Louis Gruenberg

Louis Gruenberg (August 3, 1884 – June 9, 1964) was a pianist, composer, and Broadway writer born near Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus but was then part of Russia. His family emigrated to the United States when he was an infant, and his father worked as a violinist in New York City. By the age of eight, Gruenberg was studying piano with Adele Margulies at the National Conservatory in New York, an institution then directed by Antonín Dvořák. In his early twenties he traveled to Europe to study with Ferruccio Busoni at the Vienna Conservatory, and prior to World War I he worked as both a touring soloist and accompanist while also teaching.

His 1919 orchestral work The Hill of Dreams earned him the Flagler Prize, allowing him to concentrate more fully on composition. His output reflected a strong interest in jazz and ragtime, and he became an active figure in the new-music community, joining the International Composers' Guild, which had been founded by Edgard Varèse and Carlos Salzedo in 1921. On February 19, 1922, his Polychromatics received its world premiere at the Guild's inaugural concert series at the Greenwich Village Theatre. On February 4, 1923, Gruenberg conducted the American premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire at the Klaw Theatre in another ICG-organized concert. He subsequently left the Guild along with other members over disagreements with Varèse and helped form the League of Composers.

Among his most prominent compositional achievements was the opera The Emperor Jones, based on Eugene O'Neill's play, which the Metropolitan Opera premiered in its 1933 season. The title role was created by baritone Lawrence Tibbett, and the production was revived at the Met for the 1934 season, earning enough attention to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. A scene from the opera later appeared in Paul Robeson's 1936 film Song of Freedom. Between 1933 and 1936, Gruenberg headed the composition department of the Chicago Musical College, now part of Roosevelt University. He also collaborated with filmmaker Pare Lorentz on The Fight for Life, a semi-documentary about childbirth in Chicago slums on which John Steinbeck also worked.

In 1937, Gruenberg relocated with his family to Beverly Hills, California, where fellow League of Composers members Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky had also settled. There he turned his attention to film scoring. He was part of the five-composer team credited on the score for John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), heading the list in the official credits, though his name was not included among the nominees when the film won the Academy Award for Best Music Scoring. His sole-credit score for So Ends Our Night (1941), starring Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan, and Glenn Ford, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. The following year he received another Oscar nomination, shared with Columbia's music director Morris Stoloff, for Best Dramatic Score for Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), directed by John Farrow and starring Paul Muni. That score came about after Stravinsky, originally hired for the project, completed his work before filming was finished; Stravinsky later reworked the unused material into his Four Norwegian Moods, and Gruenberg was brought in to score the completed film.

In 1944, violinist Jascha Heifetz commissioned and premiered Gruenberg's Violin Concerto, Op. 47, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Heifetz subsequently recorded the work with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1945 for RCA Victor. The concerto runs approximately 38 minutes across three movements. Gruenberg continued scoring films through the late 1940s, including Counter-Attack (1945), The Gangster (1947), Arch of Triumph (1948), and All the King's Men (1949), the last of which won three Academy Awards and earned Gruenberg a Golden Globe nomination for Best Score. His final Hollywood credit was Quicksand (1950), starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre.

Gruenberg's work extended to Broadway, where his credits include the musical Roly-Boly Eyes and Jack and the Beanstalk, for which he served as both composer and book writer.