Background
Louis Gruenberg was born on August 3, 1884 in Russian Federation to Abe Gruenberg and Klara Kantarovitch. His family emigrated to the United States when he was a few months old. His father worked as a violinist in New York City.
Louis Gruenberg was born on August 3, 1884 in Russian Federation to Abe Gruenberg and Klara Kantarovitch. His family emigrated to the United States when he was a few months old. His father worked as a violinist in New York City.
Young Louis Gruenberg had a talent for the piano, and by the age of eight he was taking piano lessons with Adele Margulies at the National Conservatory in New York (then headed by Antonín Dvořák). Louis Gruenberg played both solo concerts and in ensembles from the beginning, and in his early twenties he went to study in Europe with Ferruccio Busoni at the Vienna Conservatory.
Before World War I, Louis Gruenberg taught students and toured, both as an accompanist and soloist. In 1919, he wrote The Hill of Dreams for orchestra, which gained him the highly acclaimed Flagler Prize and enabled him to devote himself more completely to composition. As Louis Gruenberg began to make his mark as a composer, he showed his fascination with jazz, composing works with strong jazz and ragtime influences. On February 4, 1923, he conducted the American premiere of Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg as a member of the International Composers' Guild. Shortly after this performance, he and other members of the league left over disagreements with Varèse and formed the League of Composers. In its 1933 season, the Metropolitan Opera premiered his expressionistic opera The Emperor Jones, based on the major experimental the play by Eugene O'Neill which had already triumphed on Broadway with Paul Robeson playing the title role of an African-American who declares himself emperor on a Caribbean island. In the opera, the title role was created by baritone Lawrence Tibbett, performing in blackface. It was performed at the Met for the 1934 season as well, and featured on the cover of Time Magazine receiving much critical acclaim.
Between 1933 and 1936, Louis Gruenberg headed the composition department of Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University). He collaborated with a man nicknamed "Roosevelt's filmmaker," Pare Lorentz to create '"The Fight for Life," a semi-documentary film about childbirth in Chicago slums, on which John Steinbeck also collaborated.
In 1937, Louis Gruenberg moved with his family to Beverly Hills, California, where fellow League members Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky also now lived (though they never spoke). There he worked at merging music with visual media and film, and also composed for Hollywood films.
Louis Gruenberg's film composing career stops in 1950, and it seems a fair premise that, having worked with blacklisted writers (Trumbo and Lawsen), blacklisted directors (Irving Pichel and John Cromwell), and left-wing tainted actors (Ingrid Bergman, Fredric March), he either abandoned Hollywood at this moment in American cinema history or was abandoned by it. There is very little information on the impact of the blacklist on film composers, who tend to be overlooked in the best of times, and 1950 was not the best of times.
During the last twenty years of his life, Louis Gruenberg also became increasingly isolated from the concert music world. He did maintain a close friendship with Arnold Schoenberg.
Louis Gruenberg composed continually until his death in 1964 in Beverly Hills. Besides other works, he wrote five symphonies, four full length operas (Volpone, Jack and the Beanstalk, Antony and Cleopatra and The Dumb Wife) and the lengthy oratorio A Song of Faith.