Sunset Boulevard (1950-1959)
1950 brought with it Waxman’s Academy Award for Sunset Boulevard. The score is fast paced and powerful, utilizing various techniques to highlight the insanity of Norma Desmond, including low pulsing notes (first heard in The Bride of Frankenstein) and frequent trills. According to Mervyn Cooke, Richard Strauss’s Opera Salome was the inspiration for the wild trills heard during Desmond’s insane final performance.
In 1951 Waxman became the first composer to win the Academy Award two years in a row, this time for the film A Place in the Sun. However, while awards for film music highlighted the beginning of the 1950s, the 50s is also the decade during which Waxman began to write serious works for the concert hall. 1955 brought with it the Sinfonietta for Strings and Timpani and 1959 saw the completion of Waxman’s oratorio Joshua. Composed to commemorate the death of Waxman’s wife, Joshua with its strong Hebrew influences and extensive use of form is a powerful example of Waxman’s compositional powers by the end of the 1950s.
Read more about this topic: Franz Waxman
Famous quotes containing the words sunset and/or boulevard:
“Our bread need not ever be sour or hard to digest. What Nature is to the mind she is also to the body. As she feeds my imagination, she will feed my body; for what she says she means, and is ready to do. She is not simply beautiful to the poet’s eye. Not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to be fed and clothed, sheltered and warmed aright, are equally beautiful and inspiring. There is not necessarily any gross and ugly fact which may not be eradicated from the life of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)