Heinz Roemheld

Milwaukee-born Heinz Roemheld followed a circuitous route to a career as a film composer. At age four he was identified as a piano prodigy; he later studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Egon Petri in Berlin, and performed as a guest soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic at 23. On returning to America, Roemheld became a movie theater pianist and conductor; during a showing of Universal's 1925 horror thriller The Phantom of the Opera, he was seen by Carl Laemmle Sr., the president and founder of the studio, and was hired as an executive. With the arrival of talking pictures, he join...