Max Steiner

 

 

[1888 - 1971] The most important name for film music in his formative years. The silent cinema already have many creations in original music early in the 20s –performed live before the magnetic recording in films – but was the work of Max Steiner, specially the King Kong soundtrack in 1933, that outlined the most effective format for support the action on the screen.

 

Born in Austria, on a family of musicians, Maximilian Raoul Steiner was naturally oriented ot music since childhood. He studied with Gustav Mahler and became a composer and conductor for vaudeville, concert halls and operettas in his early yars of activiti. With the outbreak of World War I, Steiner moved to the United States where he worked in musical shows of George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. In 1929 he moved to Hollywood where would work as an orchestrator, but his talent naturally highlighted him as a composer. Music for Symphony of Six Millions (1932) would be a previous of what would develop more intensively in King Kong. In 1939, wrote another historical landmark with the music for Gone With the Wind, perhaps the most famous soundtrack in the history of cinema. Steiner created more than 200 soundtracks until he retired from work for health issues in 1965. Some of his compositions are unquestionable classic records of its period as The Charge of Light Brigade (1936), Jezebel (1939), Casablanca (1940), Sargeant York (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Searchers (1956), A Summer Place (1959), with one of the most memorable romantic themes of the history, and Rome Adventure (1962).