Max Steiner

Max Steiner was an Austrian born composer who moved to the United States and became one of the founding figures of film music, working in Hollywood from the early 1930s through the 1960s. He scored hundreds of films, including King Kong and Gone with the Wind, and helped establish the practice of wall to wall orchestral underscoring that cued emotion, identified characters with recurring melodies, and matched music tightly to on screen action. Concertgoers today mostly meet him through orchestral suites drawn from his film scores.

Steiner's music is lush, late Romantic orchestral writing built for storytelling rather than the concert hall in its original form. Strings carry broad, singing melodies, brass swells mark moments of drama, and each major character or place tends to get its own recurring tune, a technique borrowed from opera and adapted for the screen. Pieces move in waves, rising to a climax and settling back, because they were built to follow a scene's emotional arc rather than a fixed musical form. In concert arrangements, a piece like Tara's Theme typically opens softly with the main melody in the strings, builds through a full orchestral statement with horns and cymbals, then fades back to a quiet close, running only a few minutes.

Max Steiner was born in Vienna in 1888 into a theatrical family; his father ran popular entertainment venues, and Steiner grew up around music and performance. He trained in composition and conducting in Vienna before working as a conductor and arranger in London and other European cities in operetta and musical theater.

He emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in 1914, and worked on Broadway as an orchestrator and conductor through the 1920s. When sound film arrived, he moved to Hollywood, joining RKO Pictures and then Warner Bros., where he spent most of his career.

Steiner became one of the first composers to write large scale original orchestral scores for feature films, at a time when many studios still relied on borrowed classical music or minimal scoring. His score for King Kong in 1933 is often cited as an early landmark for treating film music as a full dramatic partner to the picture. Over the following decades he scored a large number of films across genres, including Gone with the Wind in 1939, for which his theme for the Tara plantation became widely known beyond the film itself. He continued composing for film into the 1960s and died in 1971 in Hollywood, having shaped conventions of orchestral film scoring still used today.