Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (May 10, 1894 – November 11, 1979) was a Russian and American film composer and conductor. He received classical training in Saint Petersburg before the Bolshevik Revolution. After the Russian Revolution, he moved to Berlin and later to New York City. In 1929, after the stock market crash, he moved to Hollywood, where he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, 55 Days at Peking, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Rio Bravo, and Last Train from Gun Hill.

Tiomkin was nominated for 22 Academy Awards and won four Oscars. Three of his Oscars were for Best Original Score for High Noon, The High and the Mighty, and The Old Man and the Sea. He also won one Oscar for Best Original Song for "The Ballad of High Noon" from the film High Noon.

Early life and education

Dimitri Tiomkin was born on May 10, 1894, in Kremenchug, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine).

His family was Jewish. His father, Zinovy Tiomkin, was a well-known doctor who worked with professor Paul Ehrlich and later became an important leader in the Zionist movement. His mother, Maria Tartakovskaya, was a musician who taught young Dimitri to play the piano. She hoped he would become a professional pianist, as noted by Tiomkin’s biographer, Christopher Palmer. Tiomkin described his mother as small, blonde, cheerful, and lively.

Tiomkin studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. There, he learned piano from Felix Blumenfeld, who also taught Vladimir Horowitz, and studied harmony and counterpoint with Alexander Glazunov, a teacher of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. He also studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova.

He survived the Russian Revolution and found work under the new government. In 1920, while working for the Petrograd Military District Political Administration (PUR), Tiomkin helped organize two large public events: The Mystery of Liberated Labor, a play for May Day celebrations, and The Storming of the Winter Palace, a performance marking the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. To support himself in Saint Petersburg, he played piano for Russian silent films. After the revolution, Tiomkin moved to Berlin with his father and other exiles. In Berlin, from 1921 to 1923, he studied with pianist Ferruccio Busoni and Busoni’s students, Egon Petri and Michael von Zadora. During this time, he composed light classical and popular music and made his performing debut as a pianist, playing Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Berlin Philharmonic.

In 1924, Tiomkin moved to Paris with his roommate, Michael Khariton, to perform piano duets together. They continued this work until the end of 1924.

Career

In 1925, the two musicians received an offer from a New York theatrical producer named Morris Gest and moved to the United States. They performed together on the Keith/Albee and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, where they accompanied a ballet troupe led by an Austrian ballerina named Albertina Rasch. Their professional relationship developed into a personal one, and they married in 1927.

While in New York, Tiomkin gave a recital at Carnegie Hall that included music by composers Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Francis Poulenc, and Alexandre Tansman. In 1928, he and his wife traveled to Paris, where he played the European premiere of American composer George Gershwin’s Concerto in F at the Paris Opera, with Gershwin in attendance.

After the stock market crash in October 1929 reduced job opportunities in New York, Tiomkin and his wife moved to Hollywood, where she was hired to oversee dance numbers in MGM film musicals. He worked on some minor films, sometimes without being credited under his own name. His first major film score was for Paramount’s Alice in Wonderland (1933). Although he worked on smaller projects, his goal was to become a concert pianist. In 1937, he broke his arm so severely that he could no longer pursue that career. He then focused on composing music for films.

Tiomkin received his first major opportunity from Columbia director Frank Capra, who chose him to write and perform the score for Lost Horizon (1937). The film brought him recognition in Hollywood. It was released the same year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In his autobiography, Please Don’t Hate Me! (1959), Tiomkin wrote about how Capra’s assignment forced him to confront a director about music style for the first time.

During the next decade, Tiomkin worked on several Capra films, including You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). During World War II, he continued working closely with Capra by composing scores for the Why We Fight series. These seven films were created by the U.S. government to explain the reasons for American involvement in the war to soldiers. They were later shown to the public to gain support for the war effort.

Tiomkin credited Capra with helping him expand his musical style, moving away from a purely European and romantic approach to one more connected to American themes and stories.

After working with director Fred Zinnemann on The Men (1950), Tiomkin composed the score for Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). His theme song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” (The Ballad of High Noon), was released as a single by singer Frankie Laine. The record became a global success. Because of the song’s popularity, the studio released the film four months later, with the lyrics sung by country singer Tex Ritter. The film received seven Academy Award nominations and won four awards, including two for Tiomkin: Best Original Music and Best Song. Walt Disney presented both awards that evening.

Film historian Arthur R. Jarvis Jr. said the score “saved the movie.” Another expert, Mervyn Cooke, added that the song’s success changed the direction of film music history. Tiomkin was the second composer to win two Oscars (score and song) for the same film. The first was Leigh Harline, who won for Disney’s Pinocchio and the song “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Ned Washington wrote the lyrics for both songs.

The lyrics of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” briefly summarize the story of High Noon, which is about cowardice and conformity in a small Western town. Tiomkin built his entire score around this single Western-style ballad. He removed violins from the music and added a subtle harmonica to create a simple, less glamorous sound that matched the story’s themes.

Russian film historian Harlow Robinson noted that using a single folk tune as the basis for a score was common among Russian composers. However, it is not proven whether Tiomkin’s score was based on a folk tune. The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture mentions that Tiomkin’s song, like others from the same period, was influenced by Yiddish folk music.

Tiomkin won two more Oscars: for The High and the Mighty (1954), directed by William A. Wellman and featuring John Wayne; and for The Old Man and the Sea (1958), based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway. At the 1955 ceremony, Tiomkin thanked composers who influenced him, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Tiomkin worked again with Zinnemann on The Sundowners (1960).

Many of his scores were for Western films, which were very popular during his time. His first Western was Duel in the Sun (1946), directed by King Vidor. Other Westerns he scored include Giant (1956), Friendly Persuasion (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), and Last Train from Gun Hill (1959). Films like Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960), Circus World (1964), and The War Wagon (1967) featured John Wayne. Tiomkin received Oscar nominations for Giant and The Alamo. He told TV host Gig Young that his goal for Giant was to capture the “feelings of the great land and state of Texas.”

Although influenced by European music traditions, Tiomkin was self-trained as a film composer. He scored films across many genres, including historical dramas like Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and Great Catherine (1968); war movies like The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Town Without Pity (1961); and suspense thrillers like 36 Hours (1965).

Tiomkin also wrote scores for four of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense films: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), and Dial M for Murder (1954). For these films, he used a rich style featuring solo violins and muted trumpets. He composed the score for the science fiction thriller The Thing from Another World (1951), which is considered his “strangest and most experimental score.” He also worked with Howard Hawks on The Big Sky (1952) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955), with John Huston on The Unforgiven (1960), and with Nicholas Ray on 55 Days at Peking (1963).

In addition to films, Tiomkin composed music for television, including the theme songs for Rawhide (1959) and Gunslinger. Although he was hired to compose the theme for The Wild Wild West

Personal life and death

Tiomkin married Albertina Rasch in 1926. She passed away in 1967. In 1972, he married Olivia Patch, who worked as his secretary. On November 11, 1979, Tiomkin died in London, England, two weeks after breaking his pelvis in a fall. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Legacy

During the 1950s, Tiomkin was the most highly paid film composer. He created music for almost one movie each month and became the most famous during the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1948 and 1958, his "golden decade," he composed music for 57 films. In 1952, he made music for nine films, including High Noon, for which he won two Academy Awards. During the same decade, he won two more Oscars, and his film scores were nominated for awards nine times.

Throughout his life, Tiomkin was known for a memorable 1954 awards speech and for his ability to learn languages. During his televised 1954 Oscars speech for The High and the Mighty, he thanked classical composers such as Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Debussy instead of his modern-day colleagues. A 1957 article in The New York Times said Tiomkin could speak Russian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Italian, Yiddish, and English.

He was honored in the Soviet Union and Russia. In 1967, he was a member of the jury at the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In 2014, his theme songs from It's a Wonderful Life and Giant were played during the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

From 1937, when he worked on Lost Horizon, until his retirement in 1979, Tiomkin was the only Russian-born person to become a Hollywood film composer. Other Russian-born composers, such as Irving Berlin, wrote music for Broadway plays, many of which were later made into films.

Tiomkin was the first film score composer to write both the title theme song and the full score for a movie. He used this technique in many of his western films, including High Noon and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, where the theme song was repeated throughout the film. For Red River, his biographer, Christopher Palmer, described how the music set the film’s epic and heroic tone.

Because of his use of theme songs in westerns and other genres, Tiomkin had a major influence on Hollywood films for many years. His work inspired studios to create their own hit songs for movies, such as the soundtrack for Titanic.

Tiomkin often used "source music" in his scores, which some experts say was based on Russian folk songs. His music, especially for westerns, created a feeling of wide, open landscapes and used a chorus prominently. In a TV interview, he said his love for European classical composers and his ability to adapt American folk music helped him create grand American theme music.

Many of Tiomkin’s film scores were released on LP soundtrack albums, including Giant and The Alamo. Some recordings, which often included Tiomkin conducting his own music, were later reissued on CD. The theme song from High Noon has been recorded by many artists, with one German CD producer, Bear Family Records, creating a CD featuring 25 different artists performing the song.

In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service added Tiomkin’s image to their "Legends of American Music" stamp series. The series began with a stamp featuring singer Elvis Presley in 1993. Tiomkin’s image was part of the "Hollywood Composers" selection.

In 1976, RCA Victor released Lost Horizon: The Classic Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin (U.S. catalog ARL1-1669, U.K. catalog GL 43445) with Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra. The album included highlights from Tiomkin’s scores and was later reissued on CD with Dolby Surround Sound.

The American Film Institute ranked Tiomkin’s score for High Noon as No. 10 on their list of the 100 greatest film scores. His scores for the following films were also nominated for the list:
• The Alamo (1960)
• Dial M for Murder (1954)
• Duel in the Sun (1946)
• Friendly Persuasion (1956)
• The Guns of Navarone (1961)
• Lost Horizon (1937)

Awards and nominations

• 1972 – nominated for "Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song" for Tchaikovsky (1969)
• 1965 – nominated for "Best Music, Score – Substantially Original" for The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
• 1964 – nominated (with Paul Francis Webster) for "Best Music, Original Song" for 55 Days at Peking (1963) for "So Little Time," sung by Andy Williams
• 1964 – nominated for "Best Music, Score – Substantially Original" for 55 Days at Peking (1963)
• 1962 – nominated for "Best Original Song" for Town Without Pity (1961)
• 1962 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Guns of Navarone (1961)
• 1961 – nominated (with Paul Francis Webster) for "Best Music, Original Song" for The Alamo (1960) for "The Green Leaves of Summer," sung by The Brothers Four
• 1961 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Alamo (1960)
• 1961 – nominated for "Best Original Song" for The Young Land (1959)
• 1959 – won an Oscar for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
• 1958 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for Wild Is the Wind (1957)
• 1957 – nominated for "Best Original Song" for Friendly Persuasion and "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for Giant (1956)
• 1955 – won an Oscar for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The High and Mighty
• 1955 – nominated for "Best Original Song" for The High and the Mighty (1954)
• 1953 – won (with Ned Washington) an Oscar for "Best Original Song" for High Noon (1952) for "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'," sung by Tex Ritter
• 1953 – won an Oscar for "Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for High Noon (1952)
• 1950 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for Champion (1949)
• 1945 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944)
• 1944 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Moon and Sixpence (1943)
• 1943 – nominated for "Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" for The Corsican Brothers (1941)
• 1940 – nominated for "Best Music, Scoring" for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

• 1965 – nominated for "Best Original Score" for The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
• 1962 – nominated for "Best Motion Picture Score" for The Guns of Navarone (1961)
• 1962 – nominated for "Best Motion Picture Song" for Town Without Pity (1961)
• 1961 – nominated for "Best Original Score" for The Alamo (1960)
• 1957 – received a "Special Award" for Recognition for film music
• 1955 – received a "Special Award" for creative musical contribution to Motion Picture
• 1953 – won for "Best Motion Picture Score" for High Noon (1952)