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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZFRIEDHOFER, Hugo Wilhelm(b 3 May '01, San Francisco; d 17 May '81, LA, CA) Film composer. Played cello in cinema orchestra, wrote music for silent films, orchestrated scores for early talkies beginning with Keep Your Sunny Side Up c'30. Assigned to work with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner (b 10 May 1888, Vienna; d 28 Dec. '71, Beverly Hills) because he could speak German; they became more famous, but he may have had the greater skill, one of the first to understand that music for talkies was not the same as music for silent pictures. For many years he orchestrated others' work, incl. all of Errol Flynn's best-known films for Korngold, who would allow no one else to do it; for Steiner he actually ghost-wrote part of Gone With The Wind '39. One of his own best was One Eyed Jacks '61, dir. by its star Marlon Brando; both film and score were butchered by the studio; soundtrack LP on UA is now a valuable collectors' item. He said, 'I have seen two authentic geniuses in this industry, Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. And this town, not knowing what to do with genius, destroys it.' It did not destroy Friedhofer, but kept him a secret, except among musicians. Won Oscar for his own The Best Years Of Our Lives '46 (LP on Entr'acte by LPO cond. by Collura), was nominated many times (The Woman In The Window '45, The Young Lions '58 etc): he said that nomination was the greater honour, because musicians voted on the nominees, the final winner chosen by the less knowledgeable. The great conductor Jascha Horenstein once suggested to record producer Charles Gerhardt that Schumann's symphonies could have benefitted from the assistance of an expert Hollywood orchestrator like Friedhofer. |