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
Artistes similaires
-
One-Eyed Jacks Medley: Main Title / The Getaway / The Kiss Of A Scoundrel / Pursued By Rurales / To Monterey / Luisa In Love / Dad's Suspicious Allayed / To Point Of The Devil / Dark Thoughts / Necklace And Idea / Luisa's Confession / Confidence Regained (From "One-Eyed Jacks" Original Soundtrack)
Pop - Paru chez JB Production le 13 juil. 2017
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Ski Run (Main Title "The Young Lions" 1958)
Pop - Paru chez JB Production CH le 29 juin 2023
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
-
In Love & War Main Title
Hugo Friedhofer, Lionel Newman, Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra
Pop - Paru chez JB Production le 29 déc. 2021
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Flapping Wings
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez Wings in Hell le 23 déc. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Rooftop Storys
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez golden times le 13 juil. 2018
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Toast To Friendship / Seduction (All Tracks Remastered)
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez Hit Singles Records le 2 déc. 2019
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
"One-Eyed Jack" Main Title (From "One-Eyed Jack" Original Soundtrack)
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez JB Production le 7 nov. 2018
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One eyed Jacks (Main Title OSD)
Pop - Paru chez JB Production le 30 août 2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Bravados : A Symphony
Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer
Pop - Paru chez JB Production le 29 nov. 2021
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
One-Eyed Jacks (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez SINETONE AMR le 19 juil. 2014
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Up And Down
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez cappo digital le 29 sept. 2017
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gaudy Colours
Bandes originales de films - Paru chez cappo digital le 23 avr. 2017
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo