Hans Spialek

Who was Hans Spialek?

Hans Spialek was an Austrian-born American composer and orchestrator. Raised in Vienna and given an early musical education, he continued his studies in Moscow, at first as a prisoner of war during World War I, before settling in the US in 1924.

Spialek is best known for scoring the music for Broadway musicals by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and others, as well as ballet music, and radio broadcasts. He orchestrated 147 musicals from 1926 to 1967, many in collaboration with other arrangers such as Robert Russell Bennett. In his retirement in the 1980s, he helped reconstruct the original orchestrations for recordings of some of his 1930s Broadway shows.