Richard Hageman : from Holland to Hollywood /

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Includes bibliographical references and index.Great expectations -- The Metropolitan years -- Opera conductor and pioneer -- The Caponsacchi years -- Destination Hollywood -- Bicycling between assignments -- The war years -- Back on top in Hollywood -- 3 iconic westerns -- Twilight years."Richard Hageman (1881-1966) was born in the Netherlands. A child prodigy on the piano, prodded by an ambitious father, Hageman was conducting at the Netherlands Opera by the age of 19. His career blossomed in the United States, where he successfully straddled what was then the very disparate worlds of concert music and film scoring. He was a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and helped found opera companies in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto. He knew the great singers of the age, conducting Enrico Caruso, accompanying Nellie Melba, and coaching socialite warbler Florence Foster Jenkins. Hageman was known for his art songs and his opera, Caponsacchi, the first American opera to premiere in Vienna. By the late 1930s he was composing in Hollywood sharing an Academy Award for Stagecoach and earning five more nominations. His acting career, a result of serendipity, led to appearances with Louis Armstrong, John Wayne, and Elizabeth Taylor. His private life was fodder for the papers: an ugly divorce from his first wife who threatened him with a revolver; a second marriage to one of his students, who left him for a duke; and the high life in Europe financed by his third wife and her trust fund. In the twenty-first century, composing for film has become a typical part of a concert composer's resume. Hageman negotiated this territory almost a century earlier, in the vanguard of composers to do so"--