Alexander Steinert papers

1888-1977 [bulk 1909-1977]

Alexander Lang Steinert (occasionally designated, Alexander Steinert, Jr.) was a composer, conductor, and pianist who worked in television, film, and radio, as well as concert settings. Born in Boston, Massachusetts on 21 September, 1900, Steinert came from a musical family. Steinert’s grandfather Morris Steinert, who emigrated from Bavaria, was the founder of M. Steinert & Sons, New England's preeminent piano dealer and the region’s exclusive Steinway representative, and his father, Alexander Steinert, became the Treasurer and General Manager of the company. While the younger Steinert’s brothers, Russell, Robert and Alan, joined the family firm, Alexander, Jr. studied music at Harvard with Charles Martin Loeffler and in 1922 graduated magna cum laude. In 1923 Steinert went on to the Paris Conservatoire where he studied with Andre Gedalge, Vincent d’Indy, and Charles Koechlin. Not only were these among the great musical minds in Paris at the advent of the 20th century, but it is notable that the latter two were exemplars of rival concert societies, the Societe Nationale (SN) and the Societe Musicale Independante (SMI) respectively. As such the young Steinert was among those in the fray of the evolving modern French music scene and this had a profound influence as would become evident in his own compositions. Steinert’s impressionistic tone poem, Southern Night, inspired by the French countryside, won him the American Prix de Rome, from the American Academy in May of 1927. The award consisted of a Frederic A. Juilliard fellowship for three years, with residence and a studio at the academy in Rome, and an annual stipend of $2000. Meanwhile, Steinert’s Southern Night had premiered with the Boston Symphony under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky in 1926, and was performed by the Rochester Symphony in 1928 under Howard Hanson. In June of 1929 Steinert directed the debut, in Rome, of his Two Poems for Soprano & Orchestra, based on the writings of Shelley, and his Leggenda Sinfonica was performed at Augusteo in Rome the following year, 1930. As Steinert’s compositions continued to appear in concert programs both domestically and abroad, he returned to the United States in the early thirties, or shortly after his fellowship in Rome. In 1935 he performed his own Concerto Sinfonico with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky; he performed the same piece again in 1939 at the Hollywood Bowl. In December of 1935 he conducted Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in New York and toured with the production from January through March 1936. On 8 September, 1937, Steinert conducted the Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl with the original cast and Lily Pons. In February and March of 1938 Steinert conducted Porgy and Bess on the coast directing its first performances in Los Angeles and San Francisco. From this time on Steinert began to spend more time on the west coast extending his career as a composer and conductor into Hollywood. In 1941 he arranged and conducted the music for Disney’s production of Bambi, and throughout the forties he continued to score films. He was also credited as an actor in a few films appearing as a conductor in Too Young to Kiss (1951), Because You're Mine (1952), and others. In 1945 Steinert received an invitation from Leopold Stokowski, Musical Director of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, to compose a piece for performance and broadcast, and in August of that year Steinert’s Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra was premiered featuring soloist, Kalman Bloch. The forties through the sixties found Steinert as composer and conductor for numerous radio productions for CBS, NBS, and ABC. In the later fifties and into the sixties Steinert added television credits to his body of work composing and conducting original music for productions such as The Deadly Depths and Tarawa on CBS. From 1961 to 1963 his radio and television music was recorded and published by Boosey & Hawkes. Alexander Lang Steinert died in August of 1982.