Hans Spialek

Hans Spialek, born in Vienna on April 17, 1894, was an Austrian-born American composer and orchestrator who died in New York on November 20, 1983, at the age of 89. His musical formation began in Vienna, where he sang in the children's chorus of the Vienna State Opera and performed small roles, among them the part of the little boy in the second act of La bohème under the direction of Gustav Mahler. He went on to study composing and conducting at the Vienna Conservatory.

During World War I, Spialek served in the military and was captured by Russian forces. While a prisoner of war, he was permitted to continue his musical activities and conducted an orchestra made up of fellow prisoners. Following the armistice, he remained in Moscow to study with composer Reinhold Glière. In 1924, Spialek and his wife, the singer Dora Boshoer, emigrated to the United States, where he joined the music staff of the publishing house Chappell Music. There he shared an office with Robert Russell Bennett, with whom he would go on to collaborate on dozens of Broadway productions.

Spialek's Broadway career began in 1926 when he orchestrated portions of Walter Donaldson and Joseph Meyer's score for Sweetheart Time. Over the following decades he orchestrated a total of 147 musicals, with his most concentrated period of activity spanning more than 100 shows across his first 22 years in the field. His credits from the 1920s include Rosalie (1928), The New Moon (1928), and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). The 1930s brought a particularly dense body of work: The New Yorkers (1930), Gay Divorce (1932), Anything Goes (1934), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938). Into the 1940s he orchestrated Pal Joey (1940), Panama Hattie (1940), Something for the Boys (1943), Are You with It? (1945), and Where's Charley? (1948). His final new theatre work was the 1967 musical Mata Hari.

Music historian Thomas Hischak has identified Spialek's ballet orchestrations as among his most significant contributions, citing specifically his scoring of Richard Rodgers' music for "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" and the "Princess Zenobia" ballet in On Your Toes, the "Big Brother" ballet in The Boys from Syracuse, and "Peter's Journey" in Babes in Arms. In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, scholar George J. Ferencz characterized Spialek's theatre orchestrations as distinguished by their wittiness, frequent text-painting, and masterful use of minimum resources.

Beginning in the 1940s, Spialek reduced his Broadway output and directed his energies toward other areas. He had composed music for the 1939 World's Fair, and in subsequent years he wrote and conducted for radio broadcasts as well as for trade expositions and civic pageants. Alongside his arranging work, Spialek composed and published original concert pieces, including the orchestral suite The Tall City (1933), an orchestral Sinfonietta (1936), and Manhattan Watercolors, subtitled An Orchestral Entertainment, in 1937.

In retirement during the 1980s, Spialek collaborated with conductors John Mauceri and John McGlinn to reconstruct his original orchestrations from the 1930s for new recordings of On Your Toes and Anything Goes. McGlinn described Spialek's orchestrations as transparent and supportive of singers, and noted that they were full of sly humor. Ferencz wrote that this late work earned Spialek the admiration of a new generation of theatre scholars and enthusiasts.