Ernest Gold

When he died early 1999, Ernest Gold was best remembered as one of Hollywood's most successful film composers and one of the busier composers in television during the '70s and '80s. If things had been different in the world of the '30s, however, Gold might've been one of the last of the post-romantic composers on the European continent, making his way melodically in stark opposition to a musical world increasingly dominated by atonalism and jarring non-melodies. What made that impossible, and sent Gold (like such older contemporaries of his as Miklós Rozsa and Franz Waxman) to...