Best Music, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

One thing became clear this year: Everyone was confused by the distinction between "Original Score" and "Scoring." Why, for example, was Aaron Copland's music for Of Mice and Men nominated in both categories? And why was Herbert Stothart nominated for Original Score, when much of the music in the film was by Harold Arlen and a pastiche of themes by Schumann, Mussorgsky, and Mendelssohn? Clearly the voters were confused, since they gave Stothart the Oscar for his "originality." It would take the Academy until the 1941 awards to solve this problem.

The nominees were ...  
(Original Score) 

• Anthony Collins, Nurse Edith Cavell 
• Aaron Copland, Of Mice and Men 
• Lud Gluskin, Lucien Moraweck, The Man in the Iron Mask 
• Werner Janssen, Eternally Yours 
• Alfred Newman, The Rains Came 
• Alfred Newman, Wuthering Heights 
• Max Steiner, Dark Victory 
• Max Steiner, Gone With the Wind 
• Herbert Stothart, The Wizard of Oz 
• Victor Young, Golden Boy 
• Victor Young, Gulliver's Travels 
• Victor Young, Man of Conquest 

(Scoring) 

• Phil Boutelje, Arthur Lange, The Great Victor Herbert 
• Aaron Copland, Of Mice and Men 
• Cy Feuer, She Married a Cop 
• Lou Forbes, Intermezzo 
• Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken, Stagecoach 
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex 
• Alfred Newman, The Hunchback of Notre Dame 
• Alfred Newman, They Shall Have Music 
• Charles Previn, First Love 
• Louis Silvers, Swanee River 
• George E. Stoll, Roger Edens, Babes in Arms 
• Dimitri Tiomkin, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 
• Victor Young, Way Down South 

(Song) 

• "Faithful Forever," from Gulliver's Travels; music by Ralph Rainger, lyrics by Leo Robin
• "I Poured My Heart in a Song," from Second Fiddle; music and lyrics by Irving Berlin 
• "Over the Rainbow," from The Wizard of Oz; music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg
• "Wishing," from Love Affair; music and lyrics by Buddy de Sylva  

... when they should have been ... 

(Original Score) 

• Anthony Collins, Nurse Edith Cavell 
• Aaron Copland, Of Mice and Men 
• Lud Gluskin, Lucien Moraweck, The Man in the Iron Mask 
• Werner Janssen, Eternally Yours 
• Alfred Newman, The Rains Came 
• Alfred Newman, Wuthering Heights 
• Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky 
• Max Steiner, Dark Victory 
• Max Steiner, Gone With the Wind 
• Victor Young, Golden Boy 
• Victor Young, Gulliver's Travels 
• Victor Young, Man of Conquest 

(Scoring) 

• Phil Boutelje, Arthur Lange, The Great Victor Herbert 
• Cy Feuer, She Married a Cop 
• Lou Forbes, Intermezzo 
• Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken, Stagecoach 
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex 
• Alfred Newman, The Hunchback of Notre Dame 
• Alfred Newman, They Shall Have Music 
• Charles Previn, First Love 
• Louis Silvers, Swanee River 
• George E. Stoll, Roger Edens, Babes in Arms 
• Herbert Stothart, The Wizard of Oz 
• Dimitri Tiomkin, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 
• Victor Young, Way Down South 

(Song)* 

• "Good Morning," from Babes in Arms; music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed 
• "I Poured My Heart in a Song," from Second Fiddle; music and lyrics by Irving Berlin 
• "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady," from At the Circus; music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg 
• "Over the Rainbow," from The Wizard of Oz; music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

*Under the Academy rules this year, studios could submit only one song, which means that MGM couldn't submit "Good Morning" and "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady" along with "Over the Rainbow," which was bound to win. But I threw them in because nobody cares about "Faithful Forever" or "Wishing" anyway.

And the Oscar went to ... 

(Original Score) 

Herbert Stothart, The Wizard of Oz. 

It was MGM's fault for nominating Stothart in the Original Score category and not for Scoring. Of the actual nominees for Original Score, the clear winner would have to be Max Steiner's familiar music for Gone With the Wind. 

(Scoring) 

Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken, Stagecoach.

The themes on which Stagecoach's score is based sound like a collection of Western-movie clichés: "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair," "Shall We Gather at the River," and so on. And it's not quite clear why it took four accomplished musicians to assemble them into a score: Hageman was a Dutch-born conservatory-trained composer, conductor and pianist; Harling was an Englishman who had studied at the London Academy of Music; Leipold had film music credits going back to 1928; and Shuken's career as an orchestrator for the movies stretched from 1936 to 1974, two years before his death. 

(Song) 

"Over the Rainbow," from The Wizard of Oz; music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. 

The familiar story goes that studio head Louis B. Mayer and producer Mervyn LeRoy thought the song slowed the movie down and should be cut, and only the insistence of associate producer Arthur Freed and Judy Garland's vocal coach, Roger Edens, kept it in the film. Even lyricist E.Y. Harburg has been cited as thinking Harold Arlen's melody more suited to Nelson Eddy than to a Kansas farm girl. All of this may be true, although at MGM what Mayer wanted is usually what you got. Freed's argument was that the film needed a song that would serve as a transition from Kansas to Oz, and he was, of course, right. It became one of the most beloved songs of all time, especially after Garland's troubled life gave Harburg's wistful lines a special poignancy. Neither Harburg nor Arlen ever won another Oscar, but together and in collaboration with others they are responsible for some of the greatest songs ever written. 

  

... when they should have gone to ...
(Original Score)
Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky.

Sergei Prokofiev

It is one of the greatest film scores ever written, but it's unlikely that Joseph Stalin would have allowed Mosfilm, the production company, to enter it in so bourgeois capitalist a competition as the Academy Awards. Prokofiev, who had left Russia after the revolution but returned in 1936, was under constant political scrutiny, but his teaming with director Sergei Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky was looked on favorably. It was released in the Soviet Union in December 1938 to great acclaim, and was well-received in its 1939 release in the United States. Unfortunately, the whiplash alliances of wartime Europe caught up with the film when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in August 1939. Nevsky, which is blatantly anti-German, was pulled from circulation. Then, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was just as quickly restored to screens. Prokofiev's music was integral to the film: He worked closely with Eisenstein, who sometimes shot and edited footage to match the composer's music, just as Prokofiev composed to match the director's visuals. On the other hand, the sound recording for the film was poor, so Prokofiev transformed his score into a cantata with orchestra, chorus, and mezzo-soprano soloist. It's still very much part of the repertoire of symphony orchestras, and is often performed by them in tandem with screenings of the film.

 

(Scoring)
Herbert Stothart, The Wizard of Oz. 

Herbert Stothart

This is where Stothart's achievement belongs. Because if his Wizard of Oz is not a great Original Score, it's still a great score, as the San Francisco Symphony demonstrated last year when it performed a reconstructed version of the score (the actual score had been trashed during the great sell-off of MGM property in 1970) along with a screening of the film. Although MGM erred by placing him in the wrong Oscar category, it's not entirely true that Stothart didn't compose any of the score of The Wizard of Oz -- he wrote these themes, for example: 

And the melding of the Arlen themes and the reworked classical motifs with Stothart's own compositions is skillfully done. Stothart had been a composer and orchestrator on Broadway before being hired by Louis B. Mayer in 1929. He worked as composer at MGM for his entire career, until his death in 1949, but although he was nominated nine times, this was his only Oscar.