts and other personal documentation is available in the Steiner Collection in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

WORKS
(selective list)

film scores
names of directors are given in parentheses
Cimarron (W. Ruggles), 1930; Bird of Paradise (K. Vidor), 1932; The Most Dangerous Game (E.B. Schoedsack, I. Pichel), 1932; Sym. of Six Million (G. La Cava), 1932; King Kong (M.C. Cooper, Schoedsack), 1933; Little Women (G. Cukor), 1933; The Lost Patrol (J. Ford), 1934; Of Human Bondage (J. Cromwell), 1934; The Informer (Ford), 1935; The Three Musketeers (R.V. Lee), 1935; The Charge of the Light Brigade (M. Curtiz), 1936; The Garden of Allah (R. Boles), 1936; Little Lord Fauntleroy (Cromwell), 1936; A Star is Born (W.A. Wellman), 1937; The Life of Emile Zola (W. Dieterle), 1937; Jezebel (W. Wyler), 1938; Gone with the Wind (V. Fleming, Cukor, S. Wood), 1939; Dark Victory (E. Golding), 1939; Dodge City (Curtiz), 1939; All This and Heaven Too (A. Litvak), 1940; The Letter (Wyler), 1940; They Died with their Boots on (R. Walsh), 1941; In This Our Life (J. Huston), 1942; Now, Voyager (I. Rapper), 1942; Casablanca (Curtiz), 1943; The Adventures of Mark Twain (Rapper), 1944; Arsenic and Old Lace (F. Capra), 1944; The Conspirators (J. Negulesco), 1944; Passage to Marseilles (Curtiz), 1944; Since You Went Away (Cromwell), 1944; The Corn is Green (Rapper), 1945; Mildred Pierce (Curtiz), 1945; The Big Sleep (H. Hawks), 1946; Saratoga Trunk (Wood), 1946; Life with Father (Curtiz), 1947; Johnny Belinda (Negulesco), 1948; Key Largo (Huston), 1948; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston), 1948; Adventures of Don Juan (V. Sherman), 1949; The Fountainhead (Vidor), 1949; The Glass Menagerie (Rapper), 1950; Operation Pacific (G. Waggner), 1951; The Jazz Singer (Curtiz), 1953; This is Cinerama (documentary), 1953; The Caine Mutiny (E. Dmytryk), 1954; King Richard and the Crusaders (D. Butler), 1954; Come Next Spring (R.G. Springsteen), 1955; Helen of Troy (R. Wise), 1956; The Searchers (Ford), 1956; A Summer Place (D. Daves), 1959; The FBI Story (M. Le Roy), 1959; John Paul Jones (J. Farrow), 1959; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (D. Mann), 1960; The Sins of Rachel Cade (G. Douglas), 1961; Rome Adventure (Daves), 1962; Spencer's Mountain (Daves), 1963; Youngblood Hawke (Daves), 1964; Two on a Guillotine (W. Conrad), 1965
MSS in US-PRV
Principal publishers: Remick, Witmarck, Berlin, Fox

WRITINGS
Notes to You, unpubd. [autobiography; MS in US-PRV]
'Scoring the Film', We Make the Movies, ed. N. Naumberg (New York, 1937), 216--38
'The Music Director', The Real Tinsel, ed. B. Rosenberg and H. Silverstein (New York, 1970), 387--98
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Thomas, ed.: Film Score (South Brunswick, NJ, 1979)
C. Gorbman: 'Classical Hollywood Practice: The Model of Max Steiner', Unheard Melodies (London and Bloomingon, IN, 1987), 70--98
K. Kalinak: 'Max Steiner and the Classical Hollywood Film Score', Film Music 1, ed. C. McCarty (New York, 1989), 123--42
C. Palmer: The Composer in Hollywood (London, 1990)
W. Darby and J. Du Bois: American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915--1990 (Jefferson, NC, 1990)
G. Maas: 'King Kongs musikalischer Kammerdiener: Max Steiners Musik zu King Kong (1933) im Blickwinkel der Kritik Hanns Eislers', Film- und Fernsehwissenschaftliches Kolloquium: Berlin 1989 (Munster, 1990), 153--66
K. Kalinak: Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, WI, 1992)
J.V. D'Arc and J.N. Gillespie, eds.: The Max Steiner Collection (Provo, UT, 1996)
K. Daubney: The View from the Piano: a Critical Examination and Contextualisation of the Film Scores of Max Steiner, 1939--1945 (diss. U. of Leeds, 1996)
 

KATE DAUBNEY (with JANET B. BRADFORD)