Theme from Laura
David Raksin (b.1912)
After organizing his own jazz band and studying composition in his native Pennsylvania, David Raksin moved to Hollywood in 1935, where he was engaged by Charlie Chaplin to arrange and orchestrate the music for his film Modern Times. During the 1937-38 academic year, Raksin attended the composition classes that Arnold Schoenberg was giving at UCLA. Raksin has composed scores for more than 100 films, reaching enormous popular success with the theme from the classy mystery film "Laura" (1944). The main theme of Laura is used in a remarkable way in the film. A detective investigating a murder is captivated by a life-sized portrait of a woman, evidently the victim. As he ponders the portrait in the empty apartment, Raksin's music, evocative and mysterious, makes it very clear to the viewer that the detective is falling in love with a woman who is (he thinks) completely unavailable. (Fortunately for him, Laura was not the victim; the detective's relationship with her is complicated by the need to solve the mystery, but it is, of course, satisfatorily resolved in the end.) Through the "Laura" theme has little in common with the popular song conventions of the mid-'40s, it became a great hit when Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics to it, and it remains probably Raksin's best-known tune.