Max Steiner Research Paper

Maximilian Raoul "Max" Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian-born American composer of music for theatre and films. He was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional when he was fifteen. He worked in England and then came to New York to work on Broadway. He moved to Hollywood in 1929 and became one of the first composers to write music scores for films. Steiner is referred to as "the father of film music" and is considered one of the greatest film score composers of his generation. Along with such composers such as Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, and Miklós Rózsa, Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films. …show more content…
Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include "King Kong" (1933), "Little Women" (1933), "Jezebel" (1938), "Casablanca" (1942), "The Searchers" (1956), "A Summer Place" (1959), and the film score for which he is possibly best known, "Gone with the Wind" (1939).

Steiner was a frequent collaborator with some of the most well known film directors in history, including Michael Curtiz, John Ford and William Wyler, and scored many of the films with Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire.

Steiner's talent for matching the image on screen and catching every little detail was just one facet of his abilities as a film composer. He could also find the hidden emotional undercurrent in a scene and add just the right musical