Hans Spialek

Hans Spialek (April 17, 1894 – November 20, 1983) was an Austrian-born American composer and orchestrator. Raised in Vienna and given an early musical education, he continued his studies in Moscow, at first as a prisoner of war during World War I, before settling in the US in 1924.

Spialek is best known for scoring the music for Broadway musicals by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and others, as well as ballet music, and radio broadcasts. He orchestrated 147 musicals from 1926 to 1967, many in collaboration with other arrangers such as Robert Russell Bennett. In his retirement in the 1980s, he helped reconstruct the original orchestrations for recordings of some of his 1930s Broadway shows.

Spialek was born in Vienna, where he received a musical education. He sang in the children's chorus of the Vienna State Opera and played small roles, including the little boy in the second act of La bohème under the baton of Gustav Mahler. He studied composing and conducting at the Vienna Conservatory, before fighting in the First World War. He was taken prisoner by Russian forces, but was allowed to continue his musical studies, and he conducted a prisoners’ orchestra. After the war he studied in Moscow with Reinhold Glière.

In 1924, Spialek and his wife, the singer Dora Boshoer, moved to America, where he joined the music staff of publisher Chappell Music. His Broadway debut was in 1926, orchestrating some of Walter Donaldson and Joseph Meyer's music for Sweetheart Time (1926). At Chappell, he shared an office with Robert Russell Bennett, with whom he collaborated on dozens of shows. Over the next 22 years, Spialek arranged the music for more than 100 Broadway musicals, and by the time of his retirement in 1957 he had worked on a total of 147.

Among the shows from the 1920s on which Spialek worked are Rosalie (1928), The New Moon (1928) and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). His many shows from the 1930s include The New Yorkers (1930), Gay Divorce (1932), Anything Goes (1934), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938) and The Boys from Syracuse (1938). His 1940s shows include Pal Joey (1940), Panama Hattie (1940), Something for the Boys (1943) and Where's Charley? (1948).

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