Hugo Friedhofer (1901-1981) is often named as the only native Californian among the famed film soundtrack composers of cinema's golden age with a career that started in 1929 with the advent of sound motion pictures and that ended only in 1974.
He was born in San Francisco to active professional musicians, cellist Paul Friedhofer and vocalist Eva Koenig. Hugo Friedhofer studied cello from the age of 13 with his father, but an early interest in art led him to attend San Francisco's Polytechnic High School. He dropped out at age 17 along with a group of fellow pacifist students who protested the firing of an antiwar teacher at the school.
After this he drifted away from art and towards music and moved to Berkeley where he studied music with Domenico Brescia. A biography of Friedhofer tells of him joining the People's Symphony Orchestra directed by Alexander Saslavsky at the age of 19. That organization only came into being in the fall of 1922 when he was 21; a San Francisco Chronicle article from that time lists Friedhofer as a member of that orchestra's cello section.
This biography also mistakenly gives the year of his elopement with Elizabeth Barrett as 1920. Records in the Ancestry.com database show that they were wed on March 13, 1923 in Napa, California. On the license he gave his occupation as "composer" and his employers as the People's Symphony. Two days after their wedding they participated in a performance by Dilley's Puppets at Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Percy Jay Dilley was a commercial artist and puppeteer who was active in North California for many years. Friedhofer composed the music for the show and his new wife performed it on the piano.
There are notices of him performing chamber music in the Bay Area between 1919 and 1922 in the San Francisco Chronicle, Examiner and Call. In an interview, he recalled taking his first movie theater orchestra job at theater "in the Polk-Larkin section" of San Francisco. This was likely at the Royal Theatre on Polk Street playing under director Maurice Lawrence, probably as a member of his "Royal Orchestra."
In 1924 Friedhofer joined The Artists' Ensemble a small semi-classical ensemble led by Oliver Alberti that performed at the Castro Theater. Alberti gave him the opportunity to create arrangements for the group. Around 1927-1928 he played in a string orchestra at the Granada Theater on Market Street led by Andrea Setaro. Setaro, who soon moved to Hollywood, wrote backgrounds for silent movies and sometimes asked Friedhofer to make arrangements and contribute passages.
With the success of the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, the first major "talking" picture, work for cinema musicians quickly dried up. Friedhofer took advantage of the arranging and composing skills he acquired as well as his connections in the movie world and moved south to work in Hollywood. At the invitation of another San Francisco composer and arranger, George Lipschultz, Friedhofer joined the Fox Film Corporation in July 1929. He started out orchestrating other composers work, but within a few years became a skilled and prolific composer for several Hollywood studios.
He was nominated nine times for Academy Awards and won an Oscar for his 1947 soundtrack for the best years of our lives. Read some entertaining and insightful interviews with him in Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life: A Hollywood Master of Music for The Movies.
Films in our DVD collection with soundtracks by Hugo Friedman include:
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Captain Carey U.S.A. (1950)
Homicidal (1961)
The Letter (1940)
Lifeboat (1944)
The Sea Hawk (1940)
Bibliography:
Artists in California, 1786-1940 by Edan Milton Hughes, 3rd edition (Crocker Art Museum, 2002).
Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life: A Hollywood Master of Music for The Movies. edited by Linda Danly (Scarecrow Press,1999).
"The Lights of Market Street," San Francisco Examiner (July 11, 1928).
"The Lost scores: The M-G-M Collection and Hugo Friedhofer's 'Body and Soul'," M.A. Thesis by Christa Lorenz (California State University, Long Beach, 2010). [accessed through the Dissertation Abstracts database]
Music and Dance in California, edited by José Rodriguez, compiled by William J. Perlman, 2nd edition (Bureau of Musical Research, 1940).
The Polytechnic Journal (Associated Students of Polytechnic High School, December 1917)
"Saslavsky to Direct Notable Event," San Francisco Chronicle (November 19, 1922).
"Setaro's Score to Be Widely Used: Music for 'Fire Brigade' Makes Hit," San Francisco Chronicle (February 2, 1927).
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