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It was Franz Waxman’s music, originally written for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Up until 1938, the American Federation of Musicians allowed the reuse of any music in the studio library for any studio film. What made Waxman’s score so adaptable for re-working was the composer’s, extraordinary for its time, use of symphonic music for ...
The search for an answer to this question which embraces universal values is at its core of a prose-poem by James Forsyth and heightened by the music by Franz Waxman. Opening with a broad and expressive melody played by oboes, 2 soprano saxophones and an organ and supported by the full orchestra, its closing moments are taken up by the violin.
This is the first comprehensive, source-based study about composer Franz Waxman. It focuses on the intermedial transfer of Waxman’s film music and its adaptation for other media (radio broadcasts, soundtrack recordings, sheet music, theme songs, concert suites), but also on his work as a festival organizer and conductor.
Franz Waxman began his musical career as the pianist, in the Weintraub Syncopaters: a Berlin jazz band of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He wrote arrangements for the band and was soon composing and orchestrating musicals at the UFA studios: the MGM of Germany.
In The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), directed by Billy Wilder, Stewart is carried aloft, not only by his replica of Lindbergh’s single engine monoplane, but the heroic, emotional score of Franz Waxman. So much depended on Waxman because of the limited use of dialogue and action, as the story unfolds against the long overwater flight.
In 1958 Waxman conducted the West Coast premiere of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. While studying the score he noticed a striking resemblance between the end of the second movement and the chase fugue “Farewell and Frenzy” in his A Place in the Sun Suite written seven years earlier for a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.
Franz Waxman. American composer Franz Waxman was born in Upper Silesia, Germany, on December 24, 1906. After pursuing a career in banking for two years, he completed his musical studies in Dresden and Berlin. In 1929 he was hired in Germany by a film studio to arrange and conduct Frederick Holländer's score for The Blue Angel. The success of ...
