Georg Haentzschel

Georg Haentzschel was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1907. He trained at the Stern Conservatory, studying piano, arranging, and composition. He made his way professionally as a pianist and arranger for the best dance orchestras in the city. At 21, he entered the fledgling medium of radio, in addition to playing swing music and small-group jazz on-stage in various bands. Haentzschel spent most of the 1930s arranging, conducting, and occasionally writing incidental music for broadcast until 1937, when he joined the German movie industry. He was a prolific film composer, known for his lush, late-Romantic style scores that often displayed hauntingly beautiful lyricism and rich orchestrations with the influences of Bruckner, Wagner, Schumann, and Liszt. His music for the 1944 drama Via Mala easily outstripped all but the most ambitious of Hollywood scores of the era in its sophistication and boldness, while his lullaby from the 1941 movie Annelie is equally beguiling in its simplicity. His music for Josef von Baky's 1943 fantasy film Münchhausen, one of the most opulent movies ever made at Germany's UFA Studio, is a charmingly elegant, extrovert work filled with rich melodies and glowing orchestral coloration. Haentzschel adapted the music into a suite that became his most popular extended work. He remained active writing light music during World War II and as a performing musician, jointly directing the German Dance and Light Music Orchestra with his fellow film composer Franz Grothe. His movie music career was halted with the cessation of filmmaking at the end of the war, but Haentzschel continued to compose and conduct, principally for West German Radio in Cologne. He began doing film scores again in 1949, and with the full revival of the German movie industry, enjoyed his busiest decade in that medium during the 1950s. He retired from film work in 1959, but continued to enjoy a wide audience among older listeners for his light music over the ensuing decades. He died in Cologne at age 84 on April 12, 1992. Later that year, conductor Emmerich Smola and the Cologne Radio Orchestra, for which he had written and conducted so much music in the postwar years, recorded excerpts from Haentzschel's scores for seven films. These included a 10-minute integral suite from Via Mala, the six-movement suite from Münchhausen, and a seven-movement suite derived from his music for the 1957 movie Robinson Crusoe, Soll Nicht Sterben.