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were to follow most popular accounts, classical film music was almost single-handedly invented during the 1930s by a few European émigré composers, in particular the Viennese-born Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; the German Franz Waxman; and, the son of Eastern European immigrants, Alfred Newman. Jewish exile and emigration, according to Hollywood folklore, was the primary engine behind the romantic extravaganzas of the studio era. Hollywood, we are led to believe, owes the triumphs of classical film music to nothing other than the rise of Hitler and the effects of the Great Depression in Europe. Did it, though? And did Hollywood Wagnerianism and romanticism differ in any significant respect from the way in which Nazi film practitioners aspired to forge cinematic sights and sounds into Wagnerian configurations?
Hollywood scoring practice throughout the classical studio era largely followed the romantic conception of music as a pure language of emotions, a language of excess that transcended specific social or discursive contexts.
Like the masterpieces of nineteenth-century romanticism, classical film music understood itself as the other of conventionalized representation: a direct conduit to universal meanings and passions. Music, according to this construction, conjured forth forgotten pasts and unheard-of futures. Similar to the nineteenth-century masters of the concert halls, Hollywood composers based their practice on the idea that music is inherently “sedi-tious, sensual, pre-literate, pre-Oedipal, precultural—terms which all relegate music to something close to a Lacanian imaginary.”26 Music, following this understanding, referred the listener to places where human subjectivity could indulge in unhampered presence. For Hollywood’s new romantics, then, music may have had no real referent, but it had the ability to take us out of ourselves and make us experience something ethereal and timeless. Music transcended culture. It extended universal truths that were free of ideological distortions and therefore carried the viewer beyond the contingencies of the real.
This romantic ideology of music clearly appealed to the Hollywood film industry long before the arrival of synchronized sound or the exodus of Jewish composers to Southern California. During the silent era, piano accompanists had already based their background play on catalogues of putatively “natural” emotive significations. They explicated narrative turns and intensified moods with the help of Wagnerian leitmotifs and romantic orchestrations. In 1911 W. Stephen Bush suggested in the Moving Picture World, “Every man or woman in charge of the motion picture theatre . . .
is a disciple or follower of Richard Wagner.”27 Although it thus would be silly, as Caryl Flinn contends, to insist that middle-European immigrants
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basically invented the classical conception of film music and its Wagnerian principles around 1935,28 it might not be so silly to argue that the development of sound recording techniques between 1931 and 1934 modernized the position of Wagner in Hollywood to such an extent that they offered new creative possibilities for composers such as Steiner or Korngold, who were trained in negotiating the conflicting elements of late romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. With the new technologies of sonic postproduction and multiple-track recording, Hollywood scoring methods entered a phase of rationalization that seemed to contradict not only romanticism’s quest for organic totality but also Wagner’s own refusal to share the labor invested in the creation of total artworks. If we were to follow common wisdom, then, Steiner, Waxman, and Korngold succeeded under these conditions because their upbringing at the intersection of nineteenth-century idioms and twentieth-century modernism allowed them to revitalize the pathos of romanticism with the means of modern culture. Trained under the sign of Wagner and Strauss, immigrant composers intuitively knew how to give a human coating to what had been engineered with advanced technologies. They infused twentieth-century images with the primal power of nineteenth-century sounds and thus contributed to an entertainment industry whose primary purpose was to make capital out of the individual’s utopian longings and nostalgic attachments.
It is not difficult to see that this argument, in a rather perverse fashion, parrots Adorno’s apocalyptic equation of Nazi coordination and American mass culture. Similar to Nazi film practitioners, Jewish exile composers in Hollywood—the above argument suggests—relied on mechanical reproduction in order to produce nature; similar to Nazi film practice, Hollywood scoring departments under the guidance of Hitler refugees hoped to produce the old as an effect of the newest technology. But things are of course much more complicated than this line of reasoning implies. What, for example, do old and new really mean in this context? And why should we assume that nineteenth-century sounds had the same effects on audiences in Berlin and in New York during the 1930s? What makes the argument unsound, in other words, is that, like the romantic ideologues of music themselves, it naturalizes music as a prediscursive language of pure emotions. Instead of quickly proclaiming the compatibility of, say, Giuseppe Becce’s monumentalism and Max Steiner’s Wagnerian excess, we therefore need to ask what kinds of links Hollywood scores sought to establish with the past and what sorts of (imaginary) pasts and utopian futures Jewish exile composers communicated to the present.
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f i l m s c o r e s a s p o p u l a r m o d e r n i s m The introduction of synchronized film sound had a profound impact on contemporary American music production. It put several thousands of film accompanists out of work at the same time that it transformed Hollywood virtually overnight into a center of musical production in the United States second only to New York.29 Hollywood’s exile Wagnerians played a significant, although often ambivalent, role in the transformation of American music during the 1930s. Their eclecticism upheld endangered continuities, but it also undercut the antimodernist credos of many post-Depression American composers. In the first decades of the century European modernism had placed a taboo on harmonic, melodic, or coloristic beauty. Serious concert works no longer afforded romantic expressiveness or flowing tonalities and relied instead on a quasi-scientific or explicitly constructivist conception of music. American concert hall compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, on the other hand, were in the majority dedicated to overcoming the abstractions and formal experimentations of modernism. American composers of the post-Depression era were turning to “native” resources and rural folklore in the hope of finding an indigenous American musical style.30 The work of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson defined musical Americanism as the order of the day. Although there was clearly some dispute about what could or should be counted as authentic American traditions, composers of serious music nevertheless sought to promote musical forms that expressed a distinct sense of national identity.
The Wagnerianism of the Hollywood studios occupied an ambivalent position between the legacy of European modernism and this domestic vogue of musical nationalism. Like the Americanist composers of the 1930s and 1940s, émigrés such as Steiner and Korngold relied on compositional techniques that had lost currency among modernist composers since the turn of the century. Unlike some of the ideologues of musical Americanism, however, Hollywood’s new romantics did not really deny the fact that their musical recourse to the past relied on a number of modernist principles— on constructivism, performative self-reflexivity, and antiorganicism. Classical film scores drew from highly heterogeneous sources and often resulted in eminently hybrid configurations. Studio composers saw no potential contradiction in intensifying medieval narratives with nineteenth-century idioms. Nor did their work—in spite of the standardization of musical motifs, phrases, and themes—imply that musical expressions were particular to one specific culture.
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Seen from the vantage point of modernist aesthetic theory, studio film music may indeed be considered the mere shadow of autonomous art. Studio composers, one might contend, raided the past so as to provide their audiences with a marketable sense of universality that was otherwise denied to them. But given the peculiar function of film music within the studio system, it seems far from appropriate to lump Steiner’s or Korngold’s Wagnerianism together with the dominant currents of contemporary American music and, as a result, argue that their work typified a concerted backlash against aesthetic modernism. Seen in their historical context, the scores of émigré composers were in fact far more modernist than is often recognized. At its best, exile Wagnerianism, in following its principal task to rouse emotions and define viewing positions, opened curious avenues toward what one might understand as a form of popular modernism: an alternative modernism that within the bounds of a modern leisure culture of consumption gathered selected artistic innovations in a popular and modern vernacular of its own. Instead of aiming at organic fusions of dissimilar sources, the exiles’ Wagnerian scores absorbed conflicting materials into an open framework in which cinematic sounds were meant to communicate universal human passions.
Hollywood and Nazi sound practitioners, then, may have both subscribed to essentializing conceptions of music, but they operated within discursive frameworks that attributed fundamentally different meanings to the legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism in general and Wagner in particular. Film music in Nazi cinema, as I argued in chapter 1, served the purpose of containing desire and orchestrating Germanness. In classical Hollywood cinema, by way of contrast, Wagnerian sounds were mostly seen as part of a musical language that transcended national boundaries and ethnic particularity. Defined as the other of conventional representation, neoromantic film music had the power to rouse the individual’s emotions, stimulate the viewer’s desire for desire, and thus intensify the marks of human subjectivity. Far from hitting audiences over their heads, Hollywood’s Wagner echoed the ideological projection of unencumbered individualism, that is, the utopian view that under ideal conditions an individual’s determination would be rewarded with plenty, freedom, and wedlock.
wa g n e r at wa r n e r ’s :
t h e c a s e o f e r i c h wo l f g a n g k o r n g o l d It has become commonplace to say that Hollywood studio obligations crip-pled the artistic talents of exile composers by forcing them to score ever
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more films in ever shorter periods of time. The working conditions in the studios’ scoring departments, in particular at Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century–Fox, were surely different from those that composers had experienced prior to their emigration. Hollywood studios expected even “stars”
such as Steiner or Waxman to streamline their compositional practice according to the model of industrial assembly-line production. In many cases, however, rather than simply containing creativity, the studios’ expectations released new energies and triggered unexpected stylistic breakthroughs.
Studio conditions could open spaces in which émigré composers would transcend their initial background in lighter idioms and turn more serious or even dissonant than they might ever have intended. Exile studio composers, in particular after 1940, in fact encountered many occasions that forced them to masquerade themselves as aesthetic modernists and thus to mimic musical styles that clearly did not meet their original aesthetic preferences.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s career in Hollywood between 1938 and 1946
is a good case in point. Korngold was born in 1897 in Vienna. Raised under the ambitious tutelage of his father, music critic Julius Korngold, Korngold was celebrated in the first two decades of the century as a new wunderkind—
a second Mozart, excelling in both performance and composition, a musical genius no less prodigious than Gustav Mahler.31 Korngold’s first compositions were published when he was only thirteen, and from the ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann (The snowman, 1910) to the three-act operas Die tote Stadt (The dead city, 1920) and Das Wunder der Heliane (The miracle of Heliane, 1927), from his Trio in D major (1910) to the Piano Sonata no. 3 in C major (1930), Korngold’s music prior to his exile was already marked by strong melodic writing and emotive intensities, by dance-like rhythms and delicate chromatic harmonies, by spectacular fanfares and atmospheric mood paintings. Although Korngold clearly developed his own personal signature, his work remained deeply affected by the works of Brahms, Wagner, Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Johann Strauss. Possible echoes of the Second Viennese School, on the other hand, remained muted.
Dedicated to tonality and melodic beauty, the prodigy child Korngold was far from carrying out any Oedipal revolt against the world of his fathers, including his own. The basic parameters of his music barely changed at all while the world around him went topsy-turvy.
Korngold’s work for Hollywood commenced in 1934, when he arranged the score for A Midsummer Night’ s Dream (William Dieterle/Max Reinhardt). But public recognition did not come until 1938, when after the Anschluß Korngold settled permanently in Hollywood and started to score
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