Louis Xiv The Best Little Secrets Are Kept Rar
The Steiners were a prosperous business family. Gabor owned and managed a theater, and dabbled in several entertainment enterprises-- he was the man who built the Riesenrad, the giant ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater. His wife Marie inherited three of Vienna's leading restaurants from her family. Both parents encouraged the precocious musical talents of their son. They sent him to the Vienna School of Technology, where he showed little interest in anything scholastic. But later, at the Imperial Academy of Music, he was brilliant and completed a four-year course in only one year, for which achievement he was awarded a gold medal. His brilliance was greatly aided by the affluence of his family, who could afford to send him to the best teachers available, including Robert Fuchs and Gustav Mahler. Having a father with a theater was also helpful. Recalls Steiner: \"He produced Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan and all the others. When I was twelve he let me conduct an American operetta, The Belle of New York, by Gustave Kerker. Kerker happened to be in Vienna at the time and he asked my parents if he could take me back to America with him as a Boy Wonder. My mother told him, 'No, all musicians are stinkers.' And then, as an afterthought about her own problems with her restaurants, 'And that goes for all waiters.'\" [Max Steiner interviews by Tony Thomas, Beverly Hills, California. The quotations used throughout this biographical introduction are composite reconstructions of Steiner's conversations with Thomas from two sources, according to Thomas: tape recorded interviews conducted by Thomas in 1959 and 1962, and frequent conversations with Steiner during the 1950s and 1960s. Hereafter cited as Interviews.] It was Steiner more than any other composer who pioneered the use of original composition as background scoring for films, although in those early years at RKO, sheer volume of work prevented him from applying the technique to every film to which he was assig