Eugene Zador (1894–1977)

Eugene Zador is not well known. He is certainly not as well known as the people he collaborated with, or the projects he worked on. Zador’s name appears in the credits of over 120 films. Among them are some of the most successful, some of the best-loved, and some of the most artistically acclaimed films ever made. Yet Zador never received any Oscars, and such recognition as he got in his lifetime was largely from within the somewhat closed world of the film music business itself—and even then, often grudgingly. He deserves greater recognition. In his way, he was a genius. Eugene Zador was possibly the greatest orchestrator of film music who ever worked in Hollywood.

Eugene Zador was born in Bátaszék, Hungary, in 1894. His extraordinary musical gifts emerged in childhood, and he was a virtuoso keyboard player when he enrolled at the Vienna Music Academy at the age of sixteen. After studying with Heuberger for a year, he moved on to Leipzig, where he spent three years as a pupil of the great German late Romantic composer, Max Reger (1873–1916). He continued his studies at the University of Munster, and on completion of his doctorate, he returned to Vienna, where he was a Professor of Music from 1921–1929. It is indicative of the nature of Zador’s talent that by the age of thirty-five, he had not composed—or tried to compose—any original work of note.

During the 1930s in Vienna, he taught privately and began to compose. In 1930 his opera X-mal Rembrandt (Forever Rembrandt) was produced in Vienna, and in 1935 his lively and atmospheric Hungarian Caprice enjoyed some popular success. Both show the influence of Reger in their thematic development and of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) in the lushness of their orchestration. The early opera also shows the more radical influences of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Alban Berg (1885–1935) in its occasional atonality and dramatic use of dissonance.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States in 1939, his second opera, Christopher Columbus, was produced in New York City. It was not a great success, though it has since been revived and recorded by several orchestras and choruses. It would be 25 years before Zador wrote another opera.

Instead of trying to become part of the musical life of New York City, Zador settled in Los Angeles. His gifts were very quickly in demand. He worked fast, and had an impeccable ear for the material he was working with, whether it was a Roman epic or a contemporary thriller. He became orchestrator for the great Hungarian-born film composer Miklós Rózsa, and made invaluable contributions to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Jean Negulesco’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959). It is perhaps in film noir that his unique talents are best displayed. Robert Siodmak’s dark masterpieces The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) owe much of their fierce tension and suspense to Zador’s dense and subtly menacing orchestral textures.

Zador continued to write outside Hollywood. His “Christmas Overture” from Christopher Columbus and his Hungarian Caprice are part of the concert repertoire. But his main contribution to twentieth-century art will go on being heard, largely unacknowledged, as long as people continue watching great movies.