Biography
Mischa Spoliansky was born in 1898 in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family of musicians, and learned piano, violin and cello as a child, partly in Dresden. He came to Berlin in 1914, paid for his studies at the Stern Conservatory by playing piano in coffeehouses and was soon writing for Max Reinhardt's cabaret Schall und Rauch; under the pseudonym Arno Billing he composed Das lila Lied in 1920. With the lyricist Marcellus Schiffer he created revues such as Es liegt in der Luft (1928) and the burlesque Alles Schwindel (1931), and it was in his revue Zwei Krawatten (1929, text by Georg Kaiser) that Josef von Sternberg discovered Marlene Dietrich for The Blue Angel. As a Jew he was forced to leave Germany in 1933; in London he became a British citizen and began a second career as a film composer, with scores including Sanders of the River (1935) and Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957). He died in London in 1985; his archive is held by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
On Stagelog
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