He longed to paint pictures with his music—and, in the process, he transformed the way that music was scored in films, spinning his own brand of unorthodox instrumentation and sophisticated, melodies. Henry Mancini incorporated popular music traditions into his productions, as well as a fair share of offbeat effects, bridging his classically trained awareness with a sharp ear for the instrumentalism of contemporary pop.
The career highlights of Mancini as composer and arranger of movie songs, film scores, and TV show soundtracks and themes are many. From “Moon River,” the timeless hit from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” to the sly score for “The Pink Panther” series; to the musical scores for “The Glenn Miller Story,” “The Benny Goodman Story,” and “The Glass Menagerie”; as well as TV series soundtracks ranging from “Peter Gunn” to “Newhart”; his trail was prodigious.
In due course, he was nominated for the Grammys 72 times and won 20 and was nominated for the Academy Awards 18 times, receiving four Oscars, towering over film screens with his music for four decades.
Son of Italian Steel Worker to King of Hollywood
Mancini’s father, Quinto, was a rugged individualist, who left a small, mountain town northeast of Rome and made it to the United States, all on his own. He was either 12 or 13 when he left home but made his way around Europe first before setting sail for America. Quinto ended up in Detroit and then Boston and found employment in a shoe factory. He married Anna Pece and the couple first settled in Ohio before moving to West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a bubble of Italian immigrants, and had one child.Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924, Henry Mancini gravitated toward an interest in music at an early age. Quinto introduced him to the piccolo when he was 8 years old and after that he played flute and piccolo in the Sons of Italy Band, though the piano eventually became his favored instrument.
It was a marquee showing of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Crusades” at Loew’s Penn Theater in Pittsburgh that forever changed Mancini’s young life. What he remembered most from that day was the music, the resonance of a big orchestra. The music, composed by Rudolph Kopp, mesmerized him. Powerful, suggestive, commanding, the clang and ring of the orchestra was so intimate that Mancini believed that there must have been a live orchestra performing behind the screen. That night on the ride home, Quinto told him that he should escape the steel mills by going to university and working diligently to earn a teaching degree.
In Mancini’s mind, however, the young boy had other visions eddying. He was thinking about the movies. Not about acting or starring in them. Not about directing them. He was thinking about composing their music.
During his time at Aliquippa High School, he was taken with the sounds of bandleader Glenn Miller. After graduation, Mancini attended Juilliard School of Music in 1942 and later signed up with the Air Force during World War II. He spent six weeks of basic training in Atlantic City, where he met his idol Glenn Miller, “and through his influence ... was admitted to one of the bands that was in Atlantic City at the time, an Air Force Band.”
Mancini was assigned to the 1306th Engineers Brigade in Le Havre, France, and, at the conclusion of his service, he got his discharge at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in March of 1946. Soon after, he joined the Glenn Miller-Tex Beneke Band as the group’s pianist and started to write originals. The Big Band era was drawing to a halt, but Mancini drew valuable practice writing in its vernacular with Beneke (1914–2000), a well-respected leader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. (Glenn Miller died in an aviation accident in 1944.)
“I had come to understand that you can be the greatest arranger in the world and get paid the highest fees for your work, but only composers get paid residual benefits for their music,” Mancini wrote in his autobiography “Did They Mention the Music?”
Nonstop Burst of Energy Leads to Four Decades of Creativity
The television show “Peter Gunn”—revolving around the actions of a super cool and suave detective—went on the air in September 1958, and Mancini’s jazzy score turned him into a bona fide recording artist. The music was elevated to a status as equally important as the program’s acting and script, and the soundtrack album reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, remaining on the charts for a total of 117 weeks. Mancini was nominated for four Grammys, including Album of the Year. The recognition thrust Mancini into the public limelight—and that’s where he stayed for the remainder of his days.His first Oscar nomination had come in 1954, when he and Joe Gershenson were nominated for Best Score for a Musical Picture for “The Glenn Miller Story,” a gratifying achievement of personal resonance for Mancini since Miller was not only his idol but the one who once encouraged him to join a band while in the Air Force. Among other ensuing achievements, Mancini composed the score for the 1958 Orson Welles thriller “Touch of Evil.”
He received three more Oscars in 1962: one for Best Music Score for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a joint nomination with Johnny Mercer for “Moon River,” and another for the title song of the film “Bachelor in Paradise.”
The simple melody of “Moon River” was tailored to the needs of star Audrey Hepburn, who had limited vocal resources. The wonderfully gentle ballad took Mancini one month to compose. Perhaps not even Mancini could have imagined that the two minutes and 41 seconds-long song in that film would have prompted such lasting testimony, with hundreds and hundreds of future recorded versions.
“The Baby Elephant Walk,” Mancini’s quirky, boogie-woogie, African-infused score to the 1962 John Wayne comedy “Hatari!” stands as a sterling example of his ability to take thematic risks. He continued to hit the mark with the score to “Days of Wine and Roses,” a 1962 dark drama with Jack Lemmon. “The Pink Panther” was released in 1963, and it was an immediate and huge success, made even more brilliant by Mancini’s score, which innovatively denoted humorous stealth as opposed to signifying things that were menacing and ominous, the way others did in previous films.
Cool and Elegant Legacy
Original instrumental music calls attention to a film’s narrative in ways that are both overt and subtle, and Mancini’s firmly established knack was in constructing it with singular vision. Before a single note was ever written, Mancini took thorough notes as to what themes were needed for a film or television program, and how they should be applied melodically, innately perceiving the contour and temperament of a melody, and how it would underscore and enhance the scene. Indeed, his purpose to emphasize drama.
