Background

Dimitri was born on May 10, 1894 in the Ukraine (of partly Jewish extraction, according to Nicolas Slonimsky). He was the son of Zinovie Tiomkin, a noted pathologist, and Maria Tartakovsky.

Education

He remembered little of his early childhood in Poltava, nor did he respond well to introductory music schooling in Saint Petersburg.

At thirteen, however, he was enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. There Tiomkin studied piano under Felix Blumenfeld, the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz, and composition under Alexander Glazunov. After hours, he frequented the café world of Petersburg artists and intellectuals. He also played the piano to accompany silent movie and vaudeville shows, including an appearance by the famous German comedian Max Linder.

He continued his musical studies with Ferruccio Busoni, whose rigorously classical training complemented the florid romanticism of Glazunov.

Career

Like many musicians in an aristocratic society, Tiomkin supported himself by giving piano lessons to the children of the rich. After his second term at the conservatory he was sent to the country estate of Ivanoskoye Selo as the household musician for the Princess Bariatinsky, daughter of the assassinated tsar Alexander II. He also served in the household of Count Sheremetiev, where he tutored Miss Ruby, the count's black mistress, and gained from this New Orleans native his first exposure to ragtime and jazz.

During the Russian Revolution, Tiomkin entertained soldiers in the Arctic port of Murmansk, served in an anti-cholera squad, and was briefly imprisoned while in the service of a suspect general. He finally escaped Russia in 1920, when his estranged father managed to bring the young man to Berlin. Tiomkin's relations with his father did not improve.

Tiomkin was by this time a pianist of some accomplishment. He played the Liszt A Major Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic before moving to Paris in 1924 with the virtuoso Mickel Kariton. It was there that the famous bass Fyodor Chaliapin advised Tiomkin of the opportunities for musicians in the United States. Chaliapin suggested that the classically trained Tiomkin adopt a more popular and flexible style suitable for entertaining the American masses.

Tiomkin and Kariton embarked on a vaudeville tour in 1925. Their two-piano act was the finale for a show featuring the Albertina Rasch Dancers. Its New York debut was greatly benefited when a former patron, Prince Serge Obolensky (by that time married to Alice Astor), turned it into a major society event.

Tiomkin's United States recital debut, which took place in Carnegie Hall in November 1927, included a brief "Quasi Jazz" of his own devising. Apart from some light marches and dances published in Paris, this work was Tiomkin's first significant musical composition. Further concertizing followed in New York and Paris.

Tiomkin's greatest success came with the famous 1928 concerts in which he introduced the music of George Gershwin to Paris. When Albertina Rasch was invited to choreograph dance sequences in some early Hollywood musicals, Tiomkin went along and provided original accompaniment in such films as Devil May Care and Lord Byron of Broadway (both 1930). The couple also established a presence in New York, where Tiomkin produced an unsuccessful show (Aha!) in 1930 and where Rasch established a short-lived tearoom near Carnegie Hall.

Back in Hollywood, Tiomkin committed himself to the movies. (His pianistic career ended decisively in 1937 when a broken bone failed to heal properly. ) Although he had little formal compositional training, the erstwhile classicist had become a formidable showman. His first dramatic film assignments were the 1931 version of Tolstoy's Resurrection and Alice in Wonderland (1933). A friendship with the director Frank Capra led to Tiomkin's scoring Lost Horizon (1937), his first major success. Tiomkin's musical exoticism was perfectly suited to this adventure in the mythical Shangri-La, and the success of the film made Tiomkin a recognized Hollywood figure. That same year he became an American citizen, and in 1938 he made his conducting debut at the Hollywood Bowl, leading a suite of music from Lost Horizon together with a program of the Albertina Rasch Ballet.

Tiomkin scored many other films for Capra, including You Can't Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), It's a Wonderful Life (1947), and several wartime documentaries in the "Why We Fight" series. Surprisingly, this very Russian musician became the leading composer for Hollywood Westerns, including Duel in the Sun (1946), Red River (1948), The Big Sky (1952), Gunfight at the O. K. Corral (1957), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Alamo, with the song "The Green Leaves of Summer" (1960). "A steppe is a steppe is a steppe" was Tiomkin's explanation when queried about his unlikely success at scoring American subject matter.

The most famous Western of all was High Noon (1952), for which Tiomkin devised the novel idea of a ballad ("Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darlin'") to be sung over the action. The song and the music were a considerable factor in the film's success. They also inspired a trend toward "title songs, " since producers were quick to sense the opportunities for publicity and subsidiary income. Tiomkin, a shrewd businessman, was not shy in this department, having secured the rights to his song before the picture's release. Tiomkin's acceptance speech for his third Oscar (for The High and the Mighty, (1954) evoked considerable laughter when he thanked not the usual cinema colleagues but Brahms, Strauss, Wagner, and other composers of the past. Through such wisecracks (delivered with mingled innocence and irony in a thick Russian accent) and through a love of press agentry and high living, Tiomkin became a celebrity.

The most famous composer in Hollywood, he was thought by some to epitomize the shallowness often attributed to film music. One critic described The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) as "a stereophonic score that not only drowns out most of the dialogue but also effectively obliterates the sound of Gibbon revolving in his grave. " Nevertheless, Tiomkin's extravagant orchestrations in the Russian style, lavishly embroidered with percussion and flutter-tongued brasses, provided colorful and exotic backgrounds for some of Hollywood's best-remembered movies.

Other famous Tiomkin scores include Portrait of Jennie (1949), Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), The Thing and Strangers on a Train (1951), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Giant and Friendly Persuasion (1956), and The Guns of Navarone (1961).

His last venture was a return to producing in the first Soviet-American coproduction, the musical biography Tchaikovsky (1971). He died in London.

Achievements

• Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, and Last Train from Gun Hill. Tiomkin received twenty-two Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars, three for Best Original Score for High Noon, The High and the Mighty, and The Old Man and the Sea, and one for Best Original Song for "The Ballad of High Noon" from the former film. During the 1950s Tiomkin was the highest-paid film composer, composing close to a rate of a picture each month, achieving his greatest fame during the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1948 and 1958, his "golden decade, " he composed 57 film scores. During the single year of 1952, he composed nine film scores, including High Noon, for which he won two Academy Awards. In the same decade, he won two more Oscars and his film scores were nominated nine times. He was honored in the Soviet Union and Russia. In 1967, he was a member of the jury of the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In 2014, his theme songs to It's a Wonderful Life and Giant were played during the closing ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Beginning with Lost Horizon in 1937, through his retirement from films over four decades later in 1979, and up until modern times, he is recognized as being the only Russian to have become a Hollywood film composer. Tiomkin was the first film score composer to write both the title theme song and the score. He expanded on that technique in many of his westerns, including High Noon and Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, in which the theme song was repeated as a common thread running through the entire film. In 1999, the U. S. Postal Service added his image to their "Legends of American Music" stamp series. The series began with the issuance of one featuring singer Elvis Presley in 1993. Tiomkin's image was added as part of their "Hollywood Composers" selection. In 1976, RCA Victor released Lost Horizon: The Classic Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin (US catalogue #ARL1-1669, UK catalogue #GL 43445) with Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Featuring highlights from various Tiomkin scores, the album was later reissued by RCA on CD with Dolby Surround Sound. The American Film Institute ranked Tiomkin's score for High Noon as #10 on their list of the 100greatest film scores.

Works

More photos

• book

  • High Noon Soundtrack

    (This score, by Russian composer Dimitri Tiomkin, has long...)

  • The Dimitri Tiomkin Anthology

    ((P/V/G Composer Collection). Oscar-winner Dimitri Tiomkin...)

  • Last Train From Gun Hill

    (Track listing: 1. Prelude/The Stalkers/The Rape (05:29) ...)

  • More Music from The Fall of the Roman Empire (Original Soundtrack)

    (1991 RELEASE.MORE MUSIC FROM THE FILM.)

  • The Big Sky

    (25 Tracks. The fourth collaboration between director Howa...)

  • Charles Gerhardt - Lost Horizon: The Classic Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin & The Thing from Another World Suite SACD Hybrid Multi-channel

    (1. Lost Horizon (1937) - Symphonic Suite (Tiomkin) JAC ...)

  • Lost Horizon (Tiomkin)
  • El Alamo (O.S.T - 1960)
  • Legendary Hollywood
  • Film Music of Dimitri Tiomkin
  • It's a Wonderful Life
  • 55 Days At Peking
  • Dial "M" for Murder (Original Soundtrack Theme From Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder")
  • Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Connections

Tiomkin married Albertina Rasch in 1927 and always credited the Austrian ballerina for enhancing his show business sense. Albertina Rasch died in 1967.

Tiomkin then moved to London and, in 1972, married Olivia Patch, who survived him. He had no children.

Father:

Zinovy Tiomkin

Mother:

Marie Tartakovskaya

Spouse (2):

Olivia Patch

Spouse (1):

Albertina Rasch

(January 19, 1891 – October 2, 1967) She was a naturalized American dancer and choreographer.

References

• Music for the Movies
• American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915-1990 (McFarland Classics)
• The Composer in Hollywood
• Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait