Franz Waxman - Film Music and The Los Angeles Music Festival (1935-1949)

Film Music and The Los Angeles Music Festival (1935-1949)

In Hollywood Waxman met James Whale, who had been highly impressed by Waxman’s work for Liliom. Waxman’s breakout score The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) followed. Its success 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 of the next several years, but the score that made him famous, came in 1940 with Alfred Hithcock’s Rebecca. Because of his success with Bride of Frankenstein Waxman was frequently called to work on scores of horror or suspense, and Rebecca was the culmination of the genre for Waxman.

Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first film made in Hollywood, and thus it was the first time he was allowed a full symphonic score. David Selznick financed the film at the same time he was making Gone With the Wind. Selznick had asked Hitchcock to leave England to come work on the film. Waxman’s score for Rebecca is eerie and ethereal, often times setting the mood and as Jack Sullivan put it, becoming a “soundboard for the subconscious.”

In 1943 Waxman left MGM and moved to Warner Brothers, where he was worked along side 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). However, his time at Warner Brothers did not last long and by 1947 Waxman had left Warner Brothers to become a freelance film composer, taking only the jobs he wanted rather than being appointed by the studio.

1947 brought with it another major development in Waxman’s career: he formed the Los Angeles Music Festival for which he served as music director and conductor for the next twenty years, until his death in 1967. 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 Miklos Rozsa, conducting his Violin Concerto.

In 1948 Waxman scored the film Sorry, Wrong Number, which climaxes with the use of a passacaglia thus highlighting Waxman’s highly inventive use of form for film. Waxman had used classical forms before, the climactic “Creation” cue from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is as Christopher Palmer puts it “is in effect a fantasia on one note.” A climactic scene in Objective, Burma! (1945) was scored fugally, and this would become one of Waxman’s trademarks, returning in Spirit of St. Louis (1957) and Taras Bulba (1962).