Hollywood Golden Age film scoring is unabashedly grand. It was designed to be. Studio orchestras of 80 to 100 players — full string sections, six-part brass, harp, celesta, occasional theremin — poured out the harmonic language of Wagnerian music-drama onto black-and-white and early Technicolor film. Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) works exactly like a Wagner opera transported into the sound stage: each character, place, and emotional state gets its own leitmotif; the motifs interlock contrapuntally as the story moves. Steiner's King Kong (1933) established the studio-era rule that music must synchronise continuously with what is on screen, giving rise to the technique later called 'Mickey Mousing' — a footstep matched by a violin pizzicato, a fall matched by a timpani stroke. Bernard Herrmann's Psycho (1960) shows how far the idiom could be pushed inward: strings-only, shrieking glissandi, no melody at all, just the mechanical logic of dread.

The lineage is inseparable from the Nazi expulsion of Central European Jewish musicians. Between 1933 and 1940, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957, born in Brno, whom Mahler had called a genius child), Max Steiner (1888-1971, born in Vienna, personally acquainted with Brahms, taught by Strauss and Mahler), Franz Waxman (1906-67, from what is now Poland), and Miklós Rózsa (1907-95, Budapest) arrived in Hollywood carrying the compositional culture of Vienna. Steiner, hired as Warner Bros' music director in 1929, wrote the first score to run continuously for 90 minutes as a leitmotivic whole — King Kong, 1933. Korngold's Robin Hood in 1938 lifted the artistic bar. Bernard Herrmann (1911-75, a New York-born insider trained at Juilliard) rounded out the idiom from the American side.

First, listen for the leitmotif system: each hero, villain, lover, and landscape carries its own musical signature, and those signatures collide and combine as the plot moves. This is Wagner's technique, ported wholesale into cinema. Second, the sheer weight of the orchestra: the studio music departments maintained standing 100-piece ensembles whose sound pressure could rival a concert hall. Third, Mickey Mousing — the moment-by-moment sonic tracking of on-screen action, especially in the 1930s. Fourth, in the psychological-suspense composers (Herrmann, Waxman) the use of specialty instruments — theremin, ondes Martenot, muted strings — to convey the interior, the unconscious.

Begin with the Main Title of Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); André Previn / London Symphony Orchestra restorations are the reference. Then Herrmann's Prelude and The Murder from Psycho (1960), and Rózsa's Overture and Parade of the Charioteers from Ben-Hur (1959). For deeper listening: Steiner's Gone with the Wind (1939), Herrmann's complete Vertigo (1958), and Korngold's Violin Concerto (1945), which recycles his film themes into a concert work.

Korngold was an operatic prodigy — his cantata Der Ring des Polykrates was fought over by Viennese publishers when he was eleven. He took the 1934 Hollywood offer as a temporary contract, but the 1938 Anschluss made return to Vienna impossible; he ended up writing nineteen film scores in California. He said late in life that film work had ruined his 'serious' composing career. In hindsight, those film scores stand as one of the last complete flowerings of Viennese late-Romantic writing. Second: Bernard Herrmann broke with Hitchcock after Marnie (1964), scored Truffaut and De Palma in the interim, and died the day after finishing Taxi Driver for Scorsese, on Christmas Eve 1975.