Franz Waxman was born into a large middle-class family, and was the only one of six children to show any musical aptitude, starting piano lessons at the age of seven. His father, an industrialist who did not believe that a career could be made out of music, encouraged him to work in a bank. This he did, using his salary to pay for lessons in piano, harmony and composition, and after two and a half years he moved to Dresden and then Berlin to study music. To pay for his musical studies in Berlin he played in nightclubs and with the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular band of the period. He began to make arrangements for the band, and this led to commissions to orchestrate music for films. Waxman’s first major assignment came from Friedrich Holländer, another Weintraub alumnus, who invited him to orchestrate and conduct his music for the film Die blaue Engel (1930). Erich Pommer, the head of the film’s production company, UFA, was so pleased with Waxman’s work that he commissioned him to write the music for Fritz Lang’s Liliom, made in Paris in 1933 following the Nazi assumption of power in Germany. Pommer than moved to the USA to make Music in the Air for Fox in 1934, and he took Waxman with him to arrange Jerome Kern’s music for this film.
Waxman soon made a name for himself as a composer and conductor of note for films: his first original Hollywood composition was for James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a movie in which his eerie scoring ideally matched Whale’s sinister visuals. This success resulted in a contract with the film’s makers, Universal, for whom Waxman scored a dozen of the more than fifty films with which he was involved. He then moved to MGM in 1936, signing a seven-year contract to compose for this studio. He wrote an average of seven scores a year, and began to accumulate Academy Award nominations, which included the music for several successful Spencer Tracy films, including Captains Courageous (1937) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), as well as for Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock for the producer David O. Selznick. Waxman moved from MGM in 1943 to Warner Brothers, with whom he enjoyed a long relationship. Notable film scores from this period included those for Mrs Skeffington (1944), and The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947).
A keen aficionado of contemporary music, Waxman founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival in 1947, heading it until his death from cancer twenty years later. During this period the Festival mounted either the world or American premières of at least eighty new works by composers such as Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich and Schoenberg. By the end of the 1940s Waxman was established as a major force in the musical life of the west coast of America: in addition to his work as a composer of film music and festival organiser, he was writing concert pieces and was increasingly in demand as a conductor of symphony orchestras in Europe and Israel as well as America. His Carmen Fantasia, composed for the film Humoresque (1947) and played on the soundtrack by Isaac Stern, was to become very popular. In 1950 and 1951 Waxman was awarded Oscars for his scores for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun respectively: to date, he is the only composer to have won an Academy Award for the best score in two successive years. Other, later, notable film scores included those for Prince Valiant (1954), The Spirit of St Louis (1957), and The Nun’s Story (1959). Concert works composed towards the end of Waxman’s life included the oratorio Joshua (1959) and the song-cycle The Song of Terezin (1965). He became the first American conductor to appear with the major orchestras of the Soviet Union, during a two-month long tour in 1962, an experience which, through his study of Ukrainian folk music in Kiev, influenced one of his finest later film scores, for Taras Bulba (1962).
