Max Steiner - Casablanca

Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music".

Steiner composed hundreds of film scores, including The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944), which won him Academy Awards. He was nominated for the Academy Award a total of twenty six times, a record surpassed only by Alfred Newman and John Williams for the most nominations received by a composer. Three of his scores were also nominated at a time when composers were not eligible to be nominated in the Original Score category.

Steiner was one of the best-known composers in Hollywood, and is widely regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers in the history of cinema. He was a frequent collaborator with some of the most famous film directors in history, including John Ford and William Wyler. Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), and the film score for which he is possibly best known, Gone with the Wind (1939). Despite being one of the most popular film soundtracks ever written, Gone with the Wind failed to win an Oscar for him.

Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic-drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Set during World War II, it focuses on a man torn between, in the words of one character, love and virtue. Casablanca won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Its characters, dialogue, and music have become iconic, and Casablanca has grown in popularity to the point that it now consistently ranks near the top of lists of the greatest films of all time.

The music was written by Max Steiner. The song "As Time Goes By" by Herman Hupfeld had been part of the story from the original play; Steiner wanted to write his own composition to replace it, but Bergman had already cut her hair short for her next role (María in For Whom the Bell Tolls) and could not re-shoot the scenes which incorporated the song, so Steiner based the entire score on it and "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem, transforming them to reflect changing moods.

Particularly notable is the "duel of the songs" between Strasser and Laszlo at Rick's cafe. In the soundtrack, "La Marseillaise" is played by a full orchestra. Originally, the opposing piece for this iconic sequence was to be the "Horst Wessel Lied", a Nazi anthem, but this was still under international copyright in non-Allied countries. The opening bars of the "Deutschlandlied", the national anthem of Germany, is featured throughout the score as a motif to represent the Germans, much as "La Marseillaise" is used to represent the Allies.

Other songs in the film include "It Had to Be You" from 1924 (music by Isham Jones, lyrics by Gus Kahn), "Shine" from 1910 (music by Ford Dabney, lyrics by Cecil Mack and Lew Brown), "Avalon" from 1920 (music and lyrics by Al Jolson, Buddy DeSylva and Vincent Rose), "Perfidia" by Alberto Dominguez and "Knock on Wood" (music by M.K. Jerome, lyrics by Jack Scholl), the only original song in the film.

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