Page - 248 - in Der Filmkomponist Max Steiner - 1888 - 1971

5. Summary This book deals with the film composer Max Steiner, his professional career, and his per- sonal life in Vienna, London, New York and Hollywood. Through an analysis of his mu- sic for the film Casablanca, Steiners working methods and the most important character- istics of his music will be shown. Max Steiner was one of the great pioneers of film music. Along with his colleagues Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Alfred Newman, he was part of Hollywoods so called "triumvirate of the golden era of film music". While Newman was an American native, both Steiner and Korngold were born in Vienna, Austria. Steiner came from a family with a long musical tradition. His grandfather, Maximil- ian Steiner, was the managing director of the Theatre-an-der-Wien and was responsible for convincing Johann Strauss Jr. to write operettas. Steiners father, Gabor, was a famous impresario. Max Steiner grew up in Vienna at the Fin de Siecle. His family counted as friends almost every well-known composer and musician of that time. Richard Strauss was Maxs godfather and Gustav Mahler one of his teachers. Early on Max Steiner was marked as a musical "Wunderkind". At the age of twelve, he was already conducting at one of his father's theatres, and by age fifteen, his first operetta was debuted. In 1904 he enrolled at the Imperial Conservatory. He completed this in only one year, earning a gold medal for his distinguished work. At sixteen, he became a freelance musician. Soon afterwards he moved to England where he began to focus on musicals. In 1914 at the beginning of the First World War he was expelled from Great Britain under the British policy which considered German and Austrian Citizens as alien enemies. Instead of returning to Vienna, Max moved to New York where he found work arran- ging and conducting musical shows, and conducting cinema orchestras for the silent movies of the time. These big movie theatre orchestras had one hundred or more musi- cians, and it was in these venues that Steiner first worked in this new movie medium. In 1929 Steiner received a call from RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in Hollywood to ar- range and conduct a film Version of the musical Rio Rita by Harry Tierney, which Max had already done for the Broadway theatrical Version. Thus at 41, Max Steiner began his film career after twenty-five years in live theatre. In 1927 the first so-called "talkie" film, The Jazz Singer had made its debut and with its success the demand for film mu- sicals had skyrocketed. By the time Steiner moved to Hollywood, however, audiences'