Patrick Bade
Franz Waxman: Berlin to Hollywood

Patrick Bade - Franz Waxman Berlin to Hollywood

- That was the opening title music to Philadelphia Story, which came out in 1940. My old friend John Kobal always used to say that if he wanted to conjure up Golden Age Hollywood, that was the music that did it for him. And, John Kobal was certainly one of the greatest experts on every aspect of Hollywood. And if you can possibly get hold of it, I do recommend this book, People Will Talk by John Kobal, it was actually a whole series of interviews with everybody involved in Hollywood, not just the stars, the directors, the cameramen, and so on, it’s an absolutely brilliant book, he had such a knack of getting people to open up and talk to him. So, amongst the many talented composers working in Hollywood in the so-called Golden Age, I’ve chosen Franz Waxman because he is my favourite amongst all these composers, I think he’s a wonderfully gifted composer.

Visuals and audio are played throughout the lecture.

He would’ve had a very different career, I’m quite sure, if it were not for Adolf Hitler, and if he’d been able to stay in Germany. Whether it would’ve been a better career or not, that is very difficult to say, certainly I’m very grateful for the career that he did have. He was born in 1906 in Silesia, which was then part of the German Reich, the Second Reich. And now is of course part of Poland, and he was born into a German-speaking Jewish family, not wealthy. And at the age of 16, his talent was already showing itself and he enrolled in the Dresden Academy of Music, and needed to support himself there, and later, when he moved to Berlin, by playing in nightclubs, so he was introduced very, very early on, not just to classical music and the classical tradition, but to popular music. And when he got to Berlin his first important job was pianist for a jazz band called Weintraub’s Syncopators I think that’s him, I’m not 100% sure, sitting at the piano in this photograph. And then he came across Friedrich Hollaender, who wrote the famous songs that launched Marlene Dietrich’s career in 1930, with The Blue Angel.

And it was through Hollaender that he got a job at the UFA studios, the main German studio film studios in Berlin. They had the reputation for being technically the most sophisticated studios in the world. And of course, Hollywood poached a lot of its talent in the 1930s from the UFA Studios. So he actually worked on The Blue Angel, not composing the music, but orchestrating the music that was written by Friedrich Hollaender. The two of them would later meet. But at that time, of course, the position between them was somewhat reversed, and Waxman was much more famous and more successful as a film composer than Hollaender. So he was also very familiar with the cabaret and nightclub scene in Berlin. And he had a great talent as a songwriter, which, sadly, he didn’t really develop after he left Europe for America, because there was no need in America for this type of cabaret song. But I’m going to start off by playing you one of his Berlin songs that he wrote for Marlene Dietrich. And, amazingly, it was recorded in July 1934, so more than a year after the Nazis had taken power.

And a year after he himself had fled from Germany. The song is called Allein In Einer Grossen Stadt. And I love this song, for me, it completely encapsulates that sort of melancholy that you can feel in a big city, that sense of urban alienation. And it starts off with the words , you’re living in a huge town surrounded by people, but you are still alone. And I love this recording too, and, Marlene Dietrich’s rather wonky, out of tune intonation for me is all part of the charm, ‘cause I’m sure you’re familiar with the brilliant parody of Marlene’s out of tune singing by Madeline Kahn in the film Blazing Saddles. Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, he was attacked and beaten up by Nazi thugs on the streets of Berlin. And he was smart enough to take that as a sign that he should get out, and he got out immediately. And, of course, first port of call was Paris. This is where a whole generation of Berlin Jewish composers came in the early to mid '30s, there was Kurt Weill, Mischa Spoliansky, Richard Werner Heymann, and so on, and many others. And Paris was where they felt initially most at home, despite a tradition of antisemitism, and, of course, the precedent of the Dreyfus case, on the whole, Paris was very, at that time, very open, very welcoming to.

And they felt at home too, because the similarity of the culture that there was, of course, Cabaret was a Parisian invention, it was a Parisian export to Berlin. And there was also the burgeoning film industry, with the introduction of sound to French movies roundabout 1930. And so, I was very delighted to discover a song, that Franz Waxman wrote in Paris in 1935, while he was living there, that, it seems to have gone under the radar. Even Waxman’s son John Waxman was not aware of this song. And I will tell you the story of how I came across it, because, I think it’s quite amusing. About 15 years ago, I was very, very friendly with the daughter of another Berlin composer, Mischa Spoliansky, her name, she called herself Spolly, she was an adorable woman. I was very, very fond of her indeed. And she wanted to bring out a CD of her father’s songs. And she asked me to write the notes about him, and put him in the context of Berlin Cabaret in the 1920s, so I did this.

And I was trying to characterise the different composers, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler being more politically radical, Spoliansky being quite subversive in his way, but more in sexual matters rather than political matters. And the wonderfully gifted Werner Richard Heymann, who wrote songs that had a sort of almost, they were happy songs, they have a folk-like simplicity. Well, what I didn’t realise was that the daughter, that Spolly, who’s the daughter of Spoliansky, and the daughter of Richard Werner Heymann, had a lifelong sense of rivalry. Each thought that their father was the better composer, I think they’re both wonderful composers, they’re just very different. And the daughter of Richard Werner Heymann was absolutely incensed at what I’d written, she thought I was putting her father down by saying that that his songs were simple and folk-like. But there’s an art to simplicity as well. Anyway, she wrote a furious, angry letter to Spolly’s sons. And sadly, Spolly died before the CD actually came out. And I thought “Oh my God, this is terrible, "what can I possibly do to, you know, "I’ve set off this quarrel between the two families.” So I work, as you may know, for a French record company called Malibran. I write all their notes and I often put together CDs for them, they do historical recordings.

So I persuaded them to do a CD devoted specifically to Berlin Jewish composers who were working in Paris in the mid 1930s. And this gave me an opportunity to put more emphasis on Werner Richard Heymann, 'cause he actually was, in France, he was the most successful of those composers at the time, having written all the songs for the very popular Lilian Harvey movies. And so the CD was looking at all these composers, but I put a greater emphasis on Richard Werner Heymann. And I was going through the record catalogues of the period, to find songs that came out in the mid to late '30s. In the Columbia catalogue of 1938, I came across a song called Toute Seule, All Alone. Sung by another refugee from Nazi Germany, Marianne Oswald, but sung in French. And there it was. The Wachmann, actually the birth name of Franz Waxman, he changed the spelling of his name when he went to America, so I was very pleased, and I put it on the CD. And when the CD came out, I had almost simultaneously two emails. I don’t know how they got my address, but one was from the son of Franz Waxman, John Waxman. And he said to me, he was very delighted, because he was completely unaware of this song, and it was a wonderful addition to his father’s work.

At the same time, I got an email from an American academic, Oshkosh University, saying “You are quite wrong. "This song is not by Waxman, "it’s by somebody called Wal-Berg.” Well actually, Wal-Berg is the band leader, the band that actually plays on this record, but he didn’t compose the piece, so I said to him “Where did you get your information?” And he said “Oh, I got it off at Wikipedia,” and I thought, “Oh, well that’s not very good, is it?” So I was able to prove my point by sending what you can see on the screen, the Columbia catalogue of 1938 that very clearly says who the composer is. And anyway, his fingerprints are all over this song. It’s actually really quite similar to Allein In Einer Grossen Stadt. It’s a young woman who’s disenchanted and rather depressed and melancholy, but in French rather than in German. Her intonation is possibly even more wonky than Marlene’s. Another German Jewish refugee in Paris at this time was the very great film director, Fritz Lang, perhaps Germany’s leading film director in the 1920s, Famous masterpieces like Dr. Mabuse and Metropolis.

And so famous and so admired, that apparently Goebbels called him into his office and offered him honorary Aryan status, and he was wise enough not to take that up. And he went to Paris, and while there, he directed a film of Liliom, based on the play by Ferenc Molnar, which is also, of course, the basis of the musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein. And there, in the final scenes of this movie, of course, there are these supernatural events, where the hero dies and goes to Heaven and comes back again and so on. And for these scenes, Franz Waxman used a brand-newly invented instrument called the Ondes Martenot, it was invented by a gentleman called Maurice Martenot at the end of the 1920s. And it’s an electrical keyboard instrument. And it was wonderfully effective for creating a sense of mystery, and the eerie and supernatural in this film. And the American director, James Whale, who specialised in horror movies for the studio of Universal, he saw the film, and he was very impressed by the music. So he invited Waxman to go to Hollywood, and to write the score for the 1935 movie the Bride of Frankenstein.

And this, it must have been, of course, this is the same year that Korngold arrived in Hollywood. Korngold was arranging Mendelssohn’s music for the Midsummer Night’s Dream. But I think you could say that, for the raising of the level and the transformation of the role that music plays in the movies of Hollywood, Waxman really gets there first, and this is such an extraordinary, amazing, amazing score. I think you could make a suite out of it and it would work very well in the concert hall. I’m going to play you the scene where they’re creating they’ve created this woman, artificial woman, to be a bride for Frankenstein. And she’s still sort of, she hasn’t woken up yet. But you can hear the heartbeat, there’s a drum heartbeat, and an increasing sense of menace and drama in this music. A wonderful grotesquery there. You can tell that he’s familiar with Berg score for the opera Wozzeck. So Universal Studios had two great assets, Frankenstein and Deanna Durbin, a rather odd combination.

But it wasn’t really one of the top studios in Hollywood. And, after a short time, in 1937, Waxman was poached by the top dog studio, MGM. And he signed a contract and he was with them from 1937 till 1943. And it was while he was with MGM that he was loaned out to David O. Selznick for a very prestigious high-budget film, Rebecca, it was the first Hollywood film of Alfred Hitchcock. So I’m going to play you the opening title of that. And it starts off with a kind of musical logo, that had been written for Selznick by another distinguished composer, Alfred Newman. What I think is quite interesting here is, so we have this quite chirpy opening musical logo. And then it switches immediately into another world, another mood, and Waxman is so brilliant at this. And of course, the world of Rebecca, the story, I’m sure you know it, it’s a very dark story. And so straight away, we’ve got this mood of darkness, but also of romance. Waxman was nominated for an Academy Award for that score.

In fact, in a career of 32 years, with 144 films scored by him in Hollywood. He received 12 Academy nominations, he didn’t win for Rebecca, he had to wait until 1950, quite late in his career actually, to get his first Academy Award. And that was for one of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder, of course, it’s always said to be the only truly honest film ever made about the sleazy dark side of Hollywood. And, again, it has a truly symphonic score, most masterful orchestration. And I’m going to, again, play you the opening title, I’m sure you all know this movie, I think Trudy’s talked about it with you. And it starts off with a car chase. And straight away, nobody does menace and danger quite as well as Franz Waxman does. And all mixed in with this kind of bluesy, slightly sleazy atmosphere. The most famous scene in this movie is the final one, when the ageing Norma Desmond, this great film star of the 1920s, she’s murdered her lover, William Holden.

And she’s completely lost it, she’s gone mad. And the police come to arrest her, and she is coaxed down the staircase of her mansion, by being told that they’re making a movie of Salome, this is a role that she’s wanted to play all the way through the movie. And she starts off with this famous line, “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.” And then she descends the staircase, this is one of the most famous staircase descents in all of movies. And it’s worked so brilliantly, not just because of Wilder’s brilliant direction, but very much because of Waxman’s music. And he concocts a fantastic score for this, with very knowing references to the opera Salome by Richard Strauss, at the end of the opera, when she’s kissing the severed head of John the Baptist, there are these very eerie trilling woodwind. And we get the same here. Interesting how it goes into that major chord right at the end of this extremely unsettling piece of music. So he was a composer, as I said, who had a very thorough classical training, and a really excellent technique as a composer. And he knew his stuff. Of course, he was the go-to composer in Hollywood, if you wanted a sense of menace and danger.

So he was the perfect composer for the thriller Sorry, Wrong Number, where you have a tension building through the whole movie, as you realise that the heroine, Barbara Stanwyck, there’s a plot to murder her. And so, this is wonderfully conveyed by a very classical device of the passacaglia, it’s a device used by baroque composers in the 17th and 18th century, where you have a repeated ground bass. And over that, he very disturbing disquieting bi-tonal harmonies. And when I was listening to it, as I put this lecture together, it suddenly struck me, “My goodness, this sounds so similar to the passacaglia "that Benjamin Britten uses in his opera Peter Grimes,” the third of the Sea Interludes from that opera, very, very similar. And so I did check my dates, 'cause I wondered who did this first. And it was actually Benjamin Britten, of course, it was 1945 that Peter Grimes was premiered in London, and it was a year or so later premiered in New York, so I think that Waxman must have have known the Britten.

Well, The Paradine Case in 1947, he was required to write a mini piano concerto, these were very much en vogue in the 1940s, think of Dangerous Moonlight, and the Warsaw Concerto, and The Dream of Olwen and so on. When Dangerous Moonlight was made, in 1941, the studio actually had the temerity to go to Rachmaninoff and ask if he would write , which he of course refused to do. So Richard Addinsell wrote a very effective pastiche, mini Rachmaninoff piano concerto. But this is a little bit more acerbic, I would say, than The Warsaw Concerto. Rather more modern in tone. And would, I think, make a very effective piece in the concert hall. A film, which I think, you could use the German term Edelkitsch, noble kitsch, is Humoresque, which was a vehicle for Joan Crawford, and also starred John Garfield as a working class boy from an Italian background, who becomes a brilliant virtuoso violinist, and has a doomed affair with a much older Joan Crawford. And so, this was a film that no doubt introduced classical music to a very wide audience.

And what Waxman was required to do was to take bits of classical music, the Dvorak Humoresque, of course, that gave its name to the movie, Bizet’s Carmen, and the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, and turn them all into mini violin concertos. And, of course the final scene, actually, I just heard on the radio, that there is a new recording that’s out this week, which actually has the mini violin concerto created from the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, too late, I’m afraid, to get it to include in this lecture, but I love it in the movie, it’s the most amazing scene, where Joan Crawford decides, we see John Garfield, we switch backwards and forwards between him and her, and he’s at Carnegie Hall and he’s having a triumph, and he’s playing this violin concerto created from the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. He’s sawing away on his violin. And then we see Joan Crawford committing suicide by walking into the sea. And the waves go over her head just at the climax of the Liebestod, it is the most amazing, literally over the top scene. But the mini concerto created fromf, was so liked by the great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, that he began to perform it in concerts and he recorded it.

And here is part of it. Now, as I said, there’s no doubt that if he’d remained in Germany, and there would’ve been greater opportunities for him to develop the more serious side of his art. But he never gave it up altogether. And in the 1960s, towards the end of his life, he wrote a Cantata called The Song of Terezin. And this, the picture you see is the fortress and concentration camp of Terezin or Theresienstadt. And what particularly inspired him were the drawings and the poems written by the children in the camp, this is a photograph of children in Theresienstadt, I mean, the heartbreaking thing about a photograph like this is you know that probably not one of those children survived even to their next birthday, that they were regularly shipped off for annihilation in the death camps. So it’s an irony that the children didn’t survive, but their drawings and their poems did. And the drawings are, of course, very, very touching and they’re very well known, you’re probably familiar with them. And the poems too. And he set these poems to music, either with soloists or with chorus. Now, I’ve had a real rethink of this piece, 'cause when I wrote my book about music in the Second World War, there is a chapter at the end about all the music that is inspired by the Holocaust.

And I was fairly dismissive of most of it, the music and the art, that the Holocaust was something so enormous, so ungraspable, I mean, we’re still, really, only beginning to grasp the enormity of it. And I said in the book, I didn’t think any of these things could really convey all of that, and I was slightly dismissive of this piece. But I’ve come to know it much better, and I now think I’m regretting what I wrote, 'cause I now think it’s a really, really wonderful piece, the more I listen to it, the more moving and beautiful I think it is. And it really deserves to be much better known, there is a good recording of it, on Decca, which you should be able to get hold of, and I’m going to play you a movement, you can see it’s called The Garden, and it’s about a a little boy walking through a rose garden, and how beautiful and sweet he is.

And of course, both the writer of the poem and we know that that child wasn’t going to grow up, that child was going to be murdered. And, so this is what Waxman has to say about it. “This work is dedicated to the memory "of the thousands of children "who have passed through the camp of Terezin, "and particularly to those whose poems I have set to music. "Their eloquence and imagination "have been great sources of music, "and their courage will be an eternal beacon "to all mankind.” I also feel very much that the message of this piece is still extremely relevant. That, in fact, there’s been no diminution in man’s inhumanity to man, and particularly I would say, to children. And of course, as I speak, and as you listen, children are dying in conflicts around the world. And that is a very terrible thing. A piece, I find that unbearably touching, of such delicacy. Not, perhaps, what you’d expect, from the composer of all those rather frightening film scores.

Q&A and Comments:

So, this is Hannah, she just come back from Saint-Sulpice, that is a great neighbourhood. Yeah, good, glad you had a great time.

And this is Myrna, who’s ordered 5000 Nights at the Opera from Amazon. And when it arrived it looked like a pirated copy, oh, that’s too bad. Well, it’s the content of the book that’s important, not the binding, I would say.

Thank you Monica. “The scores are very intelligent,” yes they are.

Q: “Is it possible to say that these composers "introduced an element of sophist,”

A: Yes, they did, absolutely. And I’m currently preparing a lecture on George Antheil, the so-called Bad Boy of Music, who also worked in Hollywood and was slightly dismissive of all the Hollywood composers, excepting Waxman, he really admired Waxman. But he makes a very good point. That people who’d never heard a symphony orchestra, and never been to a concert hall. That they went to the movies, and that was their introduction to what an orchestra sounds like. And of course they did bring a lot from their central European backgrounds.

Q: Does the composer have to keep looking at?

A: Yeah, and there are plenty of photographs, actually of Korngold and the other composers, and that, you know, they’re doing it with a stopwatch 'cause they have, you know, to the second, they have to fit it in with what’s happening on the screen.

Q: Ron, “Did any of the great directors "ever request changes in his music "to better suit the mood they wished "for the script or scene?”

A: I’m sure that they did, 'cause a lot of that went on, and the most notorious example of that, of course, is Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. And because Bernard Herrmann wouldn’t compromise, Hitchcock jettisoned his score for The Torn Curtain. And I’m quite sure that that’s why The Torn Curtain failed, it would’ve been a much better movie if he’d used the Bernard Herrmann score. And actually, the director of Cinémathèque in Paris, I have been working on him, trying to persuade him to see if we can try and put together a version of Torn Curtain with the score, 'cause it was all recorded, you know, to the second, to go with all the sequences. So, theoretically, it would be possible to do that.

Thank you Vivian. Max Steiner, of course, wonderful composer, I absolutely love his score for King Kong, it’s absolutely brilliant.

Alice, “It must have been complicated "if the director decides to cut bits of the film.” Yes, indeed. And so, and these composers, Waxman was the top echelon, along with Korngold. So he was treated with a bit more respect than most. But really, they were treated often in a very demeaning way, and just required to, you know, churn out stuff, with very little respect for their own creativity.

Follow-on questions.

Q: “Was it the availability of composers like Waxman, "which actually inspired the studios to be so ambitious?”

A: Interesting, interesting, it’s a slight chicken and egg thing, isn’t it, well, because suddenly there was a lot of incredible musical talent available. All thanks to Adolf Hitler. Part of Hitler’s gift, you could say, to the rest of the world.

Thank you Alice. And Lorna. No, you haven’t quite understood me about the, the film, there were different pieces of music that were each turned into a mini violin concerto. One was based on Carmen, and there was another that actually finishes the movie, which is based on the Tristan Liebestod, I’m sure you can find it on YouTube.

And, thank you Erica, I appreciate your comment very, very much.

And thank you very much Rita.

“What made German composers so talented "compared with other countries?” I know. I wish I could answer that question, It’s a very interesting question, isn’t it, the Austro-German tradition.

Thank you Henry, Hitler’s gift was, you’re right, his last, well, the worst, obviously, I don’t have to tell you, the worst monster in the history of humanity, and the awful thing. This is not a very nice way to end this, this talk, is, much as you hate him, we must hate him, he was the most influential man of the 20th century, we are still, everything, all the tragedies, all the tragedy of the Middle East, it’s all down to Hitler. He has left such a poisoned and terrible legacy, and we can’t quite get out from under his shadow.

Anyway, sorry to end on such a negative tone, but thank you all very much, again, and I’ll be with you on Wednesday.