Franz Waxman (né Wachsmann; December 24, 1906February 24, 1967) was a German-born composer and conductor of Jewish descent, known primarily for his work in the film music genre. His film scores include Bride of Frankenstein, Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Stalag 17, Rear Window, Peyton Place, The Nun's Story, and Taras Bulba. He received twelve Academy Award nominations, and won two Oscars in consecutive years (for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun). He also received a Golden Globe Award for the former film. Bernard Herrmann said that the score for Taras Bulba was "the score of a lifetime."
He also composed concert works, including the oratorio Joshua (1959), and The Song of Terezín (1964–65), a work for orchestra, chorus, and children's chorus based upon poetry written by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Waxman also founded the Los Angeles Music Festival in 1947 with which he conducted a number of West Coast premieres by fellow film composers, and concert composers alike.
Biography
Early life (1906–1934) Waxman was born Franz Wachsmann () in Königshütte to Jewish parents in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia (now Chorzów, Poland). At the age of three Waxman suffered a serious eye injury involving boiling water tipped from a stove, which left his vision permanently impaired.
In 1923, at age 16, Waxman enrolled in the Dresden Music Academy and studied composition and conducting. Waxman lived from the money he made playing popular music and managed to put himself through school. While working as a pianist with the Weintraub Syncopators, a dance band, Waxman met Frederick Hollander, who eventually introduced Waxman to the eminent conductor Bruno Walter.
Waxman worked as an orchestrator for the German film industry, including on Hollander's score for The Blue Angel (1930). One of his first dramatic scores was for the film Liliom (1934). That year Waxman suffered a severe beating by Nazi sympathizers in Berlin that led him to leave Germany and move with his wife first to Paris, and soon after to Hollywood.
Film music and the Los Angeles Music Festival (1935–1949)
In Hollywood, Waxman met James Whale, who had been highly impressed by Waxman's score for Liliom. The success of his score for Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) led to the young composer's appointment as Head of Music at Universal Studios. Waxman, however, was more interested in composition than musical direction for film, and in 1936 he left Universal to become a composer at MGM. Waxman scored a number of pictures during the next few years, but the score for Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) made his name. Waxman was frequently called to work on scores of horror or suspense films, and Rebecca was the culmination of the genre for Waxman.
Rebecca was Hitchcock's first Hollywood film as part of his contract with David O. Selznick, and thus it was the first time he was allowed a full symphonic score. Selznick financed the film at the same time as he was making Gone With the Wind. Waxman's score for Rebecca is eerie and ethereal, often setting the mood and as Jack Sullivan put it, becoming a "soundboard for the subconscious."
In 1943, Waxman left MGM and moved to Warner Bros., where he worked alongside such great film composers as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. A period of extended composition followed, including such films as Mr. Skeffington (1944) and Objective, Burma! (1945). A climactic scene in Objective, Burma! was scored fugally, and this would become one of Waxman's trademarks, returning in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) and Taras Bulba (1962).
In 1947, Waxman formed the Los Angeles Music Festival, for which he served as music director and conductor for the rest of his life. Waxman's goal with the LA Music Festival was to bring the thriving town to "European cultural standards", according to Tony Thomas. In addition to performing the work of great masters such as Stravinsky, he also collaborated with his colleagues, such as Miklós Rózsa, conducting his Violin Concerto.
Post-war film scores (1947–1959) By 1947, Waxman had left Warner Bros., to become a freelance film composer, taking only the jobs he wanted rather than being appointed by the studio. Waxman scored the film Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), which climaxes with the use of a passacaglia, highlighting Waxman's highly inventive use of unusual musical forms in film. Waxman had used classical forms before: the climactic "Creation" cue from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), as Christopher Palmer expresses it, "is in effect a fantasia on one note."