The Spirit of St. Louis: Barnstorming (for piano sextet) (1957)

Clive Hirschhorn said in his 1959 book, The Warner Bros. Story, that “the two stars of The Spirit of St. Louis (Warner Bros. – 1957) were James Stewart as Charles A. Lindbergh and composer Franz Waxman, whose symphonic accompaniment to the 3,600-mile, 33½ hour trip from New York to Paris in 1927 contributed incalculably to the film’s overall atmosphere.“

Warner Bros. tried unsuccessfully to secure the rights to Paul Hindemith and Bertolt Brecht’s 1929 cantata Lindbergh’s Flight, following which director Billy Wilder once again called on Waxman, with whom he had worked on Mauvaise Graine (1934), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Stalag 17 (1953). Waxman’s resulting score is a landmark.

However, the very expensive production did not fare well at preview. Along with other aspects of the picture, executives demanded some changes in the music – and quickly, because of the release date. Unfortunately, Waxman and Wilder were already in Paris preparing to film Love in the Afternoon (1957), so following a barrage of transatlantic telephone calls and cables, Ray Heindorf, head of the Warner Brothers’ music department, and composer Roy Webb made some editing in the positioning of the music during certain portions of the film, in addition to newly scoring (in Waxman’s idiom) just under four minutes of connective tissue for different scenes. So the “Barnstorming” music was discarded for the most part in the final editing of the music – but came back from the archival shelf as the movement “A Soldier Home” in Waxman’s symphonic suite Hemingway (1962).

“Barnstorming” originally depicted Lindburgh’s early aviation years in a scene where he has great difficulty getting an old Jenny plane the young flyer just purchased off the ground.

– Rudy Behlmer, 2020