Thirties Film Music Articles

Mr. Hamann of Filming Today Press is a researcher who documents 1930s newspaper articles on Hollywood. Following are two columns he recently unearthed which should be of interest to movie music aficionados.

HIS MUSIC PAINFUL TO KORNGOLD

By Frederick C. Othman

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is the musician who eased his ponderous self onto a piano stool two years ago to compose the music for the film, Anthony Adverse, which, as you may remember, was about the adventures of an orphan.

"No muzzer," moaned Korngold, playing a lugubrious chord, "no fazzer." Tears streamed from the eyes of the great Korngold and from the depths of his misery came one of the finest musical scores Hollywood ever produced. Anthony Adverse may not have been any great shakes as a movie, but the music which accompanied it was elegant. It won Korngold an Academy award. He has been living the lives of his musical subjects ever since and if you don't think this is tough on a man, you don't know Korngold, who is acknowledged generally as one of the world's great musicians.

FELL EVERY TIME

When he scored Robin Hood for the Warner Brothers, he died a thousand deaths. Every time a villain fell off a castle wall, Korngold fell with him. Every time an arrow slithered into the chest of a denizen of Sherwood Forest, Korngold groaned in pain.

All this is by way of introduction to the fact that Korngold leaves here tomorrow for New York where an audience in white ties and evening gowns at Carnegie Hall will pay to watch him go crazy on Sunday.

He will play in concert the score for his latest picture, Juarez, which reaches its high point when Bette (Empress Carlotta) Davis goes mad. Korngold will go as mad as Bette. Maybe madder.

We know about this because he scared the daylights out of us today. It was in his sunny office at Warner Brothers. Korngold, a great bear of a man in a brown butcher's jacket, nondescript pants, and square-toed brogans, said he'd be glad to play the music for the mad scene.

He plumped down at his grand piano and started to mutter. He shook his head. He moaned. The whites of his eyes showed and he was on the verge of frothing at the mouth as his music became wilder, and louder. When he neared the crescendo, he started to kick the piano, and bellow, while he pounded the keys with his over-sized hands.

SANE AS ANYBODY

It was then that we started to edge out the door, but with a final wallop which made the piano legs vibrate, he ended the song, whirled on his stool -- and resumed his conversation, as sane as anybody.

Since it is impossible to put his rich Viennese accent on paper, we won't try. His story is a rip-snorter, even in plain English. When he was 10 years old in Vienna, he composed "The Fairy Tale Contata." When he was 11, he wrote "The Snowman" and since this was a beautifully done piece of music, his father nearly was run out of the town. The elder Korngold was music critic of the Vienna Free Pressòand everybody thought he was writing his son's compositions.

The idea finally was straightened out, and young Korngold kept on composing music, such as the comic opera, "The Ring of Polycrates," when he was 16, and the opera, "Violanta," when he was 17. He even conducted both operas in theaters in Austria and Germany.

After serving in the World War, he returned to music composing and symphony orchestra conducting. He was busy in Vienna when Hollywood sent for him in 1934 to score "Midsummer Night's Dream." He's been here ever since.

Raves and Raps

By Harry Mines

After 20 years at the top of the ladder of screen fame, Carli D. Elinor is starting the climb again, from the bottom rung.

Were Elinor an actor his would not be an unusual Hollywood story. He is, however, an orchestra conductor. Until five years ago his history was synonymous with the rise of music to a place of dominant importance in motion pictures.

Away back in 1915, Elinor conducted a concert orchestra in the presentation of his own musical score for the world premiere of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. For five years his 60-piece concert orchestra was the magnet which made the old California Theater the most popular of Los Angeles cinema palaces. When the glittering Carthay Circle opened its doors as a home of world premieres, Carli D. Elinor with his magic baton was its principal attractions.

Elinor is still an orchestra conductor. He's playing one in Samuel Goldwyn's technicolor musical film, The Goldwyn Follies. But the musicians who respond to his baton on The Follies set are only going through the motions of playing. The melody that apparently emanates from their instruments already has been recorded on another stage.

Unchanged in appearance from his Carthay Circle days, Elinor expects to be back at the top again and shortly. His was no gradual downgrade slip into obscurity. Completing a tenure as musical director for the Fox studio in 1932 he went to Rumania to visit his parents. He was away three years. During that time the cinema parade moved swiftly.

"I returned to find mostly new faces," Elinor said. "The old-timers like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer remembered me but they were fixed with musical directors and top talent. They days of the concert orchestras with the film theaters are gone.

"I have a number of prospects but it has to be something big or nothingòwith me. In the meantime there are occasional calls like this. One can't remain idle."

Elinor was in his early 20s when, with D.W. Griffith, he first made musical scores a vital part of important motion pictures. He composed the scores for many of Griffith's greatest pictures. He composed the scores for many of Griffith's greatest pictures, took his orchestra with the national road showings of these productions.

Samuel Goldwyn brought him back to the picture capital after his association with Griffith to conduct the orchestra at the California Theater, a house which Goldwyn then owned.

"Georgie Stoll was one of the members of my orchestra," Elinor recalled. "Raymond Paige was my librarian, later my second violinist, finally my assistant.

"In 1921 I paid Lawrence Tibbett $25 a week to sing with my orchestra at the California. Ramon Novarro later sang in the chorus there."

At the Carthay Circle, where his name was always featured in lights, he was managing director, as well as orchestra conductor, for four years. Perhaps the most famous of the musical scores he composed for the many memorable pictures played there was that which accompanied the silent version of Seventh Heaven.

Elinor apparently has lost none of his enthusiasm and fire that were his at the heyday of his career. And those who get a quick glimpse of the orchestra leader in the Adolphe Menjou party scenes of The Goldwyn Follies may do well to remember his face. They'll be seeing him again on the concert stage.

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