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Louis Gruenberg ( ; June 9, 1964) was a Russian-born American pianist and prolific composer, especially of operas. An early champion of Schoenberg and other contemporary composers, he was also a highly respected Oscar-nominated film composer in Hollywood in the 1940s.
Gruenberg played both solo concerts and in ensembles from the beginning, and in his early twenties he went to study in Europe with Ferruccio Busoni at the Vienna Conservatory. Before World War I, Gruenberg taught students and toured, both as an accompanist and soloist.
In 1919, Gruenberg wrote The Hill of Dreams for orchestra, which gained him the highly acclaimed Flagler Prize and enabled him to devote himself more completely to composition. As Gruenberg began to make his mark as a composer, he showed his fascination with jazz, composing works with strong jazz and ragtime influences.
He joined the International Composers' Guild (ICG which had been founded by Edgard Varèse and Carlos Salzedo in 1921. on 19 February 1922 the ICG scheduled the first of their first series of concerts in Greenwich Village Theatre. Gruenberg's Polychromatics received its world premiere that night. Then, on February 4, 1923, Gruenberg conducted the American premiere of Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg at the another concert organised by the ICG. Shortly after this performance, he and other members of the league left over disagreements with Varèse and formed the League of Composers.
In its 1933 season, the Metropolitan Opera premiered his expressionistic opera The Emperor Jones, based on the major experimental the play by Eugene O'Neill which had already triumphed on Broadway with Paul Robeson playing the title role of an African-American who declares himself emperor on a Caribbean island. In the opera, the title role was created by baritone Lawrence Tibbett, performing in blackface. It was performed at the Met for the 1934 season as well, and featured on the cover of Time Magazine receiving much critical acclaim.
Paul Robeson's 1936 film Song of Freedom also features a scene from the opera with Robeson singing the role of Jones. (This has sometimes resulted in a confusion that the 1933 film of O'Neill's play is a film of the opera.)
Between 1933 and 1936, Gruenberg headed the composition department of Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University). He collaborated with a man nicknamed "Roosevelt's filmmaker", Pare Lorentz to create The Fight for Life, a semi-documentary film about childbirth in Chicago slums, on which John Steinbeck also collaborated.
In 1937, he moved with his family to Beverly Hills, California, where fellow League members Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky also now lived (though they never spoke). There he worked at merging music with visual media and film, and also composed for Hollywood films.
Gruenberg soon composed an original film score under his sole credit for So Ends Our Night (1941) adapted from famous German exile Remarque's fourth novel, starring Oscar-winner Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan and a very young Glenn Ford as desperate exiles whom Nazi Germany's rise has rendered stateless. Knowing well the Vienna in which much of the film takes place, Gruenberg composed an enormous breadth of source music, a loving homage to the world of Austrian and German music he had grown up in, now lost to Nazi madness. Gruenberg was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
In 1942, Gruenberg was again nominated for his next film, along with Columbia's head of music, Morris Stoloff, for Best Dramatic Score for Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), directed by John Farrow and starring Paul Muni in a story of a secret Allied attack on the Nazi-occupied Norwegian coast. Originally, Stoloff had convinced his boss, Harry Cohn, to hire Stravinsky for this job, since the Russian genius happened to be sitting out the war in Los Angeles. Stravinsky's wife, Vera, discovered some Norwegian folk songs in a used LA book shop, and Stravinsky set to work adapting these with his usual speed. When the prolific composer finished his score before a single frame of film had been shot; Stoloff ruefully paid Stravinsky and gave the work back. Months later, Stoloff brought Gruenburg on to compose to the completed film, as was the usual practice. Stravinsky, never one to let work go to waste, refashioned his unused score into "Four Norwegian Moods", and Gruenberg was nominated for another Oscar.
His next film job, An American Romance, was a heart-breaking failure for its director, King Vidor, a $3 million Technicolor tale of a steel industrialist that nobody saw; an uncredited composer was brought in to patch up the half-hour that was lopped out of it after its first screenings, before it lost a million dollars. It ended director King Vidor's long career at MGM.
All The King's Men (1949), the Pulitzer-Prize-winning fictional story of Huey Long, was a tremendous success, winning three top Oscars among many other prizes. Louis Gruenberg was nominated for Best Score in the newly minted Golden Globe Awards. Gruenberg's last Hollywood score was for Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre in the film noir Quicksand (1950), directed by veteran Irving Pichel, and considered by many to be the adult Rooney's best work. Again, the orchestral opening under the credits has a powerful use of brass, and as Rooney descends into his life of petty crime, a sinewy jazz score emerges.
During the last twenty years of his life, Gruenberg also became increasingly isolated from the concert music world. He did maintain a close friendship with Arnold Schoenberg, by now a permanent resident of Los Angeles as well as a music professor at UCLA, until the latter's death in 1951.
Louis Gruenberg composed continually until his death, which took place at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles on June 9, 1964. He was buried at Westwood Memorial Cemetery. Besides other works, he wrote five symphonies, four full length operas ( Volpone, Jack and the Beanstalk, Antony and Cleopatra and The Dumb Wife) and the lengthy oratorio A Song of Faith.
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