Silent movies were filled with music.
Surprised? More than in many of today’s films, movies of the silent era overflowed with music, whether from a single piano in smaller movie houses or a full orchestra in large cities. As film unspooled onto the screen, musicians provided live accompaniment. While this was often improvised or chosen from the classical repertoire common among Western musicians, there were also original scores that directors sent to theaters along with the reels: sad music for sad scenes, love music for romantic bits, heroic music for the clashes of good and evil, etc. Charlie Chaplin’s silent movies came packaged with music composed by him.
Just at the moment when silent movie music was at its peak, providing nonstop accompaniment and employing hundreds if not thousands of musicians nationwide, sound came to the screen, and with it … musical silence. Live music for silent film had been almost unceasing, covering up the awkwardness of hearing nothing while looking at something. It was also a creative part of the cinema experience: Except where directors wrote or commissioned their own music, musicians were free to imagine music for any given scene.
All that vanished in 1927, when “The Jazz Singer” ushered in the era of the talkies.
Talkies Without Music and With
At first, the novelty of sound on film produced a flood of all-singing, all-dancing features. By contrast, the few nonsinging talkies that were released in the late ‘20s had no music at all. Producers were convinced that moviegoers would be flummoxed by hearing music coming from the screen unless it was made by musicians they could see on the screen. Live music during a silent movie had been one thing; audiences knew where it was coming from. But background music on the actual soundtrack would appear to emanate from some hidden place, thus confusing moviegoers. Or so producers thought.Max Steiner set their thinking straight.
Steiner (1888–1971) was born in Vienna, studied piano as a little boy with the renowned Johannes Brahms, and conducted with Gustav Mahler as a teenager. His godfather was the famed composer Richard Strauss. At age 22, Steiner moved to London and quickly attained celebrity status as composer and conductor. In 1914, war broke out between England and Steiner’s native Austria. When England began to round up Austrian and German nationals for incarceration, Steiner used his connections to get passage to New York City. For more than a decade, he worked there as a theater musician, orchestrating and conducting Broadway shows.
A Composer Finds His True Calling
The advent of sound on film must have sent Steiner’s imagination racing, for he packed up and moved to Hollywood in 1929, taking a job doing what he’d done in New York—orchestrating and conducting musicals—this time for the screen. In 1931 came the break that his composer-self had doubtlessly been dreaming of, when producers decided to take a chance on a background score to “Cimarron,” based on a novel by Edna Ferber. He composed only a handful of cues, but each one was carefully crafted to fit the shape and mood of the scene. At age 43, Steiner had found his true métier.Then in 1933 came what is considered the first great film score: Steiner’s music for the original “King Kong.” The opening title music for this classic set the stage for film-music language to come. It is the harmonic syntax and melodic gestures of Late Romantic symphonic fare, with Steiner channeling Brahms and Mahler in the thick, brassy chords of a striking masculine theme, balanced immediately by a quiet, almost sweet string melody—the pair a musical equivalent of “beauty and the beast.”
Steiner’s life throughout most of the 1930s consisted of scoring dozens of features very quickly, first for RKO and later for Warner Bros. His incisive cues set the standard for other composers arriving in Hollywood in the ‘30s, many of them from Europe, reinforcing the tradition of Late Romantic symphonism.
Epic Tenderness
Steiner’s music for “Gone With the Wind” was a milestone in film scoring. Selznick let Steiner go crazy, filling up almost every minute of the movie with music, recalling the old days when silent films had wall-to-wall tunes. More than a dozen songs of the period are woven into the score’s orchestral fabric, songs such as “Dixie,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Folks at Home.” These lend a feeling of Civil War-era ambience without dominating a scene’s emotions.Steiner tagged certain characters with their own musical motifs, such as the Irish jig-like tune that accompanies old man O’Hara, Scarlett’s father. His cues for action scenes are a study in how background music helps create the internal rhythm of a film. The score is best known for “Tara’s Theme,” a melody that nearly bursts the seams of its own range, with octaves constantly reaching upward again and again, a perfect musical analog for the land of its title—expansive and beautiful.
Steiner went on to compose a total of more than 300 film scores, adapting his style along the way to fit changes in musical fashion but never losing sight of his symphonic heritage. One of his last scores was for 1959’s “A Summer Place.” His theme for it became a pop ballad of the day—not bad for a man in his 60s.
He is known today as the “Father of Film Music.” And indeed, if movie scores can be said to have founders, then Max Steiner was the George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams of the form. Everyone from Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklos Rozsa to Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein, to John Barry, John Williams, Thomas Newman, and Alexandre Desplat owes a debt of gratitude to the man who imbued movies with the majesty of symphonic sound.
