Juventino Rosas’ waltz “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves) is perhaps the most famous song of its generation. Now, more than 130 years after it was written, the tune still feels immediate—sweeping, dreamy, and above all, supremely sure-footed. Every note is both rooted and soaring, coaxing even the wallflowers to dance and sway. It is easily on par with his contemporary Johann Strauss Jr.’s masterwork “The Blue Danube”—to the point that Strauss Jr. is often mistakenly credited with having composed “Sobre las Olas.”

Why is this so? Is it simply because Strauss hailed from Vienna, the very center of the waltz craze? Or is there something else, conscious or not, that has kept Juventino Rosas from his rightful place among the great melodists, then and now?

I wrote Ghost Waltz, a new play receiving its world premiere on May 4 at the Los Angeles Theatre Centre (LATC), to recover the composer’s story. This excavation into Rosas’ life follows a tune that has been haunting me throughout much of my career: Why whitewash so many artists of color? Why bury their names? Why divest the art from the artist? Why erase the rich history of who we are?

Rosas was Indigenous, dark-skinned in his photographs, and young. Proudly Otomí, an ancient people known to be great warriors, he and his family played music for coins on the street in Mexico City in the 1880s. It was a time of great change: The French and Austrian attempt at colonization had failed in spectacular fashion, but vestiges of European culture were everywhere. Beer and polkas became core to the Mexican identity. Rosas embodied this moment in time. Yet, even as his famous waltz took the world by storm, he found himself having to prove his authorship. Losing the battle for the song’s royalties was just one indignity of many to come. In his own epoch as much as ours, Juventino did not fit the frame of the composer of “Sobre las Olas.” How could someone like him have written something so elegant, so graceful, so very Viennese?

There is precious little historical information to be found on the man himself. Part of a musical family, he was a violin prodigy who studied for a short time in conservatory before joining the world-famous Mexican Marching Band. Besides his famous waltz, he composed popular salon music, seductive polkas, and mazurkas for the piano.  The wife of Mexican president/dictator Porfirio Diaz gifted him a grand piano for his genius, and his music was played throughout the Americas and in Europe, then and now.

For perhaps the same reasons he had to prove himself constantly to a disbelieving world, Rosas did not merit a biography in his day. His was also a generation before recorded music, and photographs were a relatively new technology. For Ghost Waltz, all I had were the compositions and how they made me feel.

Sometimes a play can get closer to the heart of a character than data or documentary. Listening to “Sobre las Olas” and other Rosas compositions over and over, I began to see past the darkness and locate gestures and contours of the 1890s—bits of politics, romantic dalliances, and the youthful desire to create something immortal, timeless. In an epoch rampant with economic inequity, crippling labor strikes and violent assassinations, not to mention enforced colorism and racial discrimination, this is music full of hope and joy, even when tinged with heartache and loss.

I was also able to locate Rosas in others. He was the same age as Scott Joplin, the undisputed “King of Ragtime,” a Black man whose musical oeuvre was similarly buried or forgotten alongside his life story until the 1973 movie The Sting used his song “The Entertainer,” and an expectant generation of music lovers recovered his ocean of rags and waltzes (one of which quotes a Rosas melody). How wonderful it was to discover that both Rosas and Joplin were both in Chicago in 1893 for the World’s Fair! Two young men of color, musical virtuosi, at the beginning of their heroes’ journeys, undaunted by the odds against them, with visions of as-yet-unwritten operas and symphonies dancing in their heads.

An opera singer originally from Mazatlan named Ángela Peralta, another of Rosas’ musical colleagues (and a possible love interest), also helped open up his story. Known to the world by her nickname the “Mexican Nightingale,” she was brown-skinned and Indigenous like Rosas. Unlike Rosas, she hid her dark complexion beneath white face powder.

In many ways, Peralta was the opposite of Rosas: elitist, self-conscious, Eurocentric. A soprano, she played La Scala and other European opera houses, as well as toured the Americas—always under the mask of whiteness. Yet, despite her different philosophy of dealing with casteism and racism, the “Nightingale” ultimately endured the same fate as Rosas: Their names and exploits buried, at home and abroad, their brownness whitewashed, erased.

After many decades of writing plays, I’ve concluded that there is no good reason to write about the past unless you’re trying to work out the problems we confront in our own everyday present. When I go back into history, my main thrust is to open the mystery in a historical moment, and by mystery, I mean what is unknown—as of yet. This history/mystery rhyme is vital to my artistic intentions, and the way I set about building the world of the play. There can hardly be one without the other.

The new play “Ghost Waltz” tells the story of Juventino Rosas, one of Mexico’s most significant composers. Image courtesy of author.

As it happens, this play began in dream form. I knew nothing about Rosas until the Latino Theater Company presented his story as one potential commission idea for the Circle of Imaginistas writing circle. Here was an Indigenous forebear, someone who might have influenced and inspired generations of native-born Americans on either side of the border, but whose story was silenced, lost. The presentation made an impression on me, but I was hot about another project, so Rosas found himself on my back burner.

Then I had a dream: Rosas in huaraches and white cotton, dancing to the waltz in his head, while the world circa 1890 was crashing all around him. Despite the tumult, he danced with calm and purpose, as if following the tune toward an as-yet unrevealed destiny. When I woke up, I went to my laptop and wrote a page or so, trying to catch not only the images but the dream’s feeling.

Many years ago, I wrote the libretto for an opera called America Tropical about the great 1932 mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros on Olvera Street in Los Angeles that was literally whitewashed by the all-white city council and town fathers for its political content. Not only was the image taken forever from us, but the artist was deported, never to return. The center figure of the mural? A 14-foot-tall Indio crucified on a double cross, facing City Hall, foretelling the fate of his violent erasure, the double injustice of past and present bigotry.

Today, the “America Tropical” mural lives in a liminal state. Years of California sun beating down on the whitewashed wall have thinned the cover-up, destroying the mask, allowing Siqueiros’ original images to ghost through. Between two worlds, living on the fringes, the mural’s story now is both the original punch of provocation and the counterpunch of effacement, deletion from history. Thesis and antithesis leave us forever on the borders unless we can find a way to synthesize the experience, see beyond the false front, and reconcile the mysteries of our relation to both the artist and the silencer of art.

As a playwright, my job is to shine a light on these layers of whitewash hiding the lives of Rosas and so many others like him. The damage cannot be undone, but there is a chance at recovery and a story to tell in the ghosting through of our history, and our mystery.

Not everyone has forgotten Rosas. There is a town named for him, along with a statue, in the central east region of the state of Guanajuato where he was born and where the Otomí continue to thrive. One day I’ll pay my respects. But I write to bring the dead to life.

Juventino Rosas deserves to be heard and seen. Because when we see him, we see ourselves. When we hear his music, he lives again.

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Today, Chacon’s music is having a moment. In 2022, his composition for church organ and ensemble “Voiceless Mass”—a piece that “considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power”—won a Pulitzer Prize. And in August 2023, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Chacon its prestigious “Genius” grant, lauding his “practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music” to activate “spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

On December 14, Zócalo and partners wasteLAnd, GRoW Annenberg, and ASU Gammage present “How Do We Hear America?,” an evening showcasing performances of two Chacon works: “American Ledger No. 1,” an ensemble piece performed beneath a giant, flag-inspired score that tells the creation story of the U.S.; and “Echo Contest,” a call-and-response duet that plays with notions of distance. The program will take place at the historic ASU California Center, in downtown Los Angeles. (Tickets are free. Sign up here.)

Zócalo’s editorial director Eryn Brown caught up with Chacon over Zoom to talk about the saxophone sitting on his couch, how Los Angeles influences his work, and what it means to be American.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The year is 1933. The studio is RKO. And the movie is King Kong.

Then as now, audiences made anxious by global upheaval hungered for escapism; and in March 1933, Kong delivered the financial rescue its makers prayed for. But the movie might have failed, depriving us of later RKO classics like Citizen Kane, if not for the ninth-inning involvement of one man: RKO’s 44-year-old music director, Max Steiner.

You may not know the name, but you do know his music. More than any other composer, the Vienna-born Steiner established the ground rules of writing movie music that are still in use today.

Pre-Steiner, orchestral underscore was rare in talking pictures, which replaced silent films in 1929. As King Kong neared completion, nervous RKO brass told Steiner not to waste additional dollars writing music for the film, after finding the ape’s stop-motion movement underwhelming.

But Kong’s visionary producer, Merian C. Cooper, knew better. As Steiner recalled, “Cooper said to me, ‘Maxie, go ahead and score the picture to the best of your ability. And don’t worry about the cost because I will pay for the orchestra.’”

Steiner’s epic score—a thrilling synthesis of Wagnerian opera, Stravinskian dissonance and Viennese romanticism—convinced audiences that Kong was both terrifying and ultimately tragic. Its DNA is still found in the sweeping scores of John Williams and countless others. (Star Wars’s original “temp track” of music, used during editing before its score was written, included music by Steiner.)

Max Steiner, circa 1936. Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

By the mid-1930s, Max’s trademarks were widely imitated if rarely equaled: separate, distinctive musical themes for characters, which he developed throughout a score to illuminate those characters’ thoughts and emotions; ingenious use of orchestral color to create atmosphere; and a gift for soaring lyricism that lifted dramas like Gone with the Wind and Now, Voyager into the realm of myth.

Best known for his work at Warner Bros. from 1936 to 1965, Steiner’s 300-plus credits include Casablanca, The Searchers, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards and won three.

While retracing Max’s steps to write his biography, I realized why Steiner—a diminutive, wisecracking, but deeply romantic figure—related so strongly to the characters in his best-known films. Scarlett O’Hara’s fight to rebuild a family dynasty … Rick Blaine’s cynical wit that covers a broken heart … Kong’s vulnerability to beauty. All of these were part of Steiner’s story.

His life had the jolting plot twists typical of the Warner Bros. biopics he scored. During a pampered youth in late 19th century Vienna, Max was the presumed inheritor of a theatrical empire. His grandfather Maximilian launched the craze for Viennese operetta in the 1870s, after convincing waltz king Johann Strauss, Jr., composer of “The Blue Danube,” to write for the theater. Die Fledermaus, the world’s most performed operetta, was one result.

Max’s father Gabor was also a showman, fascinated by new technology; his productions ranged from symphony concerts to DeMille-like stage spectacles. Family friends included Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Even Austria’s emperor was a fan, decorating Gabor with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph.

Papa Steiner’s most ambitious creation was the amusement park “Venice in Vienna.” Sixty years before Disneyland, the multi-acre venue offered a re-creation of the Italian city, complete with canals and gondolas. Patrons could ride rollercoasters, listen to gramophone records (then a novelty), and watch silent movies just months after cinema’s invention. Most popular was the Riesenrad, a Ferris wheel that remains one of Vienna’s most iconic attractions. Max reveled in “Venice”’s potpourri of symphonies, jugglers, waltz concerts and water slides. That pop culture mix proved ideal training for Steiner, who spent his life writing sophisticated, yet accessible, music for the masses.

He did not arrive in Hollywood until the age of 41. Until then, his life mirrored the rise and fall of Gabor’s Ferris wheel: early success thwarted by family bankruptcy; itinerant music-making in Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, and beyond; and, in 1914, a panicked escape from London to New York, after the outbreak of World War I changed Max’s status in Britain from successful conductor to enemy alien.

Europe’s loss was America’s gain. During the 1920s, Steiner thrived as a Broadway conductor. He oversaw shows by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and George and Ira Gershwin—most notably the Gershwins’ trailblazing Lady, Be Good! starring Fred Astaire. Conducting theater orchestras during a time before microphones, Steiner learned how to make sure music didn’t overwhelm a performer’s speech.

An invite from RKO to join its fledgling music staff brought him west in 1929. Within months he was made the studio’s musical director. Max’s early attempts to blend underscoring and onscreen dialogue were usually thwarted, by literal-minded producers who asked: where was the music coming from? But with scores like 1932’s Symphony of Six Million and 1933’s King Kong, Steiner proved that audiences accepted the unreality of an unseen orchestra accompanying the drama.

An Oscar win in 1936, for John Ford’s The Informer, cemented his reputation as leader in his field.

Whether overseeing the silky arrangements of Irving Berlin’s songs for Top Hat (1935), or writing snarling musical noir for James Cagney in White Heat (1949), Steiner set speed records for composing that were nearly superhuman. He thrived under pressure, writing scores in as little as a week if required.

Max Steiner conducts his score for King Kong (1933). Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

His score pages are filled with handwritten quotes of the movie dialogue being spoken at that moment (“Here’s looking at you, kid.” “It was beauty killed the beast!”). And somehow he found time to scribble notes in the margins sharing studio gossip, lamentations about his love life (he married four times), and sardonic, sometimes lewd commentary on screen action. His audience for these remarks was a private one: the orchestrators, who, like Max, slogged through days with little sleep to convert score pages into separate instrumental parts.

His jokes usually served a serious purpose: to keep his cohort alert, and to communicate dramatic intention. “Heaven music!” he wrote on the final pages of his score for Dark Victory, as Bette Davis bravely succumbs to a brain tumor. “Make this such a beautiful Heaven that no [studio] supervisor can ever get there!” On a 1952 religious drama: “Harps and Pianos are going ‘mad’ on account of the picture being just so-so.” And often, a comparison to the style of a beloved concert work: “A la Ravel’s Bolero—only better!” To keep his music from competing with dialogue, Steiner wrote above or below the pitch of an actor’s voice, after determining where that voice would be on a musical scale. In his score for the Bette Davis Oscar-winner Jezebel, he jots down that in her Southern belle accent, Davis “says ‘Am ah?’ … between [the notes] E and F.”

Steiner shaped not only how composers write film music, but how much they are paid. It was Max who launched a 27-year battle for film composers to receive royalties. (Until his efforts, studios paid a flat fee, and the royalty collection organization ASCAP ignored film music.) Today’s composers—some of whom make millions as their work plays on TV, home video, and streaming—have Steiner partly to thank.

Unfortunately, Max was both an innovator and a spendthrift. He earned millions, but spent even more on gambling, alimonies, alcohol, cigars, and generous handouts to friends in need.

A workaholic with manic tendencies, he was happiest when composing. Guilt led him to lavish his wives and his only son with everything except what they wanted most: his time. And although at age 71 he hit a financial jackpot—1959’s “Theme from A Summer Place” became the best-selling instrumental of the rock era—his failure as a parent would end in a tragedy from which he never fully recovered.

Fortunately, the music that was his addiction, and his escape from pain, still surrounds us. Every day, somewhere, a viewer’s heartbeat quickens as Steiner intensifies a classic moment of cinema: White Heat gangster Cody Jarrett’s defiant “Made it, Ma—top of the world!” The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, cradling his long-lost niece in his arms. Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Or Rick and Ilsa’s farewell in a fog-shrouded airport in Casablanca.

It should be noted that Steiner did not write “As Time Goes By.” In fact, he hated the song, which was written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931, and had been largely forgotten. Entranced by Ingrid Bergman’s performance and her beauty, Max was eager to write an original love theme. But when ordered to weave Hupfeld’s tune into his score, Steiner created such heartbreaking variations that it’s hard to believe he didn’t love “As Time Goes By”— and compose it.

Typically, Max concluded his handwritten score for Casablanca with a joke to his orchestrator. “Dear Hugo: Thanks for everything! Yours, Herman Hupfeld.” It took him years to accept how effective that shotgun musical marriage had been. Without Steiner’s exquisite interpretations of Hupfeld’s melody—reimagined in the score as everything from a swooning waltz to a Puccini-esque lovers’ farewell—the song may not have attained its status as a pop standard.

Casablanca also demonstrates Steiner’s greatest strength as a composer: his gift for translating human emotion—grief, hope, romantic ecstasy—into music that still works its magic on 21st century viewers.

Just ask Steven Spielberg. In 2008, the filmmaker said of Casablanca’s score, “It just gets your heart. When you’re about ready to cry, Max Steiner comes in [and] those tears start to flow.”

Spielberg’s respect is also reflected in the nickname he uses for his favorite musical collaborator, John Williams. It’s also the name of Spielberg’s first son.

Max.

Listen to some of Max Steiner’s greatest scores:

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