CHSA 5294 – HOLLYWOOD SOUNDSTAGE

 

Hollywood Soundstage

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Overture from ‘The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex’

Robert, I don’t know which I hate the most: you for making me love you or myself for needing you so.

So declaims Elizabeth I as she longs for her lover, the Earl of Essex, in the words of the screenwriters Norman Reilly Raine and Aeneas MacKenzie who adapted Maxwell Anderson’s Broadway play Elizabeth the Queen into the 1939 movie The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.

Ideally fiery and implacable though she was, Bette Davis was just thirty-one when she shaved her forehead to play the sixty-year-old queen opposite handsome Errol Flynn, so she needed all the help she could get. And she got it, not just in the well-stocked costume and jewels departments but in the extravagant score by the most influential and highly paid composer in Hollywood, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 – 1957). His exuberantly rich, chromatic, late-romantic sound world formed Hollywood’s aural blueprint, one to which all other film composers of the era would aspire.

The Overture brims over with gleaming brass reflecting the courtly pomp and ceremony that opens the film, but also the absolute ardour of the love affair. As always in the work of Korngold, it is not just the luxuriant harmony of the music that is notable, it is the command and splendour of the sound.
 

David Raksin: Theme from ‘Laura’

Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir / murder mystery Laura is a fascinating one-off. Smooth on the surface but twisty beneath, it is by turn elegant, suspenseful, brittle, and caustic.

Stymied in his attempt to get the rights to Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, from Porgy and Bess, which he regarded as the ideal theme to his new picture, Preminger demanded that his composer, David Raksin (1912 – 2004), use Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ instead. Loath to depend on another composer’s work, Raksin wanted to write something of his own but was only given a weekend in which to come up with something better. On Sunday night, having got nowhere, he composed the theme that wound up controlling all the contrasting moods of this unique film. The teasing marriage of serpentine melody and floating harmony in this theme was so successful that there have since been more than 400 cover versions of it. Raksin’s own concert version, played here, emphasises the glamour of the tension-filled story of a woman murdered under ever-more suspicious circumstances.

 

Herbert Stothart / Harold Arlen: Suite from ‘The Wizard of Oz’
There are three little-known facts about the enduring, endearing The Wizard of Oz. First off, the MGM boss, Louis B. Mayer, wanted sweet-as-saccharine Shirley Temple, not Judy Garland, as Dorothy. Secondly, after a poor response at a preview screening, the studio cut ‘Over the Rainbow’ and no one is certain who put it back in. Thirdly, although Harold Arlen (1905 – 1986) (music) and E.Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg (lyrics) are credited for writing that and all the other beloved songs, the Oscar went to the composer and arranger Herbert Stothart (1885 – 1949) whose underscoring, derived in part from the songs, held the film together. And it is that less familiar music which is the basis for the concert suite recorded here.

That suite opens with the fanfare that accompanies the roaring MGM lion; this leads directly into the main title. The mood changes with the surging horror of the hurricane. The farmhouse in which Dorothy lives is swept into the air and her life flashes past her. Mysterious, unsettled music captures her sense of wonder as she walks out into a Technicolor land in which nothing is familiar until explained by the twinkling arrival of Glinda the Good. After brief sketches of her journey and arrival at the Emerald City, the suite cuts to Toto’s journey to save the imprisoned Dorothy. In his quest to find her friends, Toto scampers along to a musical figure not unlike part of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. There are further Russian hints as Dorothy and her three friends climb the rocks to the castle of the witch, which is guarded by her creatures, depicted by low men’s voices. The final section sees Glinda returning to save Dorothy and send her home. ‘Over the Rainbow’ steals in and is reprised as Dorothy wakes up to rediscover all the people she holds most dear.

 

Frederick Loewe: Transylvanian March and Embassy Waltz from ‘My Fair Lady’

The stage musical of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion by Alan Jay Lerner (1918 – 1986) and Frederick Loewe (1901 – 1988) broke Broadway records with a six-and-half-year run, made Julie Andrews a star, and elicited an original cast recording that remained in the charts for an astounding 480 weeks. Warner Brothers were so desperate to acquire the property that they paid $5 million (the equivalent of $50 million today) for the rights. At a cost of $17 million, My Fair Lady was, at that point, the costliest film in history but the gamble paid off as it took over four times that at the box-office and won eight Oscars, including one for André Previn’s musical direction of a scoring that was as ravishing as Cecil Beaton’s costumes.

Although nominated as Best Actress at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, the film’s star, Audrey Hepburn, lost out in both to the actress playing the title role in Mary Poppins –

Julie Andrews, who had been turned down for the film version of My Fair Lady by the studio boss, Jack Warner. In a delicious case of revenge being a dish best served cold, when Andrews won the Golden Globe she tartly thanked Warner ‘who made all this possible in the first place’.

The grand ball scene at which Eliza triumphantly passes herself off as a lady is accompanied by Loewe’s lush, spirited ‘Embassy Waltz’.

 

Max Steiner: Suite from ‘Now, Voyager’
Over thirty-five years, the Austrian emigré Max Steiner (1888 – 1971) wrote more than 300 scores, of which twenty-four were Oscar-nominated (and three won). Indeed, in 1947 and 1948 he wrote a staggering twenty-two, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre which uses Wagnerian-style leitmotifs for characters and specific dramatic themes amid a wealth of underscoring; Steiner had invented the technique for his breakthrough score of King Kong, in 1933, and it was immediately copied throughout the industry.

The score for Now, Voyager, which won Steiner his second Oscar, is arguably the finest he wrote for Warner Brothers’ greatest star, Bette Davis. Beloved by many, it is John Wilson’s absolute favourite:

I think it’s one of the most effective, enriching scores ever written for a movie. It is inspired from beginning to end.

Indeed, his passion for it is so strong that he created his own suite of music from the film.

Working chronologically, the suite begins with the main title. Then comes the portrait of the ugly duckling Charlotte Vale (Davis), suffering at her Boston home under the thumb of her termagant of a mother (Gladys Cooper). That is followed by music for her meeting with a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) and, next, for her treatment for a nervous breakdown and her recovery on a sea voyage. After three months, she emerges as the shyest of swans whose wings strengthen when she meets a marvellous-but-married man (Paul Henreid); to wonderfully ardent music, they fall in love. Stranded in South America for five days (accompanied by Steiner’s Latin-American instrumentation and rhythms), they find their happiness growing. But fate intervenes. The final scene, a few years later, sees them recognise that their love can never be. As she says, while they now notoriously smoke cigarettes together, ‘Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars’.

 

Johnny Mandel: Main Title from ‘The Sandpiper’
With his début as a film composer, the trumpeter and trombonist Johnny Mandel (1925 – 2020) received three nominations in the inaugural Grammy awards: Best Performance by an Orchestra, Best Musical Composition (over five minutes’ duration), and Best Soundtrack Album, all for his score for the 1958 real-life melodrama I Want to Live! His work as an arranger was so highly regarded that when, in 1961, Frank Sinatra quit Capitol Records to found his own label, he brought Mandel on board to arrange his first album, Ring-a-Ding Ding! The album has real zing thanks in no small part to Mandel’s punchy, gleaming brass writing. Mandel found another colour entirely in the muted trombones and heartfelt trumpet solo of the ‘Main Title’ of Vincente Minnelli’s 1965 film The Sandpiper.

The story of a free-minded painter and her adulterous affair with a religious, married headmaster, The Sandpiper was largely a vanity project for the, at the time, notoriously adulterous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who married just before shooting began. It is fair to say of Taylor and Burton that when they were good, they were very, very good and that when they were bad, they were torrid – and this film is most definitely a case of the latter. Mandel’s beautifully restrained and tender score, however, is the film’s highpoint. Indeed, the ‘Main Title’ music, with added lyrics, became the Oscar- and Grammy-winning Best Song ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’, subsequently recorded by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Stevie Wonder.

 

Franz Waxman: Suite from ‘Rebecca’ 
One of the exceedingly rare cases of an adaptation being as great as the original, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling gothic romance Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture. Telling the story of a famously unnamed heroine who is swept off her feet and marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter, a widower still in thrall to the memory of his mysterious late wife, the film owes much of its haunting atmosphere to the superb score of Franz Waxman (1906 – 1967), one of 122 that he wrote, and the one which he considered his finest.

As Waxman told the Hollywood Women’s Club Federation that same year:

The really dominant character in the story is dead... yet the entire drama revolves around her... Whenever a scene involving Rebecca appeared on the screen, it was up to the music to give Rebecca’s character life and presence.

To suggest her, whenever her character is referred to, he used the eerie sound of two novachords, an electronic precursor to the synthesiser, against the rest of his richly romantic orchestration.

His own suite from the film treats some of the ten musical themes which he linked to different characters and situations, including his noble theme for Manderley, the grand house at the centre of the story, and a plushly orchestrated Straussian love theme.

The suite opens with the ‘Main Title’ sequence, a troubling bell tolling insistently above scurrying strings, before modulating to lush F sharp major to illustrate the sweep of the dark love story. The suite then jumps forward to ‘After the Ball’, a scene in which the heroine breaks down, unwittingly having been tricked by the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, into impersonating Rebecca. A solo alto flute playing Rebecca’s theme introduces the ‘Confession Scene’ in which Maxim reveals his true feelings, accompanied in the strings by the Love Theme. The final sequence evokes the terrifying fire that engulfs Manderley, and in the process purges the traumatic past.

 

Alfred Newman: Street Scene
 Even if he had not been a first-rate composer, Alfred Newman (1900 – 1970) would be enduringly famous for two reasons: he wrote the celebrated fanfare which accompanies every Twentieth Century Fox film, and he created the still-used Newman System that synchronises the playing and recording of film scores with the moving image. The conductor’s print of the film is specially marked for two in every ten frames to create a standard beat so the conductor can keep the players in strict time to synchronise music and action.

Of the more than 200 scores that Newman wrote, Street Scene is arguably the most celebrated and well used. On 17 September 1948, the Fox boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, sent Newman a memo: ‘Dear Al, Do nothing but continue to use Street Scene wherever it fits.’ The key word is ‘continue’. Newman’s signature work had been composed for the gritty, early sound-film Street Scene, but the melody became a dance and military band hit and, with lyrics added, a vocal standard. It reappeared in the 1941 film noir I Wake Up Screaming and no fewer than six other 1940s films. Its most full-bodied version, however, was this theatre-style overture in four-track stereophonic sound for the main title of the rom-com in brand-new CinemaScope starring Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall, How to Marry a Millionaire.

 

© 2022 David Benedict
 The writer and broadcaster David Benedict is the London critic of Variety and columnist on The Stage. He is writing a biography of Stephen Sondheim for Random House (U.S.A.) and Picador (U.K.).