Mischa Spoliansky composed music for more than fifty films. But his own long life contains enough material for any number of film-scripts: he was a child-prodigy pianist, orphan, colleague and friend of some of the best-known names in the early cinema, wildly successful cabaret composer in Weimar Germany, a long-term British exile from the Nazis who was triumphantly received back in Berlin in his old age. His many hit songs, though, were generally associated with the singers who made them famous, as when Jan Kiepura sang ‘Heute Nacht oder Nie’ (‘Tonight or Never’) in the 1932 film Das Lied einer Nacht. The result is that Spoliansky’s music is better known than its composer.

His colourful existence began on 28 December 1898 in Białystock, then in Russia (and now in north-eastern Poland, close to the Belarussian border): Mischa’s father, Pawlov Spoliansky, a member of the Jewish-majority population of the city, was a baritone with the opera there, although soon after Mischa was born the family moved to Warsaw. They breathed music: his sister Lisa was a good enough pianist to study with Artur Schnabel and took to the concert stage thereafter, and his brother Alexander joined the Warsaw Symphony as a cellist. But the family was ill-starred, too: Mischa was only six when his mother died, and they split up, his brother and sister moving to Berlin to further their musical education and Mischa, for the meantime, staying with his father, moving with him to Vienna in 1905. His formal musical education began in Dresden, where the pianist-pedagogue couple Mark Guensberg and his wife thought enough of his musicality (he played violin and cello as well as piano) to take him on as a student, and he made his first public appearance at ten.

But tragedy was to strike again: only a year later his father died, once again throwing Mischa’s young life into confusion – but perhaps also helping him develop the self-reliance that was soon to stand him in good stead. Initially friends of his father in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) took in the orphaned boy; in 1914, prompted by the outbreak of war, he went to Berlin where his siblings were now old enough to receive him. Here his keyboard skills came to his aid: playing the piano in cafés in the evenings earned the money that allowed him to study piano and composition at the Stern Conservatorium by day.

Still in his teens, Spoliansky soon began to make a name for himself. He joined his brother in the trio playing in the Café Schön on Unter den Linden. He was drafted into the chamber orchestra that played film music in the UFA Theatre on Friedrichstrasse and the Mozart Saal on Nollendorfplatz, and Victor Hollaender and Werner Richard Heymann recruited him to ‘Schall und Rauch’ (‘Noise and Smoke’), the literary cabaret founded by Max Reinhardt in 1919 which operated from the cellar of the Grosses Schauspielhaus.

Now he was in his element, and by 1920 he was the musical director of Schall und Rauch. He worked with some of the leading lyricists of the day, among them ‘Klabund’ (the expressionist poet Alfred Henschke), Kurt Tucholsky, Joachim Ringelnatz and Walter Mehring, and he accompanied some of the major stars of the day: Trude Hesterberg, Gussi Holl, Rosa Valetti. Spoliansky was on his way to becoming the voice of Weimar Germany; indeed, he was soon dubbed ‘the Offenbach of Berlin’ – although he still enjoyed enough respect as a ‘serious’ classical musician to be asked to accompany Richard Tauber in a recording of Winterreise in 1925.

Meeting the writer Marcellus Schiffer and the director Max Reinhardt in 1922 gave Spoliansky the two creative alliances that assured his success; Margo Lion, Schiffer’s diseuse wife, became a treasured colleague, too. In 1927 Reinhardt’s show Victoria, with music by Spoliansky, swept the boards in Berlin, Vienna and Salzburg. The next year Schiffer wrote the book and lyrics of Es liegt in der Luft, which Reinhardt produced; its star was a young unknown by the name of Marlene Dietrich, making her stage debut. Dietrich was again centre-stage in Spoliansky’s next popular success, the revue Zwei Krawatten, to a text by Georg Kaiser. Among the audience members on the opening night was the film-director Josef von Sternberg, then casting his film Der blaue Engel, the first German talkie (he made an English version, The Blue Angel, simultaneously); he immediately signed up Dietrich for the female lead, Lola Lola, making her an star overnight.

Spoliansky and Schiffer continued to turn out archly witty shows that delighted his Berlin public: Wie werde ich reich und glücklich? (‘How can I become rich and happy?’; 1930), Alles Schwindel (‘It’s all a Swindle’; 1931), Rufen Sie Herrn Plim (‘Send for Mr Plim’; 1932) and Das Haus dazwischen (‘The House in between’; 1932) and 100 Meter Glück (‘100 Metres of Happiness; 1933). But with Hitler’s seizure of power the stages of Germany were closed to Spoliansky who, not only a Jew but also a satirist, was doubly in danger. The Nazis forced Spoliansky’s hand by expelling him from Germany and so, in 1933, he, his wife and three young daughters moved to London – his international fame easing the immigration process.

Alexander Korda was among the directors who soon had him hard at work writing film scores, his final tally of 53 including many high-profile films: The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), featuring an aging Douglas Fairbanks, Sanders of the River (1935) starring Paul Robeson, The Man who Could Work Miracles (1936), to a script by H. G. Wells, King Solomon’s Mines (1937), again with Robeson, Paradise for Two (1937), Secret Mission (1942), Don’t Take it to Heart (1944), a kind of proto-Ealing comedy, Wanted for Murder (1946), starring Eric Portman, the realist domestic drama It Always Rains on Sunday (1948), The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a vehicle for Margaret Rutherford and Alistair Sim as the rival heads of two schools billeted together, Trouble in Store (1953), an early slap-stick for Norman Wisdom, Saint Joan (1957), directed by Otto Preminger – and many more: Spoliansky’s last film score, ironically enough, was Hitler: The Last Ten Days, written in 1973.

Spoliansky’s post-War return to the German stage had been relatively modest, with a musical version of Carl Zuckmayer’s Katharina Knie in 1957 and Wie lernt man Liebe (‘How You Learn Love’) in 1967, both in Munich. But in 1978, just short of his 80th birthday, Spoliansky took up an invitation to the Berlin Arts Festival, performing his own music with the now-widowed Margo Lion, earning a triumphal success and an immediate invitation to return the next year.

After Spoliansky’s death, on 28 June 1985, his estate was lovingly administered by his daughter ‘Spoli’ Mills, who launched a one-woman crusade on behalf of his music: she had it typeset, catalogued and indexed, she edited his autography and engineered a revival of Send for Mr Plim at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1999. But when Spoli herself died, in March 2004, her own sons realised that the volume of work required to do Spoliansky’s legacy justice was going to require the involvement of a mainstream musical publisher – hence the partnership with Music Sales, which promises to return Spoliansky’s name to the international prominence it once enjoyed.

—Martin Anderson