Oscar Levant(1906-1972)
- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Oscar Levant's own versatility may have helped to cloud his memory as a
sort of Hollywood utility man, perhaps in the worst sense; people
tended to see him as one among many personalities, but he was so much
more. It is unfortunately forgotten that he was first and foremost, a
brilliant musician and very competent composer. He was from an Orthodox
Jewish Russian family, growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
Like his siblings, he started music lessons at an early age and on
various instruments, first taking piano lessons from his older brother
Benjamin. At seven he continued piano under Martin Miessler, originally
of the Leipzig Conservatory. Levant was giving public recitals within a
year. He attended music lessons at the Fifth Avenue High School, where
he was exposed to classical performance by his instructor, Oscar
Demmler. This included going to recitals of the great Polish pianist
Ignacy Jan Paderewski and concerts
conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
Demmler invited Levant to accompany him in violin and piano repertoire,
which was Levant's first public playing - he was only twelve.
Levant dropped out of high school (Fifth Avenue) in 1922 when his
mother decided to take him to New York to continue music instruction.
There he studied with Zygmunt Stojowski, a compatriot and disciple of
Paderewski and a student trained by
Wladyslaw Zelenski, Louis-Joseph
Diemer and Clement Philibert Léo Delibes. By
early adulthood, Levant had evolved an engaging and opinionated
personality that was attracted to the social life of the city. One
great influence on him was the glamor and allure of Broadway, which he
saw firsthand while hiring out as a pianist for the stage pit and the
many nightclubs in the area. He was in the musical play "Burlesque"
(1927) and had his first stint at Broadway composing as co-composer for
"Ripples" (1930). Though he gave a private recital in early December
1922 for Paderewski and kept up a schedule of attending mainstream
classical musical events, he was also becoming something of a bon
vivant in popular music circles, and became attracted to the seamier
side of New York society, developing acquaintanceships with a variety
of the city's mobsters. His mobility in social circles was, to say the
least, surprising. Later Levant became a member of the Algonquin Round
Table, the exclusive circle of New York wits and writers that met
regularly at the Algonquin Hotel and included such luminaries as
Robert Benchley,
Dorothy Parker and
Alexander Woollcott.
It would seem natural that Levant would eventually be attracted to the
glitter of Hollywood. He had a taste of "the movies" in 1923 when he
appeared with popular orchestra leader
Ben Bernie and his band, All the
Lads, in a little-known experimental sound effort by DeForest Phonofilm
in New York City. Touring in cabaret in London from 1926, Levant heard
about New York composers and musicians going west to Hollywood, where
music was coming into big demand. He left for the coast in 1928. He
quickly secured employment as a composer, and from that year to 1929
his compositions appearing in 21 films. From 1929 to 1937 he composed
regularly for films, and a bit more sporadically from 1939 to 1948, for
a total of 19 films. His mingling with the musical elite in town
resulted in his developing a close friendship with legendary composer
George Gershwin. The association
resulted in a profound musical relationship. He was still keeping a
foot in the New York music scene, mainly in Broadway and on Tin Pan
Alley (he co-wrote many pop songs). He also returned to some
concertizing (1930 and 1931) at two large venues: the Hollywood Bowl
and Lewisohn Stadium in New York.
By 1932 Levant was turning his attention to classical composing and
limiting his concertizing. His "Sonatina for Piano" caught the ear of
composer Aaron Copland, who persuaded him
to premiere it in April 1932 at Copland's festival for contemporary
American music. Gershwin asked him to play second piano in a duet
version of the "Second Rhapsody" under conductor
Arturo Toscanini. He also played -
almost as his own - Gershwin's signature "Concerto in F" in 1932.
Although Levant launched into a crowded schedule of radio performances
of popular and easy listening classical music, he did no more public
concerts for some five years. He did take Gershwin's advice and
refreshed his theory skills with
Joseph Schillinger, a Russian
who was a resident Hollywood theorist/composer. Levant was not alone in
using Schillinger's music school services; at that time some of the
Big-Band era's most famous names appearing on the silver screen,
including Tommy Dorsey,
Benny Goodman and
Glenn Miller, were also using the
Russian. This was in 1934, the same year Levant's "Sinfonietta" (in
three movements) premiered with
Bernard Herrmann conducting in
New York.
Levant was back in Hollywood in 1935 for more film composing, but part
of the time was spent studying under one of the great musical minds to
arrive in Southern California,
Arnold Schönberg. Schoenberg's time was
already crowded with local academia commitments and studying with some
of Hollywood's brightest composers, including
Alfred Newman and
Franz Waxman. Levant's study ranged from
1935 to 1937. Part of the result was the inspiration for completing his
"Piano Concerto", his first of several string quartets (among other
pieces he composed, including a woodwind trio), and the "Nocturne for
Orchestra" (premiered in L.A. in 1937). The latter was released by New
Music Editions in 1936 - this was his only orchestral score to be
published. In the meantime Levant was doing music for Hollywood. His
"Crayon est sur la Table", ("The Pencil is on the Table") was a sort of
parody of French opera in the style of
Claude Debussy. It was a centerpiece
(though transformed as "Carnaval" with an Italian libretto) for the
20th Century-Fox film
Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936).
In July of 1937 Gershwin passed away. This opened a new period of
recognition for Levant, for he was immediately crowned sole interpreter
and virtuoso performer of Gershwin's music, the beginning of a quixotic
20-year reign. That same year Levant started his "Suite for Orchestra"
and finished its orchestration by early 1938. In October of that year
he returned to the east to debut as a Broadway conductor while
replacing his brother Harry for 65 performances of
George S. Kaufman and
Lorenz Hart's "The Fabulous Invalid". He
augmented that by seeing to the Broadway stage as composer and
conductor a new Kaufman and Hart work, "The American Way" in January of
1939.
By the middle of that year Levant had returned to concertizing in all
the big American cities, showcasing not only such Gershwin works as
"Concerto in F" and the "Rhapsody in Blue", but also a whole repertoire
including an occasional work of his own, including his two 1940 pieces
"Caprice for Orchestra" and "A New Overture and Polka for
'Oscar
Homolka'" (the actor). "Caprice" was particularly showcased by British
conductor Thomas Beecham.
But these were his last major concert works. Nevertheless, this marked
a decade of concertizing, radio broadcasts and recording significantly
with Columbia Records and great conductors such as Reiner,
Eugene Ormandy,
Andre Kostelanetz, Wallenstein,
Efrem Kurtz and
Morton Gould.
Occasionally Levant appeared on film in a showcase piano piece, but
there are only a handful of film roles where he showed his substantial
skill as an actor. He played himself in the highly fictionalized
Gershwin bio
Rhapsody in Blue (1945),
highlighted by his playing of the piece. He was still himself but
convincingly in character in one of his best dramatic roles as
wisecracking (he often wrote his own lines for his film characters)
concert pianist Sid Jeffers in
Humoresque (1946) with
John Garfield and
Joan Crawford. He went into the
studio to record a set of excerpts from
Richard Wagner's "Tristan"
arranged for piano, violin, and orchestra with violinist
Isaac Stern, and conductor
Franz Waxman as part of the sound track for
the film. He was able to play two of his favorite pieces
(Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's
"Piano Concerto No. 1" and
Aram Khachaturyan's "Sabre Dance")
when he got around to doing the sophisticated comedy
The Barkleys of Broadway (1949).
A few years later he did his last two films. In
An American in Paris (1951)
the focus is on Gene Kelly, but a
close second was Gershwin's music, the title of the movie taken from
his extraordinary montage of movements visualizing Paris. Levant was
his usual carefree pianist character, but during a fantasy concerto
sequence, he is spotlighted as playing the piano soloist, the
conductor, and representative musicians for each orchestra instrument,
a great sight gag tour de force of his musical know-how. In his final
film Levant is a caricature of himself mixed with the film's
co-screenwriter, Adolph Green. This was the
comedy musical
The Band Wagon (1953) in which
friend Fred Astaire was also a caricature
of himself as a legendary but essentially washed-up song and dance man
who has a stellar comeback.
Levant seemed to have fun with this film and its bright script that
poked fun at entertainment in general, but his dialog, obviously more
of his own input, included hints at his progressive decline, including
his accumulative neuroses and accompanying hypochondria. His
extraordinarily glib and incisive tongue had evolved from earlier
life-of-the-party witty repartee to increasingly self-critical and
acerbic patter which showed up sometimes most inappropriately in his
recitals from the late 1930s. His spontaneous remarks bordered, and
often flowed over into, downright rudeness and sometimes only slightly
veiled invective. He seemed unable to resist putting down his own
musical efforts, a compulsion to parody himself, revealing his
insecurities and a rather knee-jerk need to be funny and play the clown
at his own expense. He had renamed his "Poeme for Piano", "Insult for
the Piano" or "The Lone Ranger in Vienna." In answer to friend/musical
promoter Robert Russell Bennett's
radio interview with Levant (1940) asking what he thought about the
reception of his first string quarter, he replied: "Violently. It not
only brought me obscurity but many enemies." Such was typical of his
sometimes inextricably extreme one-liners. During the height of his
concertizing, Levant was the highest paid concert performer, but after
1951 he canceled many commitments, which finally brought a temporary
banning by the American Federation of Musicians. There were still
occasional concerts in the 1950s, one of the most memorable being Royce
Hall at UCLA (1958) when he launched into the first movement of the
second piano concerto of
Dmitri Shostakovich only to forget
his place and stop, turning to the audience and quipping,"I don't even
know where I am. I'm going to start all over again". He did, and with
great triumph. His final public effort that same year was the "Concerto
in F" in which it took all the urging of conductor
Andre Kostelanetz to keep Levant from
simply stopping mid-course and walking off stage. Levant prefaced his
encores with the quip that he was "playing under the auspices of Mt.
Sinai" (the high-profile Los Angeles hospital often patronized by the
stars).
That statement was rather pathetically true. Along with real and
imagined illnesses, Levant's mental state, always fragile at best,
developed into classic stage fright. By this time he was long-addicted
to prescription drugs and was in and out of the hospital on a regular
basis. His faithful second wife of 33 years, actress/singer
June Gale, had to commit him to mental
institutions on several occasions. Yet Levant continued onward. There
was a series of album recordings in the late 1950s. He made the rounds
of a few prime-time game shows and late-night TV talk shows,
particularly that of friend Jack Parr. Between
1958 and 1960 he had his own prime-time local Los Angeles TV show
called "The Oscar Levant Show", which sometimes offered a rather
subdued and intimate look at the restive mind of Levant. As a talk show
with guests and Levant, usually ringed in a cloud from his chain
smoking, playing impromptu pieces on the piano, it was inevitably
canceled because of Levant's controversial monologues and off-color,
inflammatory remarks about personalities. He wrote three memoirs: "A
Smattering of Ignorance" (1940), "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" (1965) and
"The Unimportance of Being Oscar" (1968), each incisive as well as
outlandish in the context of Levant's lifelong self-analysis and skewed
view of humanity. He increasingly retired from any sort of public
exposure over the last decade of his life. A composer of vital and
original music and an extraordinary individual in whatever
interpretation one might use, Oscar Levant was one of the most
intriguing entertainment enigmas of the 20th century.
sort of Hollywood utility man, perhaps in the worst sense; people
tended to see him as one among many personalities, but he was so much
more. It is unfortunately forgotten that he was first and foremost, a
brilliant musician and very competent composer. He was from an Orthodox
Jewish Russian family, growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
Like his siblings, he started music lessons at an early age and on
various instruments, first taking piano lessons from his older brother
Benjamin. At seven he continued piano under Martin Miessler, originally
of the Leipzig Conservatory. Levant was giving public recitals within a
year. He attended music lessons at the Fifth Avenue High School, where
he was exposed to classical performance by his instructor, Oscar
Demmler. This included going to recitals of the great Polish pianist
Ignacy Jan Paderewski and concerts
conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
Demmler invited Levant to accompany him in violin and piano repertoire,
which was Levant's first public playing - he was only twelve.
Levant dropped out of high school (Fifth Avenue) in 1922 when his
mother decided to take him to New York to continue music instruction.
There he studied with Zygmunt Stojowski, a compatriot and disciple of
Paderewski and a student trained by
Wladyslaw Zelenski, Louis-Joseph
Diemer and Clement Philibert Léo Delibes. By
early adulthood, Levant had evolved an engaging and opinionated
personality that was attracted to the social life of the city. One
great influence on him was the glamor and allure of Broadway, which he
saw firsthand while hiring out as a pianist for the stage pit and the
many nightclubs in the area. He was in the musical play "Burlesque"
(1927) and had his first stint at Broadway composing as co-composer for
"Ripples" (1930). Though he gave a private recital in early December
1922 for Paderewski and kept up a schedule of attending mainstream
classical musical events, he was also becoming something of a bon
vivant in popular music circles, and became attracted to the seamier
side of New York society, developing acquaintanceships with a variety
of the city's mobsters. His mobility in social circles was, to say the
least, surprising. Later Levant became a member of the Algonquin Round
Table, the exclusive circle of New York wits and writers that met
regularly at the Algonquin Hotel and included such luminaries as
Robert Benchley,
Dorothy Parker and
Alexander Woollcott.
It would seem natural that Levant would eventually be attracted to the
glitter of Hollywood. He had a taste of "the movies" in 1923 when he
appeared with popular orchestra leader
Ben Bernie and his band, All the
Lads, in a little-known experimental sound effort by DeForest Phonofilm
in New York City. Touring in cabaret in London from 1926, Levant heard
about New York composers and musicians going west to Hollywood, where
music was coming into big demand. He left for the coast in 1928. He
quickly secured employment as a composer, and from that year to 1929
his compositions appearing in 21 films. From 1929 to 1937 he composed
regularly for films, and a bit more sporadically from 1939 to 1948, for
a total of 19 films. His mingling with the musical elite in town
resulted in his developing a close friendship with legendary composer
George Gershwin. The association
resulted in a profound musical relationship. He was still keeping a
foot in the New York music scene, mainly in Broadway and on Tin Pan
Alley (he co-wrote many pop songs). He also returned to some
concertizing (1930 and 1931) at two large venues: the Hollywood Bowl
and Lewisohn Stadium in New York.
By 1932 Levant was turning his attention to classical composing and
limiting his concertizing. His "Sonatina for Piano" caught the ear of
composer Aaron Copland, who persuaded him
to premiere it in April 1932 at Copland's festival for contemporary
American music. Gershwin asked him to play second piano in a duet
version of the "Second Rhapsody" under conductor
Arturo Toscanini. He also played -
almost as his own - Gershwin's signature "Concerto in F" in 1932.
Although Levant launched into a crowded schedule of radio performances
of popular and easy listening classical music, he did no more public
concerts for some five years. He did take Gershwin's advice and
refreshed his theory skills with
Joseph Schillinger, a Russian
who was a resident Hollywood theorist/composer. Levant was not alone in
using Schillinger's music school services; at that time some of the
Big-Band era's most famous names appearing on the silver screen,
including Tommy Dorsey,
Benny Goodman and
Glenn Miller, were also using the
Russian. This was in 1934, the same year Levant's "Sinfonietta" (in
three movements) premiered with
Bernard Herrmann conducting in
New York.
Levant was back in Hollywood in 1935 for more film composing, but part
of the time was spent studying under one of the great musical minds to
arrive in Southern California,
Arnold Schönberg. Schoenberg's time was
already crowded with local academia commitments and studying with some
of Hollywood's brightest composers, including
Alfred Newman and
Franz Waxman. Levant's study ranged from
1935 to 1937. Part of the result was the inspiration for completing his
"Piano Concerto", his first of several string quartets (among other
pieces he composed, including a woodwind trio), and the "Nocturne for
Orchestra" (premiered in L.A. in 1937). The latter was released by New
Music Editions in 1936 - this was his only orchestral score to be
published. In the meantime Levant was doing music for Hollywood. His
"Crayon est sur la Table", ("The Pencil is on the Table") was a sort of
parody of French opera in the style of
Claude Debussy. It was a centerpiece
(though transformed as "Carnaval" with an Italian libretto) for the
20th Century-Fox film
Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936).
In July of 1937 Gershwin passed away. This opened a new period of
recognition for Levant, for he was immediately crowned sole interpreter
and virtuoso performer of Gershwin's music, the beginning of a quixotic
20-year reign. That same year Levant started his "Suite for Orchestra"
and finished its orchestration by early 1938. In October of that year
he returned to the east to debut as a Broadway conductor while
replacing his brother Harry for 65 performances of
George S. Kaufman and
Lorenz Hart's "The Fabulous Invalid". He
augmented that by seeing to the Broadway stage as composer and
conductor a new Kaufman and Hart work, "The American Way" in January of
1939.
By the middle of that year Levant had returned to concertizing in all
the big American cities, showcasing not only such Gershwin works as
"Concerto in F" and the "Rhapsody in Blue", but also a whole repertoire
including an occasional work of his own, including his two 1940 pieces
"Caprice for Orchestra" and "A New Overture and Polka for
'Oscar
Homolka'" (the actor). "Caprice" was particularly showcased by British
conductor Thomas Beecham.
But these were his last major concert works. Nevertheless, this marked
a decade of concertizing, radio broadcasts and recording significantly
with Columbia Records and great conductors such as Reiner,
Eugene Ormandy,
Andre Kostelanetz, Wallenstein,
Efrem Kurtz and
Morton Gould.
Occasionally Levant appeared on film in a showcase piano piece, but
there are only a handful of film roles where he showed his substantial
skill as an actor. He played himself in the highly fictionalized
Gershwin bio
Rhapsody in Blue (1945),
highlighted by his playing of the piece. He was still himself but
convincingly in character in one of his best dramatic roles as
wisecracking (he often wrote his own lines for his film characters)
concert pianist Sid Jeffers in
Humoresque (1946) with
John Garfield and
Joan Crawford. He went into the
studio to record a set of excerpts from
Richard Wagner's "Tristan"
arranged for piano, violin, and orchestra with violinist
Isaac Stern, and conductor
Franz Waxman as part of the sound track for
the film. He was able to play two of his favorite pieces
(Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's
"Piano Concerto No. 1" and
Aram Khachaturyan's "Sabre Dance")
when he got around to doing the sophisticated comedy
The Barkleys of Broadway (1949).
A few years later he did his last two films. In
An American in Paris (1951)
the focus is on Gene Kelly, but a
close second was Gershwin's music, the title of the movie taken from
his extraordinary montage of movements visualizing Paris. Levant was
his usual carefree pianist character, but during a fantasy concerto
sequence, he is spotlighted as playing the piano soloist, the
conductor, and representative musicians for each orchestra instrument,
a great sight gag tour de force of his musical know-how. In his final
film Levant is a caricature of himself mixed with the film's
co-screenwriter, Adolph Green. This was the
comedy musical
The Band Wagon (1953) in which
friend Fred Astaire was also a caricature
of himself as a legendary but essentially washed-up song and dance man
who has a stellar comeback.
Levant seemed to have fun with this film and its bright script that
poked fun at entertainment in general, but his dialog, obviously more
of his own input, included hints at his progressive decline, including
his accumulative neuroses and accompanying hypochondria. His
extraordinarily glib and incisive tongue had evolved from earlier
life-of-the-party witty repartee to increasingly self-critical and
acerbic patter which showed up sometimes most inappropriately in his
recitals from the late 1930s. His spontaneous remarks bordered, and
often flowed over into, downright rudeness and sometimes only slightly
veiled invective. He seemed unable to resist putting down his own
musical efforts, a compulsion to parody himself, revealing his
insecurities and a rather knee-jerk need to be funny and play the clown
at his own expense. He had renamed his "Poeme for Piano", "Insult for
the Piano" or "The Lone Ranger in Vienna." In answer to friend/musical
promoter Robert Russell Bennett's
radio interview with Levant (1940) asking what he thought about the
reception of his first string quarter, he replied: "Violently. It not
only brought me obscurity but many enemies." Such was typical of his
sometimes inextricably extreme one-liners. During the height of his
concertizing, Levant was the highest paid concert performer, but after
1951 he canceled many commitments, which finally brought a temporary
banning by the American Federation of Musicians. There were still
occasional concerts in the 1950s, one of the most memorable being Royce
Hall at UCLA (1958) when he launched into the first movement of the
second piano concerto of
Dmitri Shostakovich only to forget
his place and stop, turning to the audience and quipping,"I don't even
know where I am. I'm going to start all over again". He did, and with
great triumph. His final public effort that same year was the "Concerto
in F" in which it took all the urging of conductor
Andre Kostelanetz to keep Levant from
simply stopping mid-course and walking off stage. Levant prefaced his
encores with the quip that he was "playing under the auspices of Mt.
Sinai" (the high-profile Los Angeles hospital often patronized by the
stars).
That statement was rather pathetically true. Along with real and
imagined illnesses, Levant's mental state, always fragile at best,
developed into classic stage fright. By this time he was long-addicted
to prescription drugs and was in and out of the hospital on a regular
basis. His faithful second wife of 33 years, actress/singer
June Gale, had to commit him to mental
institutions on several occasions. Yet Levant continued onward. There
was a series of album recordings in the late 1950s. He made the rounds
of a few prime-time game shows and late-night TV talk shows,
particularly that of friend Jack Parr. Between
1958 and 1960 he had his own prime-time local Los Angeles TV show
called "The Oscar Levant Show", which sometimes offered a rather
subdued and intimate look at the restive mind of Levant. As a talk show
with guests and Levant, usually ringed in a cloud from his chain
smoking, playing impromptu pieces on the piano, it was inevitably
canceled because of Levant's controversial monologues and off-color,
inflammatory remarks about personalities. He wrote three memoirs: "A
Smattering of Ignorance" (1940), "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" (1965) and
"The Unimportance of Being Oscar" (1968), each incisive as well as
outlandish in the context of Levant's lifelong self-analysis and skewed
view of humanity. He increasingly retired from any sort of public
exposure over the last decade of his life. A composer of vital and
original music and an extraordinary individual in whatever
interpretation one might use, Oscar Levant was one of the most
intriguing entertainment enigmas of the 20th century.