‘It’s time to take cinema music in hand, to eliminate the bungling and the inartistic and to thoroughly clean the Augean stable. The only way to do this is to write special music’
- Shostakovich
FRANZ Waxman - Sinfonietta for Strings
Bernard Herrmann - Suite from Fahrenheit 451
ERICH Korngold - Lento Religioso (from Symphonic Serenade)
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SAMUEL Barber - Adagio for strings
DMITRI Shostakovich - Chamber Symphony No.8
Franz Waxman
1906 - 1967
Franz Waxman was one of the most prolific and respected twentieth century composers of film music. Winning back-to-back Oscars for Sunset Blvd. (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951), he composed more than 100 film scores and earned 12 Academy Award nominations.
Aged 30, Waxman signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in 1937 was nominated for both Best Original Music and Best Score – the first two of 12 Academy Award nominations he was to receive for the 144 films he scored in his 32 years in Hollywood.
During the three decades he spent in the motion picture industry, Waxman also composed numerous concert works, and was a noted conductor. In 1947, he founded the Los Angeles Music Festival, which he directed for 20 years. World and American premieres of 80 major works by composers such as Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovitch and Schoenberg were given at the festival.
BERNARD HERRMANN
1911 - 1975
Herrmann is most known for his collaborations with the director Alfred Hitchcock, working on every film from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964). He wrote perhaps the most iconic cue in film history for Psycho (1960) - high screaming violins that depict the stabbing knife and heroine's screams.
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Hitchcock and Herrmann's close creative relationship came to an abrupt, dramatic end during the making of Torn Curtain (1966), badly disagreeing over the score. Still sore from the fallout, Herrmann received a new request from filmaker François Truffaut to write the music for his sci-fi dystopia Fahrenheit 451. Whilst flattered, Herrmann questioned why the French director didn't ask an avant-garde composer like Boulez or Stockhausen to write the score. Truffaut replied that they would merely write 20th-century music; what he wanted from Herrmann was "music of the 21st century".
ERICH KORNGOLD
1897 - 1957
Korngold was one of the most influential co-founders of the “sound of Hollywood” with his classics such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), “The Sea Hawk” (1940) and “The Sea Wolf” (1941). He received four Oscar nominations and received the prize for the "Best Original Score" in 1936 (“Anthony Adverse”) and 1938 (“The Adventures of Robin Hood”).
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Following all this success, Korngold wanted to re-establish himself as a composer of concert music and made plans to return to Europe for the first time since fleeing the Nazis almost ten years earlier. His plans were delayed following a heart attack in 1947. During his recovery at hospital, he began composing the Symphonic Serenade.
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"Lento religioso is of timeless depth and beauty – heartbreaking, but never sentimental."
- Jörg Widmann
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SAMUEL BARBER
1910 - 1981
Following Barber's graduation from the Curtis Institute, he won two Pulitzer Travel Scholarships to travel to Europe. He received the Prix de Rome and during his time there, met conductor Arturo Toscanini. This meeting proved valuable, as Toscanini went on to premiere his Adagio for Strings. Originally the slow movement from his String Quartet, this adaptation for full strings has become perhaps his most popular work.
“There is an arch of melody and form. The composition is most simple at the climaxes, when it develops that the simplest chord, or figure, is the one most significant.” - Olin Downes
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The Adagio famously features on the film score of Platoon (1986), and has been heard in episodes of The Simpsons, South Park, and Seinfeld.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
1906 - 1975
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Not necessarily known for his film music, Shostakovich wrote his first full-length score to Grigori Kozintsev's silent film New Babylon when he was only 23. Having spent much of his youth accompanying silent films on piano in St Petersburg's movie palaces, he was not new to the movies. Shostakovich described this score as having an "unbroken symphonic tone throughout".
Even though the film was not a huge success, Shostakovich was excited to be at the cusp of the modern day film score - moving away from silent films and towards scores where the 'music would be linked to the inner meaning and not to the external action.’ He continued throughout his career to write film scores alongside his concert music.​​​