Louis Gruenberg

In 1919, Gruenberg wrote The Hill of Dreams for orchestra, which gained him the highly acclaimed Flagler Prize and enabled him to devote himself more completely to composition.

As Gruenberg began to make his mark as a composer, he showed his fascination with jazz, composing works with strong jazz and ragtime influences.

He joined the International Composers' Guild (ICG which had been founded by Edgard Varèse and Carlos Salzedo in 1921. on 19 February 1922 the ICG scheduled the first of their first series of concerts in Greenwich Village Theatre. Gruenberg's Polychromatics received its world premiere that night. Then, on February 4, 1923, Gruenberg conducted the American premiere of Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg at the Klaw Theatrein another concert organised by the ICG. Shortly after this performance, he and other members of the league left over disagreements with Varèse and formed the League of Composers.

In its 1933 season, the Metropolitan Opera premiered his expressionistic opera The Emperor Jones, based on the major experimental the play by Eugene O'Neill which had already triumphed on Broadway with Paul Robeson playing the title role of an African-American who declares himself emperor on a Caribbean island.

In the opera, the title role was created by baritone Lawrence Tibbett, performing in blackface.

(This has sometimes resulted in a confusion that the 1933 film of O'Neill's play is a film of the opera.)

Between 1933 and 1936, Gruenberg headed the composition department of Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University).

He collaborated with a man nicknamed "Roosevelt's filmmaker," Pare Lorentz to create '"The Fight for Life," a semi-documentary film about childbirth in Chicago slums, on which John Steinbeck also collaborated.

It was performed at the Met for the 1934 season as well, and featured on the cover of Time Magazine receiving much critical acclaim.

Paul Robeson's 1936 film Song of Freedom also features a scene from the opera with Robeson singing the role of Jones.

In 1937, he moved with his family to Beverly Hills, California, where fellow League members Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky also now lived (though they never spoke).

There he worked at merging music with visual media and film, and also composed for Hollywood films.

Gruenberg worked on the musical scoring for John Ford's masterpiece Stagecoach (1939), incorporating folk songs; the four other composers who worked with him are named on the Academy Award Stagecoach won for Best Music Scoring in that legendary year - against such tough competition as Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Korngold and Aaron Copland—but Gruenberg, inexplicably, is not on the list of nominees.

One wonders, since Gruenberg heads the list of the five-man team who worked on the score in the official credits and was soon well known in the industry as having worked on Stagecoach's Oscar-winning score —if he perhaps took his name off at nomination time, not wanting to be reduced to a team of five that wrote background music for a Western after having his opera on the cover of Time Magazine.

After all, no one knew Stagecoach was going to be a masterpiece, let alone win two Oscars; up until then, no Western had ever been a masterpiece.

It was also John Ford's first Western with sound.

And Schoenberg and Stravinsky, not to mention Rachmaninoff, were all in a three-mile radius.

But that is just a guess.

An early champion of Schoenberg and other contemporary composers, he was also a highly respected Oscar-nominated film composer in Hollywood in the 1940s.

Louis Theodor Gruenberg was born near Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus but then in Russia), to Abe Gruenberg and Klara Kantarovitch.

His family emigrated to the United States when he was a few months old.

His father worked as a violinist in New York City.

Young Louis had a talent for the piano, and by the age of eight Gruenberg was taking piano lessons with Adele Margulies at the National Conservatory in New York (then headed by Antonín Dvořák).

Gruenberg played both solo concerts and in ensembles from the beginning, and in his early twenties he went to study in Europe with Ferruccio Busoni at the Vienna Conservatory.

Before World War I, Gruenberg taught students and toured, both as an accompanist and soloist.

Gruenberg soon composed an original film score under his sole credit for So Ends Our Night (1941) adapted from famous German exile Remarque's fourth novel, starring Oscar-winner Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan and a very young Glenn Ford as desperate exiles whom Nazi Germany's rise has rendered stateless.

Knowing well the Vienna in which much of the film takes place, Gruenberg composed an enormous breadth of source music, a loving homage to the world of Austrian and German music he had grown up in, now lost to Nazi madness.

The constant presence of music becomes a kind of tone poem of the deep nostalgia the frantic exiles feel for their former lives, from characters who whistle a few bars of Beethoven that trigger another character's memory of his mother at the piano, to raucous jazz bands, to tuneless calliopes at the Vienna fairground, to phonograph records in a stranger's apartment.

Gruenberg was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, his fellow musical members of the Academy doubtless particularly enjoying his witty musical quote of Richard Strauss' famous descending 6-note "sigh" from Der Rosenkavalier whenever the virginal 19-year-old character of Glenn Ford gazes longingly at his new love, 32-year-old Margaret Sullavan (on her third marriage in real life, as they all knew).

In 1942, Gruenberg was again nominated for his next film, along with Columbia's head of music, Morris Stoloff, for Best Dramatic Score for Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), directed by John Farrow and starring Paul Muni in a story of a secret Allied attack on the Nazi-occupied Norwegian coast.

Originally, Stoloff had convinced his boss, Harry Cohn, to hire Stravinsky for this job, since the Russian genius happened to be sitting out the war in Los Angeles.

Stravinsky's wife, Vera, discovered some Norwegian folk songs in a used LA book shop, and Stravinsky set to work adapting these with his usual speed.

When the prolific composer finished his score before a single frame of film had been shot; Stoloff ruefully paid Stravinsky and gave the work back.

Months later, Stoloff brought Gruenburg on to compose to the completed film, as was the usual practice.

Stravinsky, never one to let work go to waste, refashioned his unused score into "Four Norwegian Moods," and Gruenberg was nominated for another Oscar.

His next film job, An American Romance, was a heart-breaking failure for its director, King Vidor, a $3 million Technicolor tale of a steel industrialist that nobody saw; an uncredited composer was brought in to patch up the half-hour that was lopped out of it after its first screenings, before it lost a million dollars.

It ended director King Vidor's long career at MGM.

But Gruenberg had happier things to worry about, for in 1944, the greatest violinist in the world, Jascha Heifetz, commissioned and premiered Gruenberg's Violin Concerto, Op. 47 with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and recorded it with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1945.

It is a lively work in three movements (Rhapsodie - With simplicity and warmth - Lively and with good humour), and lasts 38 minutes (in Heifetz's performance).

Louis Gruenberg ( – June 10, 1964) was a Russian-born American pianist and prolific composer, especially of operas.