Werner Janssen

Werner Alexander Oscar Janssen, born in New York City on June 1, 1899, was an American composer, conductor, and Broadway writer who worked across classical music, film scoring, and musical theater until his death on September 19, 1990. His Broadway credits include the musicals Boom Boom, Lady Butterfly, Letty Pepper, and Love Dreams, as well as the revue Nic Nax of 1926.

Janssen was the son of August Louis Janssen, a New York restaurateur who founded the Janssen Hofbräu Haus on Broadway, and Alice Bianca E. von Boeckmann Janssen. The family resided in Great Neck on King's Point Road, next door to George M. Cohan, who encouraged the young Janssen to pursue piano and music. Janssen's first two piano students were Cohan's daughters. Despite his father's preference that he enter the restaurant business, Janssen financed his own musical education at Dartmouth College by working as a waiter and performing in cabarets and theaters, while also selling his own popular compositions. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Dartmouth, where he earned a bachelor's degree in music in 1921. At the New England Conservatory of Music he studied composition with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, and he studied piano with Arthur Friedheim, a pupil of Franz Liszt. He also served in the United States Army infantry during World War I.

Following the war, Janssen composed jazz songs for Tin Pan Alley and made piano recordings of two of his popular songs in 1920. He contributed compositions to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1925 and 1926, and several of his songs became national hits. Revenue from these successes helped fund conducting studies with Felix Weingartner in Basel from 1920 to 1921 and with Hermann Scherchen in Strasbourg from 1921 to 1925. He received a Juilliard Fellowship and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for his tone poem New Year's Eve in New York, a work for large orchestra in a jazz idiom. That composition received its premiere on May 8, 1929, performed by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra under Howard Hanson. The Cleveland Orchestra under Nikolai Sokoloff performed it in 1930, and the Victor Symphony Orchestra under Nathaniel Shilkret recorded it in 1929. In 1945, Janssen and Shilkret exchanged roles when Janssen conducted the Genesis Suite, a work Shilkret had conceived and coauthored.

In 1927, NBC hired Janssen to conduct symphony concerts on radio, though he was dismissed early in that engagement. Samuel Roxy Rothapfel engaged him in 1929 to conduct at the Roxy Theater, a position from which he was also soon released. He subsequently spent three years studying in Rome at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Ottorino Respighi, producing new compositions including the Louisiana Suite and the string quartet American Kaleidoscope, the latter performed by the Quartetto di Roma. His association with that ensemble led to an engagement conducting the Royal Orchestra of Rome, and he took additional conducting engagements in Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Riga, Stockholm, and Turin. In February 1934, he conducted an all-Sibelius concert in Helsinki, after which Sibelius remarked that Finland had for the first time discovered his music. On March 8, 1936, the Finnish government awarded Janssen the Order of the White Rose for his contributions to Finnish music.

Janssen was appointed associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic for the 1934–35 season, and on November 8, 1934, he became the first American-born conductor to lead that orchestra. He served as conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1937 through 1939, resigning that post to work with film producer Walter Wanger. His first credited film score, for The General Died at Dawn in 1936, earned an Academy Award nomination, the first of six such nominations he received for his film work. Additional scores included Blockade (1938), Winter Carnival (1939), Eternally Yours (1939), Slightly Honorable (1940), The House Across the Bay (1940), Guest in the House (1944), The Southerner (1945), Captain Kidd (1945), A Night in Casablanca (1946), Ruthless (1948), Uncle Vanya (1957), and the 1966 German television production Robin Hood, der edle Ritter. Alongside his film work, he continued composing concert music, including the Foster Suite (1937), String Quartet No. 2 (1938), Octet for Five (1965), and Quintet for 10 Instruments (1968).

In 1940, Janssen founded the Janssen Symphony in Los Angeles, which operated as a rival to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and served as a platform for contemporary music until 1952. The ensemble commissioned works from American composers and recorded for Capitol Records. Janssen also partnered with producer David L. Loew to create the Musicolor series of classic musical shorts, including Toccata and Fugue (1946) and Enchanted Lake (1947), both filmed in Cinecolor. He subsequently held positions as music director of the Utah Symphony from 1946 to 1947, the Oregon Symphony from 1947 to 1949, and the San Diego Philharmonic from 1952 to 1954. He also held posts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1956, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1956 to 1957, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra from 1959 to 1961, as well as the Vienna Volksoper. Recordings with the Vienna Volksoper included Karl-Birger Blomdahl's opera Aniara and Sergei Prokofiev's opera War and Peace. He returned to the United States in the early 1970s.

Janssen was married three times. His first wife was Elsa Schmidt, an Indianapolis brewery heiress, with whom he had two children, Werner Jr. (1924–2012) and Alice (1923–2011). That marriage ended in divorce in 1937. He married Hollywood actress Ann Harding in 1937; they divorced in 1962, and he acquired a stepdaughter, Jane Harding, through that union. His third wife was Christina Heintzmann, with whom he had a daughter, Jennifer. Janssen also authored an unpublished autobiography, written with D. Bruce Lockerbie around 1980 and titled While the Music Lasts, running to approximately 261 double-spaced typed pages.