Hugo Friedhofer
Despite the fact that he came to prominence in the heyday of Hollywood's great film scores, Hugo Friedhofer never achieved the recognition enjoyed by his contemporaries Miklos Rozsa, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, and Franz Waxman. This may have been a result of the fact that he tended to score movies that were more noted for their stars than their dramatic content.
Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer was the son of a cellist from Dresden. He quit school at the age of 16 to take a job as an office boy, and studied art at night at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco. He'd started learning the cello from his father at age 13, but for most of his teen years, music and art challenged each other as his first love. At 18, he finally decided to devote himself to music, taking up the cello in earnest and achieving a professional level of competency by the time he was 20. He played in a symphony orchestra and a theater orchestra while continuing to study music full-time, including composition courses with Italian composer Dominico Brescia. He worked periodically as an arranger for popular bands and playing in theater orchestras, and then, with the advent of talking pictures, was suddenly thrown out of work when the theater orchestras disappeared. He scrambled around for work for two years, already married and with a wife and child to support. Then in the late '20s, he landed a job in Hollywood as an arranger at Fox Studios. Arriving there in April of 1929, he took his first assignment, the movie Sunny Side Up, and then worked as a freelancer for the next few years. He was finally hired by Warner Bros. and spent the middle and end of the '30s orchestrating more than 50 of the movie scores written by Max Steiner, and 15 of the renowned scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
By the early '40s, he was widely admired as an orchestrator even among the classical community, which normally looked down its nose at film music, including such renowned figures as conductor Jascha Horenstein. Friedhofer emerged very slowly as a composer. His first assignment, for The Adventures of Marco Polo starring Gary Cooper, came about in 1937 through his friend Alfred Newman. Unfortunately, the Warner Bros. music department had all of the composing talent it needed and only used Friedhofer as an orchestrator. Luckily, he had Newman's lasting friendship. In 1944, Newman got Friedhofer an assignment at 20th Century Fox to score The Lodger. Newman was the most respected creative figure in film music in Hollywood, whose word was law with many producers and even a few moguls, among them Samuel Goldwyn. It was on Newman's recommendation that Goldwyn -- over the objections of director William Wyler (who wanted Newman) -- selected Friedhofer to compose the music to the most important movie he had ever made, The Best Years of Our Lives, in 1945. Friedhofer's score for The Best Years of Lives was one of the finest ever written for a Goldwyn movie and it won the composer an Academy Award and attracted the favorable attention of serious music critics. Friedhofer's career as a composer was made, and he went on to score such diverse films as Ace in the Hole, The Bishop's Wife, Three Came Home, Seven Cities of Gold, An Affair to Remember, The Young Lions, and One-Eyed Jacks. He worked well into the 1970s on movies including Roger Corman's Von Richthofen & Brown and Paul Bartel's Private Parts. In the 1970s, Friedhofer was respected as an elder statesman of film music. As one of the few surviving members of his generation, he ended up as a spokesman for them and a symbol of the neglect to which their work was subjected; many of his scores were part of a massive amount of studio documents bulldozed as landfill during the early '70s. Ironically, by the end of that decade, scholars and record companies were busy reconstructing Friedhofer's orchestrations and arrangements for new recordings.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo
Ähnliche Künstler
-
The Barbarian and the Geisha (Original Soundtrack) [1958]
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtrack Collector am 09.10.2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Boy on a Dolphin (1957 Film Score)
Soundtracks - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtracks am 13.07.2012
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Barbarian and the Geisha
World Music - Erschienen bei TP4 Music am 06.01.2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Young Lions
Hugo Friedhofer, Lionel Newman
Soundtracks - Erschienen bei Hollywood am 01.01.2010
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Sun Also Rises
World Music - Erschienen bei TP4 Music am 06.01.2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Lydia Bailey (Original Soundtrack) [1952]
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtrack Collector am 05.08.2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Soldier of Fortune (Ost) [1955]
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtrack Collector am 10.07.2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Between Heaven and Hell (Ost) [1956]
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtrack Collector am 10.07.2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One Eyed Jacks (Original Film Soundtrack)
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Stage Door am 01.01.1961
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Smooth
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei the sound girly am 06.03.2015
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Express Yourself
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei sinderella am 06.12.2015
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One Eyed Jacks (Original Soundtrack)
Pop - Erschienen bei Soundtrack Records am 29.10.2018
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Barbarian and the Geisha Suite (From "The Barbarian and the Geisha" Original Soundtrack)
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Fly Records am 16.12.2014
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Nightingale
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei oldies and hits for future am 30.05.2019
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Barbarian & The Geisha
Soundtracks - Erschienen bei Hollywood am 01.07.2010
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
This Earth Is Mine (Original Soundtrack) [1959]
Universal International Pictures Studio Orchestra
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Classic Soundtrack Collector am 19.02.2014
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Confectioner's
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei fsp analog am 27.03.2017
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Open Stage
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei open reeez regarde am 24.03.2016
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One-Eyed Jacks Main Title (From "One-Eyed Jacks" Original Soundtrack)
Original Soundtrack - Erschienen bei Fly Records am 16.12.2014
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One Eyed Jack (Original Soudtrack" I Due Volti Della Vendetta")
Country - Erschienen bei M.Z.Records am 29.10.2018
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo