Louis Xiv The Best Little Secrets Are Kept Rar: What Critics and Fans Say About the Album

The Steiners were a prosperous business family. Gabor owned and managed a theater, and dabbled in several entertainment enterprises-- he was the man who built the Riesenrad, the giant ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater. His wife Marie inherited three of Vienna's leading restaurants from her family. Both parents encouraged the precocious musical talents of their son. They sent him to the Vienna School of Technology, where he showed little interest in anything scholastic. But later, at the Imperial Academy of Music, he was brilliant and completed a four-year course in only one year, for which achievement he was awarded a gold medal. His brilliance was greatly aided by the affluence of his family, who could afford to send him to the best teachers available, including Robert Fuchs and Gustav Mahler. Having a father with a theater was also helpful. Recalls Steiner: "He produced Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan and all the others. When I was twelve he let me conduct an American operetta, The Belle of New York, by Gustave Kerker. Kerker happened to be in Vienna at the time and he asked my parents if he could take me back to America with him as a Boy Wonder. My mother told him, 'No, all musicians are stinkers.' And then, as an afterthought about her own problems with her restaurants, 'And that goes for all waiters.'" [Max Steiner interviews by Tony Thomas, Beverly Hills, California. The quotations used throughout this biographical introduction are composite reconstructions of Steiner's conversations with Thomas from two sources, according to Thomas: tape recorded interviews conducted by Thomas in 1959 and 1962, and frequent conversations with Steiner during the 1950s and 1960s. Hereafter cited as Interviews.]

It was Steiner more than any other composer who pioneered the use of original composition as background scoring for films, although in those early years at RKO, sheer volume of work prevented him from applying the technique to every film to which he was assigned. Mostly the scores consisted of a main title, perhaps a snippet or two during the film, and then the end title. Even within those limitations Steiner could make himself felt. For Katharine Hepburn's first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), the film ends with her and John Barrymore sitting at the piano playing a Steiner miniature sonata, which leaves the audience feeling they have heard more music than they actually have. This is something at which Steiner quickly became a master-- the careful placing of music. That, and an unusual talent for 'catching' things musically-giving a musical fillip to a little piece of action or a human characteristic. He caught Leslie Howard's limp in Of Human Bondage (1934): Leopold Stokowski told Steiner he thought this was a stroke of genius. Other people, Aaron Copland among them, considered it questionable taste. Either way, it was an arresting device and one which marked Steiner's use of music in film. At its best, this 'mickey-mousing' could be very effective-- some examples: a dog walking along a corridor in Since You Went Away (1944); old prospector Walter Huston scrambling like a goat up a hillside in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Errol Flynn gently loping his horse across a parade ground in They Died With Their Boots On (1941); or the harp-celesta counterpointing of the water dripping in Victor McLaglen's cell in The Informer (1935), and any number of catchy tunes for comic characters.

Louis Xiv The Best Little Secrets Are Kept Rar

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The film score that brought Steiner to everyone's attention was King Kong (1933). "It was made for music. It was the kind of film that allowed you to do anything and everything, from weird chords and dissonances to pretty melodies. When the picture was completed, the studio bosses were very skeptical about it and doubtful that the public would take to it. They thought the big gorilla looked unreal and too mechanical. In fact, they didn't want to waste any more money on it and told me to use old tracks. Merian C. Cooper, the producer, then came to me and asked me to score it to the best of my ability and that he would pay the cost of the orchestra." [Interviews. See also Notes to You, pp. 118-21.] Steiner took him at his word, he brought in an eighty-piece orchestra and ran up a bill for fifty thousand dollars. But it was worth every penny because it was his score that literally makes that film work. As soon as the audience hears that three-note theme-- those three massive, darkly orchestrated descending chords-- it knows it is in for a fantastic experience. The score accents all the strangeness and mystery and horror in the story, it limns the frightful giant gorilla but it also does something else. It speaks for the streak of tenderness in the monster, the fascination and the compassion he feels for the terrified girl he picks up in his huge paw-- the music is the voice of the doomed brute.

Two of Humphrey Bogart's best films have Steiner scores. The Big Sleep is the ultimate "private eye" story, with Bogie as Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's tough, glib detective. Steiner ushers in the mystery and the mayhem with heavy chordal passages accented with chimes; he gives Bogie a cheeky little theme, a wryly romantic one for Lauren Bacall, swirling music for chases in fogs, orchestral flutters for suspense, and, in that final showdown where Bogie routs the hoods, there are rising modulations punctuated by heavy chords. And when the gun smoke clears and Bogie and Baby are looking at each other in that sardonic but enticing way-- you know they're meant for each other because there's a gorgeous Steiner theme telling you it can't be any other way. 2ff7e9595c