Franz
Waxman was born on December 24, 1906, in Königshütte, Upper Silesia,
German Empire (present-day Chorzów, Poland).
Waxman was the first
composer to win an Academy Award for best film score two years in a row.Waxman
began playing piano when he was seven years old. His father was
concerned that he might not be able to support himself as a musician, so
he convinced him to work at a bank. Waxman worked as a bank teller for
two and half years, using his earnings to pay for piano and composition
lessons. He then left the bank and went to study music in Dresden and
Berlin.Waxman
supported himself by playing with the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular
jazz band, in the 1920s. This led him to orchestrate several early
German films. He began working with producer Erich Pommer, who brought
Waxman with him to the US in the 1930s.
The first US film Waxman
contributed to was Jerome Kern’s Music in the Air (1934). The following year, he composed his first original Hollywood score for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
His work on this movie earned Waxman a two-year contract with Universal
as head of the studio’s music department. During that time, he scored
12 films, most notably Magnificent Obsession (1935), Diamond Jim (1935), and The Invisible Ray (1936).After
Universal, Waxman went on to compose songs for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
films for seven years. He scored an average of seven films per year
during this period.
His music can be heard in the Spencer Tracy movies Captains Courageous (1937), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and Woman of the Year (1942). In 1943 he moved to Warner Bros. Notable films he scored for that studio included Mr. Skeffington (1944), Objective, Burma! (1945), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), and Taras Bulba (1962). His score for Taras Bulba earned a Golden Globe nomination and was called “the score of a lifetime.”By
1947, Waxman was working with multiple film studios, conducting
orchestras in the US and Europe, and composing concert music. It was
also in 1947 that he created the Los Angeles International Music
Festival, which he ran for 20 years.
Over the years, the festival
hosted American and world premieres of 80 works by composers including
Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovitch and Schoenberg.Sunset Boulevard earned Waxman an Academy Award in 1950. He won an Oscar again in 1951 for A Place in the Sun,
making him the first composer to win an Academy Award for best film
score two years in a row. Over the course of his 32-year career Waxman
scored 144 films and earned 12 Academy Award nominations. He received
the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of West Germany and
honorary memberships in the Mahler Society and the International Society
of Arts and Letters.
Waxman died in Los Angeles on February 24, 1967.
For the 100th anniversary
of his Waxman’s birth, a street was named in his honor in his
hometown. The Museum of Modern Art also held a 24-film retrospective –
the first time that museum honored a composer.