Film Score Pioneer Max Steiner Is Ripe for Rediscovery, with the Help of a New Biography

, whose scores for “King Kong,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Casablanca” placed him in the movie-music pantheon, isn’t much discussed today. He seems to belong to that old-school, pre-synthesizer world of orchestral scoring from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.points out in his engrossing new biography of the three-time Oscar winner, “Music by Max Steiner” , the Austrian wunderkind pioneered the art of film scoring and ranks as “Hollywood’s most influential composer.

He wrote three hours of music in 12 weeks, including the immortal “Tara” theme that became synonymous with Hollywood . Summoned to Hollywood in 1930, he soon began experimenting with dramatic music in such films as “Cimarron” and “Symphony of Six Million”; perfecting the use of the click track , still in use today; and adapting Richard Wagner’s concept of the leitmotif — themes for characters, places and ideas — for the big screen.

Another Oscar winner was “The Informer,” one of three John Ford films with Steiner scores, the last of which, 1956’s “The Searchers.” is now considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Steiner not only underscored John Wayne, he was a frequent accompanist for Humphrey Bogart .

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