Hugo Riesenfeld

Who was Hugo Riesenfeld?

Hugo Riesenfeld was a Jewish Austrian-American composer. As a film director, he began to write his own orchestral compositions for silent films in 1917, and co-created modern production techniques where film scoring serves an integral part of the action. Riesenfeld composed about 100 film scores in his career.

His most successful compositions were for Cecil B. DeMille's Joan the Woman, The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings; D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln; and the original scores to F. W. Murnau's Sunrise and Tabu.