Ernö Rapée

Ernö Rapée (or Erno Rapee) (4 June 1891 – 26 June 1945) was one of the most prolific American symphonic conductors in the first half of the 20th Century. His most famous tenure was that of the head conductor of the Radio City Symphony Orchestra, the resident orchestra of the Radio City Music Hall, whose music was heard by millions over the air.

A virtuoso pianist, Rapée is also remembered for popular songs that he wrote in the late 1920s as photoplay music for silent films. When not conducting live orchestras, he supervised film scores for sound pictures, compiling a substantial list of films on which he worked as composer, arranger or musical director.

Rapée was born in Narva, Estonia and later on moved to Budapest, Hungary where he studied as a pianist and later conductor at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music. Later, he was assistant conductor to Ernst von Schuch in Dresden. As a composer, his first piano concerto was played by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Vienna, and after a tour of America as a guest conductor, began performing at the Rialto Theater in New York as assistant to Hugo Riesenfeld, where he began composing and conducting for silent films.

Following positions at the Rialto and Rivoli theaters, he was hired by Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel as the musical director of the Capitol Theatre's 77-member orchestra in New York. It was at the Capitol that Rapée made his most famous classical arrangement of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody, No. 13. While at the Capitol, he pioneered orchestral radio broadcasts over station WEAF as part of the Roxy's Gang programs. He also engaged Eugene Ormandy as the Capitol's concertmaster and assistant conductor. The Capitol orchestra made a number of commercial recordings under Rapée's direction in 1923-24 for the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company.

Rapée's next move was to Philadelphia, where he conducted an orchestra of 68 at the Fox Theatre. Percy Grainger was one of his guest artists during this engagement. After his tenure at the Fox, Rapée went on to international success in Berlin with an orchestra of 85 at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo. While there he was invited to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert. Later he appeared as conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic and other European orchestras.

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