Interview by John Mauceri
Recorded November 15, 2023, in Manhattan, New York City
John Waxman, son of composer Franz Waxman, tells how Billy Wilder, who had introduced his parents on a dance floor at Hiddensee, talked them out of naming him Wilhelm when he was born in 1940. He traces his father’s path from Dresden to Berlin, where he arranged and conducted Friedrich Hollaender’s score for The Blue Angel, until a beating on the street in 1934 sent his parents to Paris.
He recounts how James Whale, struck by the “ghost orchestra” in Liliom, hired his father for Bride of Frankenstein; how a fee dispute with Jascha Heifetz on Humoresque led to hiring a young Isaac Stern; and the Carmen Fantasy that grew out of that score. He also tells of a cousin, Rudy, presumed killed at Auschwitz, who turned up in Munich after the war.
His childhood memories include waking beside the Oscar for A Place in the Sun, angering Hitchcock with hiccups atop a ladder during a Rear Window session, hiding Heifetz’s violins one New Year’s Eve, and a dinner at which Dmitri Shostakovich heard a cue from A Place in the Sun. He describes his father’s Los Angeles Music Festival, with some 70 premieres and Igor Stravinsky present 29 times, and the stories behind the oratorio Joshua and The Song of Terezin.
He explains how he started Themes & Variations “literally on the kitchen table” to bring film music to orchestras, and calls the restoration of Bernard Herrmann’s music his “proudest moment.” His great disappointment, he says, is that film music never became part of the standard repertoire.