MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer and conductor Werner Janssen died ten years ago today, on September 19, 1990, in Stony Brook, New York, following a brief illness, at the age of 91,

A distinguished symphonic conductor as well as a Hollywood film composer, Janssen enjoyed an unusually varied career, earning six Academy Award nominations for his film music while also championing contemporary concert music in the United States and Europe.

Janssen was born in New York City on June 1, 1899, the son of German immigrants. He studied at Dartmouth College and the New England Conservatory, and later pursued conducting studies in Europe. After winning the Rome Prize in 1930 he studied orchestration in Rome, and during the early 1930s established an international reputation as a conductor. In 1934 he became the first American-born conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic, and subsequently served as conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1939.

Janssen entered Hollywood relatively late. His first major film score was Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), starring Gary Cooper. The film’s Chinese setting gave Janssen an opportunity to incorporate Asian-influenced colors into an otherwise large-scale symphonic score, while its combination of romance, political intrigue and action brought out the dramatic instincts he had developed in the concert hall. The score immediately earned him an Academy Award nomination.

He followed it with William Dieterle’s Spanish Civil War drama Blockade (1938), another ambitious orchestral score and another Oscar nominee. Janssen’s music combined conventional Hollywood romanticism with martial writing and Spanish-flavored material, demonstrating his ability to adapt his concert technique to the direct emotional requirements of film.

Other assignments during this productive period included Winter Carnival (1939), Eternally Yours (1939), Slightly Honorable (1940) and The House Across the Bay (1940). Eternally Yours, a romantic comedy-drama starring Loretta Young and David Niven, brought Janssen another Academy Award nomination. By then he had left his Baltimore conducting post and moved increasingly toward Hollywood, although he never abandoned his parallel career in classical music.

The mid-1940s produced several of Janssen’s best-known scores. He received three Academy Award nominations in a single year for Guest in the House (1944), Rowland V. Lee’s swashbuckling Captain Kidd (1945), and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945). The latter, a stark drama about a struggling Texas farming family, allowed Janssen to draw on American folk idioms within a serious symphonic framework. These nominations brought his career total to six.

His later films included the Marx Brothers comedy A Night in Casablanca (1946), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless (1948), and the 1957 screen production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Film composition, however, represented only one part of his musical life. In 1940 he founded the Janssen Symphony of Los Angeles, which performed contemporary American works as well as film and theatrical music and made numerous recordings for Capitol Records.

Janssen later held conducting positions with orchestras in Utah, Oregon and San Diego and continued to conduct internationally, including engagements in Vienna and Belgrade. He remained particularly committed to contemporary music, maintaining a career that moved unusually freely between Hollywood studios and the concert hall.