Franz Waxman

Oscar Calling - Waxman received a total of 12 Oscar nominations during his Hollywood career. He was the only composer to be awarded Academy Awards two years running – for 1950s SUNSET BOULEVARD and 1951s A PLACE IN THE SUN. For the former, Paramount will be releasing a DVD of the film for Christmas 2002 and one of the special features will be a ten-minute documentary on Waxman. For the latter, Waxman’s compositions included an alto saxophone denoting Elizabeth Taylor’s character. Waxman went to great lengths to find the right saxophonist for the job and auditioned a hundred musicians, before finally settling on Ted Nash. As a saxophonist myself, I feel it is one of the few instruments where an individual’s tone can vary so greatly from that of another, so Waxman’s time-consuming search was an astute decision. Film music aficionados will be most familiar with the RCA album conducted by Charles Gerhardt, with the sax solos on the suite of music from A PLACE IN THE SUN played to perfection by session man Ronnie Chamberlain. Another fine rendition of the suite was on the album ‘Music from Hollywood’, a live recording of a 1963 Hollywood Bowl concert featuring the original soloist Ted Nash, re-released on compact disc by Columbia Legacy in 1995.

Annoyed with Oscar - Waxman resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1954, in protest over Alfred Newman’s THE ROBE not receiving a nomination, which demonstrates his respect for his fellow composers. Interestingly, Waxman scored the sequel to THE ROBE, DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS, which reworked Newman’s themes from the former film.

Waxman at Work - Some of Waxman’s working practices have become standard procedure in film music composition. He felt that “the foremost principle of good scoring for motion pictures is the color of orchestrations. The melody is only secondary.” Waxman of course wrote his own fair share of memorable tunes, as he believed “in strong themes which are easily recognizable and varied according to the film’s needs but the variations must be expressive and not complicated.” While these two comments might appear to be contradictory, in actual fact they show a keen intellect ultimately concerned with providing music which suited a given film, not taking center stage unless absolutely, dramatically necessary. Music editor and Paramount Pictures music department executive Bill Stinson remarked that, “when Franz would score a picture, he would put the dialogue in his ear and he would conduct to dialogue just to get the nuances in music that he needed.” Makes a change from a click track, I suppose! But seriously, this remark goes a long way to explain why, amongst his colleagues, Waxman’s under-dialogue music worked so well, when that of other composers could be overpowering and ultimately distracting.

As he progressed from his assignments of the early to mid Golden Age, Waxman’s predominant compositional style, influenced by the music of Wagner, Strauss, his fellow Hollywood composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and also the stylisms of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, was slowly superseded by a more forward-thinking, progressive characteristic of dissonant harmonies. Those who say that it was primarily Alex North, David Raksin and Leonard Rosenman who remodelled the 19th Century approach of the typical “Hollywood Sound” should study Franz Waxman. Also, Waxman made great use of fugal writing in his film scores, proving that movie music does not have to be watered down, so-called “serious” music. Today’s composers would do well to remember this. From the Latin “fuga”, meaning “flight”, a fugue is a technique where one voice states a theme, which is developed by further voices, before returning to the opening statement. One of the best examples of his use of a fugue is to be found in the Oscar-nominated OBJECTIVE, BURMA! During the parachute drop / hill-climbing sequence, the music adds to the struggle as each layer builds on the previous layer. Another Waxman-ism is the use of the passacaglia, wherein a theme in the bass is continually repeated while variations are introduced around it, a good example being the climactic scene in SORRY, WRONG NUMBER (1948), the music increasing the tension greatly. For more familiar examples of a passacaglia and fugue, just think of Jerry Goldsmith’s THE BLUE MAX and the final aerial battle, which took him more time to write than the rest of the score.

Another working example is Waxman’s use of the luftpause, which is a pause for a dramatic point; for instance, in the climax of the “Asleep” cue from THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS. Another may be found in the last minutes of LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, when Audrey Hepburn is running alongside the train as it leaves the Paris station. The music is building. When Gary Cooper sweeps her up on board, the music stops for a second or two to make the moment more dramatic.

In the contemporary film and television environment, one often hears of composers working on many projects either simultaneously or back to back. But it has been proven that composers in the Golden Age worked on many more films, with or without help, than is the norm today. John Waxman, who first became aware of what his father did for a living around the time of OBJECTIVE, BURMA!, has his own recollections of the time his father was working on three high profile films at the same time: “He’d get up in the morning and work on a contemporary jazz score for CRIME IN THE STREETS until breakfast, take a break and work on a Kirk Douglas western called THE INDIAN FIGHTER until lunch, and then from lunch till dinner, work on THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS.”

More Time for Research - Franz Waxman represents a good example of how important it is for a certain amount of musical research in some film scores. Today, many ethnic sounds are layered in, often through the use of samples, with little actual research. Time is the biggest hurdle as to why this is not done nowadays, with three weeks being an average time to compose and record a score. In the Golden Age, one may have had longer in which to deliver the goods but it still speaks to the composer’s merit. Undoubtedly, Waxman was not the only composer to indulge in a great deal of research. Miklos Rozsa researched historical and geographical idioms for many scores, including QUO VADIS and BEN-HUR.

For PRINCE VALIANT (1954), Waxman composed in an English idiom, combining early madrigals with post-romantic symphonic writing. More revealing is that, commissioned to score THE NUN’S STORY (1959), Waxman wrote a letter to director Fred Zinneman and producer Henry Blanke, in which he asked for an earlier starting date, explaining his reasons in a most literate manner. In part, he said “We need time – time to create”. Unfortunately, this is one luxury composers do not often have but in Waxman’s case, he got the extra time and the results were worth it, earning Waxman his eleventh Academy Award nomination. The music was recorded in Rome, where Waxman had gone to the Papal Institute of Religious Music, to research Gregorian chants, which were to form the basis of the score. He also made the singular use in his film music of the twelve-tone scale to depict the insane asylum in the film. At the Oscars, THE NUN’S STORY lost to Rozsa’s BEN-HUR, a score which Waxman said deserved to win, stating that Rozsa was “the best film composer”. Producer Blanke praised Waxman’s efforts in the original album’s liner notes, stating “I feel that this is as close to the perfect dramatic motion picture score as has yet been written.” Not bad, considering that Zinneman had originally thought the film did not need music but Warner Bros. had dictated otherwise, as they had no faith in the film and thought music might help.

In 1962, Waxman had the good fortune to have been invited by the Soviet government to conduct in Russia, thus becoming the first American conductor to conduct the major orchestras of the USSR in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. While there, he found time in Kiev to study Ukrainian folk music, which he put to good use in his score for the same year’s TARAS BULBA, including the understandably celebrated sequence ‘The Ride to Dubno’, a tour-de-force musical extravaganza for a score he was fond of and which earned him his final Academy Award nomination. These three scores are amongst the most respected in film music circles.

Television - Waxman was not a snob when it came to the small screen, which used his PEYTON PLACE theme for the ensuing series. He also composed for series such as GUNSMOKE and ARREST AND TRIAL and the music for ‘The Sixteen Millimetre Shrine’ episode of Rod Serling’s acclaimed anthology series THE TWILIGHT ZONE. The story and, therefore most logically, the score, covered similar territory to that of the Waxman-scored SUNSET BOULEVARD.

Festivities in the City of Angels - In 1947, Franz Waxman founded the Los Angeles Music Festival and it was through his efforts as principal conductor and music director during the ensuing twenty years until his untimely death, that he brought many works to the West Coast. Amongst these premieres were Claude Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, Arthur Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (Waxman conducted the West Coast premiere, which was its second performance in the United States), as well as symphonies by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and William Walton. Stravinsky, who never managed to compose for film himself, despite a number of his students using his techniques in their film music, was featured with Soldier’s Tale and his opera The Nightingale. The composer himself conducted the world premiere of his ballet Agon and gave the US premiere of his Canticum Sacrum at the 1957 Festival. The previous year, Waxman conducted the West Coast premiere of Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto.

Concert Hall Composer - Concerts of the Los Angeles Music Festival, 1947-1966 - Franz Waxman is one of the few composers whose film music translates well to the concert hall and this reflects upon the fact that he did not differentiate between his film and concert hall music. Unlike Miklos Rozsa, he did not lead a ‘double life’; he did not draw clear lines of demarcation between his programmatic and concert compositions. Like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, for example, Waxman adapted material from his film music. His Elegy for string orchestra and harp came from OLD ACQUAINTANCE (1943), while Ein Feste Burg was taken from EDGE OF DARKNESS (1942)  and Overture for Trumpet and Orchestra was based on music in THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT (1945). The Carmen Fantasy for violin and orchestra was based on themes from Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ for the film HUMORESQUE (1947, an Oscar nominee for Best Score), which was performed on the soundtrack by the violinist Isaac Stern and Jascha Heifetz recorded it for the RCA label. A new generation of violinists have championed this work and Maxim Vengerov’s recording with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic has become a legend in our own time. Of course, some of Waxman’s film scores were fashioned into suites for concert performance, such as A PLACE IN THE SUN, REBECCA and SUNSET BOULEVARD. Waxman was also fascinated by Stevenson’s ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, for which he wrote the music for the 1941 film version starring Spencer Tracy; for years he worked on and off on an opera but it was never completed. One might surmise (although it is not actually the case) that this, too, contained material from the film score, which was Academy Award-nominated for Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture, along with his SUSPICION. Waxman did sometimes feel like turning his back on Hollywood and writing purely for the concert hall but as his son observes, “he was basically a dramatist and loved the challenges that a new film score assignment presented.”

Among Waxman’s other concert hall works are 1955s Theme Variations and Fugato for jazz orchestra and Sinfonietta for Strings and Timpani, the oratorio Joshua four years later and the following year’s Goyana. Perhaps his most heartfelt non-film work, The Song of Terezin was commissioned by the May Festival of Cincinnati and performed there in May 1965. This was a song cycle for mixed chorus and orchestra, which had its origins in ‘I Never Saw Another Butterfly’, a collection of poems by children interned in the Theresianstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Fritz, one of Waxman’s brothers, had died in a concentration camp while another, Max, was killed in action in the First World War (also, a brother and a sister had both died in infancy).

What If…? - Franz Waxman turned down the film MARTY (ultimately scored by Roy Webb and analyzed by this writer in Soundtrack Vol. 20, No. 77), as his son comments “he did not think the public would be interested in the life of a butcher”. It went on to win the 1955 Oscar for Best Picture. Due to scheduling conflicts, he also was unable to score such films as THE EGYPTIAN (co-composed by Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann), THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (Dimitri Tiomkin), SPARTACUS and CLEOPATRA (both scored by Alex North). It is interesting to imagine what Waxman would have done for these films and indeed, his son John mentions that “the late Christopher Palmer and I used to play the ‘what if’ game – what if Tiomkin had scored HOW THE WEST WAS WON etcetera.”

Philatelist Composer - For Franz Waxman it was always music; John Waxman says that when he was not writing film scores, his father was guest conducting orchestras, writing concert works and planning the next season of the Los Angeles Music Festival. This left little time for hobbies but he was a stamp collector. Little did he know, that one day his image would grace a postage stamp of its own, along with his Golden Age colleagues Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, all painted by talented film poster artist, Drew Struzan.

John reports that some of his father’s own particular favourites of his own film scores were THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, REBECCA, OBJECTIVE, BURMA!, CRIME IN THE STREETS and TARAS BULBA. As for non-film compositions, “He greatly admired his colleagues’ work, such as Shostakovich and Rozsa, to name a few, as well as Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ and Tschaikovsky’s ‘Svmphonv No.6.’”

The Legacy - While still actively working, Franz Waxman contracted cancer and passed away on the 24th of February 1967. His final film score is often mentioned as being the previous year’s LOST COMMAND. In fact, he composed the music for one other production that never made it into cinemas and instead turned up on television – THE LONGEST HUNDRED MILES. In his thirty two years in Hollywood, he had scored a total of one hundred and forty-four films (if one counts the films tracked with Waxman’s music, this brings the total to one hundred and eighty-eight) and it begs the question, as with the other film music greats, how they could maintain a high standard of writing over an extended period of time. This perhaps stems from the fact that he was not interested as much in the music he wrote for film as a separate entity (although, like all good music, much of it does stand on its own in the concert hall or on album) but as a part of the production, much like the costume design or the cinematography. As for the son, is he the keeper of his father’s musical legacy? “The music is his legacy. Not an individual.” In John’s opinion, is there a Franz Waxman equivalent working in film music today? “My father was multifaceted and there have been several ‘Hollywood’ composers who have successfully taken the same route.”

Franz Waxman’s legacy speaks of a highly talented individual, whose contributions to the worlds of cinema and music, through his roles as composer and conductor and concert impresario are remembered to this day and will be as long as they are people like John Waxman, record producer such as Robert Townson, and publications such as this one, to never let that legacy fade away.

Themes & Variations - As a companion to our Franz Waxman appreciation, let’s get the low-down on Waxman Junior and his own work, who has been kind enough to answer my questions, giving me a deeper insight into the work of his father.

John’s name appears a lot in various film music books and periodicals and this is because he is seen as one of the first ports of call, due to his knowledge and education. As a film historian, he is invited to participate in forums and lectures on the subject. His company, Themes & Variations supplies parts for concerts and new recordings of music for film. The company was founded when John was working on the RCA Classic Film Scores series of recordings with George Korngold and Charles Gerhardt. This series was undoubtedly one of the most important recording projects in film music and recording history in general. Without them, maverick filmmakers such as Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese may not have “rediscovered” Bernard Herrmann (recording in England and working on European, films) and he would have not made the triumphant return to Hollywood that he did, prior to his untimely death. John Waxman says that his memories of the RCA series “are fond ones. The impact of the thirteen recordings was tremendous.”

Perhaps the direct successor to RCA and the Elmer Bernstein Filmusic Collection is the Marco Polo label. Citing a couple of works by his father, John says “In addition to Marco Polo, there is Bob Townson’s fabulous series on Varese Sarabande. PEYTON PLACE is a great recording and from what I have heard so far, REBECCA is also going to be wonderful.” But surely, there is already a representative album of the latter score on Marco Polo, why re-record it yet again, when so much of Franz Waxman’s work remains unpreserved on disc? “When Marco Polo recorded REBECCA, it was not under the best conditions [the early recordings were made in a church, which resulted in a poorer-than-hoped-for sound]. But that has changed recently thanks to John Morgan and Bill Stromberg. OBJECTIVE, BURMA! and MR. SKEFFINGTON are both excellent CDs. In addition to these, there will be at least two or three original soundtrack recordings coming from Varese Sarabande and Film Score Monthly in 2002-2003.

The music parts housed in the rental library were reconstructed from the composer’s original sketches and orchestrations, although of course a number of concert arrangements do differ from the film versions, be they those of Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams, to name just two fan favorites. But if you would like to get your hands on a copy of the music, think again. Themes & Variations does not send, sell or lend scores to fans or collectors, only to professionals.

John is also a consultant to recording labels such as Decca, Koch, Nonesuch, Philips Classics, Silva Screen, Sony, Telarc and Varese Sarabande, helping in preparing recording projects. Themes & Variations also represents Famous Music Publishing Companies, the music subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. From the Columbia Pictures library, the company has James Horner’s THE MASK OF ZORRO, Patrick Doyle’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and Thomas Newman’s LITTLE WOMEN. T&V, to use its website address acronym, has restored many of the major works by Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman and Max Steiner (among others), while every year adding such contemporary works as Stephen Warbeck’s SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and Rachel Portman’s THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and CHOCOLAT. Two years ago, John added a recording unit to the T&V family.

‘Celebrating the Classics’ was the premiere release – this was to commemorate the release by the US Postal Service of the ‘Hollywood Composer’ series of six stamps. John also mentions that “my next record project will be called ‘Alone in a Big City…’, aka the Franz Waxman Songbook. This CD will feature songs composed by Waxman Senior for German and French films before he came to the United States. The songs will be sung in German, French and English.”

John played the piano and violin as a youngster – but, even though his father was “in the business”, there was no pressure on John – Franz and Alice’s only child – to play an instrument. Although he never contemplated following in his father’s footsteps, he has created suites from film music for his rental company. I was curious as to whether the Waxman line might result in another composer for film with the illustrious surname – are there any other relatives who work in the arts, or entertainment field? “No, not directly in music but our daughter Alyce is a graphic designer and our son Joshua is a lawyer.”

As regards his father’s works, John's “personal favourites are not, restricted to his film music, I appreciate his classical works as well, such as his soon to be recorded oratorio ‘Joshua’ and ‘The Song of Terezin’, which was released by Decca for their Entarete Musik series.”

Has John ever contemplated writing a book about his father or indeed is he aware of any such plans? “I’m thinking about it. There are several books in the works.” But has he found that everything written about the subject today has nothing new to say? That everything there is to be said has been covered or is there anything he personally would like, to see covered? John’s answer is enigmatic: “That’s for my book.”

Primary Sources

The Composer in Hollywood by Christopher Palmer, Marion Boyars, London 1993
Music for the Movies (Second Edition) by Tony Thomas, Silman-James Press, CA 1997
Film Score: The View from the Podium by Tony Thomas, A.S. Barnes and Co., NJ 1979
Listening to Movies: The Film Lover’s Guide to Film Music by Fred Karlin, Schirmer Books, NY 1994

© Dirk Wickenden 2002/2022