Louis F. Gottschalk
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Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk (October 7, 1864 - July 15, 1934) was an American composer born in St. Louis, Missouri. The son of a Missouri governor, also named Louis, and grand-nephew of composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, his first notable work in music was as conductor of the U.S. premiere of Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow[1]. He was a pioneer of original film music, largely due to his work with independent filmmaker L. Frank Baum, for whom he composed the musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, to Baum's libretto, which producer Oliver Morosco decided not to bring to Broadway after only modest success in Los Angeles.
Baum, as president, with Gottschalk, as vice president, Harry Marston Haldeman as secretary, and Clarence R. Rundel as treasurer, founded The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 as an outgrowth of Haldeman's men's social group, The Uplifters. As co-producer, Gottschalk composed the earliest known feature length film scores for The Patchwork Girl of Oz, The Magic Cloak of Oz, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, and The Last Egyptian, at a time when cue sheets were the norm. He also wrote several stage musicals with Baum for The Uplifters, including Stagecraft, or, The Adventures of a Strictly Moral Man (1914), The Uplift of Lucifer, or Raising Hell: An Allegorical Squazosh (1914), and The Orpheus Road Show: A Paraphrastic Compendium of Mirth (1917).
After the Oz company dissolved, Gottschalk went on to work with D.W. Griffith, arranging cue sheets for Broken Blossoms and composing a score for Orphans of the Storm. Other major films for which he contributed scores include The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Three Musketeers, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Romola. He composed a score for Charles Chaplin's A Woman of Paris in 1923, but Chaplin replaced it with a score of his own writing in 1976.
[edit] References
- ^ McPherson, Jim "The Savage Innocents--Part 2: On the Road with Parsifal, Butterfly, the Widow, and the Girl." The Opera Quarterly - Volume 19, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 28-63
