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...