Walter Jurmann

Walter Jurmann was born on October 12, 1903 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He was married to Yvonne Jellinek.

Jurmann received a classical education, taking his Matura exams in 1921.

He was spotted by the at that time well-known Fritz Rotter in 1928 and they wrote together the hit "Was weisst Du, wie ich verliebt bin", Jurmann as a composer, Rotter as a lyricist. Soon the composer Bronislau Kaper joined in and was responsible for the arrangments.

From 1931 Walter Jurmann got regular engagements for composing the music and songs for movies. To these works belong "Ihre Majestät die Liebe" (1931), "Salto Mortale" (1931), and "Madame wÃf¼nscht keine Kinder" (1933).

His comet like rise came to an abrupt end in 1933 when the National Socialist came into power. As a jew Walter Jurmann emigrated together with Bronislau Kaper to Paris where he continued his career. Among others he also wrote the music for movies like "Une femme au volant" (1933) and "Les nuits moscovites" (1934).

In August 1934 Jurmann married Anni Wassermann, but the couple divorced not long after.

He and Kaper became an invitingly offer from Hollywood which they accepted. They went to the USA in 1935 where they continued there works as composers and songwriters.

Walter Jurmann wrote the music for the productions "Three Smart Girls" (1936), the Marx-Brothers movie "A Day at the Races" (1937), and "Miracle on Main Street" (1939).

In the mid-1940s he came across a subject that seemed promising. Collaboration on the resulting musical Windy City with the librettist Philip Yordan and the lyricist Paul Francis Webster, Jurmann's longtime collaborator, went through many convoluted stages. Yet Jurmann considered the music he wrote for the work to be among his best. Critics at the premier performances in 1946 unanimously agreed. "The best of its music blows smoke in your ears and may sting your eyes a little, too," wrote Claudia Cassidy in the Chicago Tribune. However, as Sidney J. Harris of the Chicago Daily News lamented, "Walter Jurmann's poignant and memorable music (by far the richest in melodic invention that Chicago playgoers have heard this year) never got the chance to soar that it deserved. . . . If the composer had found a librettist of comparable ability, Windy City might easily have turned into an urban Oklahoma!" Windy City closed after brief runs in New Haven, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.

When the United States entered World War II he enlisted-he had become an American citizen in April that year-and after his medical discharge in May 1942 he participated in USO entertainment of wounded soldiers.

He retired in 1943 from the film business and only between 1948 and 1950 he was active again. In 1950 he produced the movie "Kill or Be Killed" (1950) for which he also wrote his last film composition.

In 1953 he married Yvonne Jellinek, a Hungarian fashion designer whom he had met at a party in the U.S.

As with the German film Schlager, a number of Jurmann's American film songs enjoyed a long life after their initial film debut. All God's Chillun Got Rhythm, from A Day at the Races, a stunning achievement in capturing elements of black spiritual and jazz, was taken up by Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Nat Gonella, Jimmy Dorsey, Art Tatum, and many others. Mario Lanza became practically synonymous with Cosi Cosa, from the film A Night at the Opera. Over the decades almost one hundred different recordings appeared of San Francisco, and Judy Garland included the song in her legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall farewell concert.

In 1971, during a trip to Europe, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Budapest, his wife's home town.

Jurmann knew that he could compose "American" songs just as brilliantly, and he got his first chance to prove it with the title song for the eagerly anticipated film San Francisco, starring Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable. It remains, probably, the song for which Jurmann is best known. Two years after the film was released he was named an honorary citizen of the city of San Francisco, and in 1984 the city voted to make Jurmann's song the official city song. It is not hard to understand the song's lasting popularity, for it is a musical tour de force: the melody, at once exhilarating and joyous, gives focused expression to the film's dramatic climax yet can stand on its own, and at the same time it provides virtually all of the musical background material, carrying the entire film.