Austrian musician Maximilian Raoul Steiner was born in Vienna in 1888. He came from a wealthy family and he was the son of an impresario, so he grew up in the world of show business long before he became a famous film composer in Hollywood.

His father encouraged his musical talent from a young age. Younger than you might think, because at the age of 12 Steiner was already conducting operettas. Even Steiner’s godfather was famed composer Richard Strauss, who also influenced Steiner’s musical career.

Steiner appeared to be musically gifted when he attended the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna and finished a four-year course in just one year while still a teenager, even conducting and writing the operetta The Beautiful Greek Girl at the age of 15. That production ran for a year in the Orpheum Theatre and it opened a path for Steiner to conduct around the world, mostly in England, until World War I drove him out of Europe and he escaped to America where he had to start his career over from scratch, although it wasn’t long before New Yorkers discovered how talented he was. A job as a copyist for Harms Music Publishing led to him working in the world of Broadway and he would eventually become an orchestrator, conductor and musical director in the U.S. for 15 years, working with such musicians as Jerome Kern (Show Boat) and George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess).

By 1915, a year after he moved to America, Steiner was discovered by the film studio Fox Film, which hired Steiner as their musical director at a time when Hollywood films did not regularly have original orchestrated scores. Steiner would actually enjoy making film scores so much that he would end up leaving Broadway for good in 1929 to write scores for RKO, mostly composing the scores you would regularly hear over the main titles and the end titles at the beginning and ending of the film, as well as some occasional on-screen musical cues during the movie. While film scores were still seen by some people as a novelty that would eventually wear off and some people even found music scores unnecessary, Steiner’s score for the 1931 Oscar-nominated Western Cimarron was widely praised and seen by some as a big reason for the film’s success, while kicking off the more widespread use of orchestrated film scores in the 1930s.

Steiner pioneered the use of original compositions as background music, and David O. Selznick’s 1932 drama Symphony of Six Million, which told the story of a Jewish physician whose rise to the top of his profession comes at the cost of his connections to his roots in his humble Jewish community, used music extensively and it not only marked a turning point for Steiner’s career but also a turning point for Hollywood and the way film scores were implemented.

However, it was Max Steiner’s score for RKO’s King Kong (1933) that really cemented his place in Hollywood, raising the bar for the level of drama and ambition of adventure and fantasy films from that point forward. Steiner’s score for King Kong was actually a huge key to what helped sell something that could have easily been dismissed as a hokey horror film about a stop-motion gorilla. Steiner added a lot of seriousness and emotion to his music, and he was even allowed to experiment with weird sounds for the unusual picture, which made the film score even more memorable as Steiner would humanize Kong in some ways. Plus there was a notable use of leitmotifs for the monster, Fay Wray and others that were implemented in creative ways. The film was among Steiner’s favorite scores he wrote and it would also help him become a respected figure in Hollywood, with many filmmakers at RKO treating Steiner as their unofficial music consultant as he was regularly brought in to improve the drama in a scene by adding music or give advice about how best to score their films.

Steiner won his first Oscar for scoring John Ford’s The Informer (1935), and in an unusual situation that score would actually end up influencing the film’s creative direction as Steiner was hired so early on in the film’s development that he would write music while Ford was shooting. This can be seen with actor Victor McLaglen, who was directed by Ford to fumble around as he walked to match Steiner’s fumbling theme for his character Gypo. The Oscar for that film was well-earned. The score for The Informer was especially well done.

Other films Max Steiner wrote the scores for that decade include The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Flying Down to Rio (1933) as well as many other Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals following that one, Jezebel (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Selznick couldn’t see anyone else but Max Steiner composing the music for his epic drama Gone with the Wind so he ended up borrowing Steiner from Warner Bros. just to let Steiner compose for this one film of his. Gone with the Wind’s 3-hour score was the longest composed for any film at the time, although Steiner had assistance from other composers for practicality reasons. But he did have to fight the powers that be on keeping the music score totally original when the studio had the idea to borrow from traditional and recognizable music throughout the picture. The end result is that Max Steiner created what is considered among the most highly regarded film scores in cinematic history.

Other than Gone with the Wind, Steiner worked exclusively with Warner Bros. from 1937 to 1953, and this period was not only his most prolific but possibly his most iconic. The two genres Steiner became most associated with were Westerns and film noir, but in my mind, every time I hear Max Steiner’s name I think of Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Among the work Steiner did for WB was composing the scores for The Letter (1940), Sergeant York (1941), Casablanca (1942), Now, Voyager (1942), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Key Largo (1948), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and White Heat (1949). But most memorable and iconic to me was the WB logo fanfare Steiner wrote that preceded every film in this period beginning in 1937 when WB first hired him.

Max Steiner was not taken seriously by some other composers for the ways in which he seemed to play with his music. He delighted in using the score to tell the story, whether in subtle ways or through deliberate Mickey Mousing (a term used in Hollywood to describe matching the music to the action on screen exactly). But Steiner was popular for a reason. A guy doesn’t get to work with George Cukor, King Vidor, John Ford, Michael Curtiz, William Wyler, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra by accident. Steiner was synonymous with film music in Hollywood. Even after he died in 1971, one of the composers George Lucas wanted John Williams to evoke specifically for the score of Star Wars was Max Steiner. And the 1970s were a time when grand scores and leitmotifs were not as en vogue. The success of Star Wars and the important contribution John Williams’ score had to that success only underlines further how far-reaching Max Steiner’s influence was.