Willy Schmidt-Gentner
German and Austrian film score composer (1894-1964)
Willy Schmidt-Gentner (6 April 1894 – 12 February 1964) was one of the most successful German composers of film music in the history of German-language cinema. He moved to Vienna in 1933. At his most productive, he scored up to 10 films a year, including numerous classics and masterpieces of the German and Austrian cinema.
Life
Schmidt-Gentner was born in Neustadt am Rennsteig in Thuringia, Germany. During his childhood he learnt the violin and took lessons in composition from Max Reger. After World War I Schmidt-Gentner worked as a civil servant checking that cinema owners were paying their full taxes. Through one of his clients he got a position as a band leader at film theatre performances. This raised his interest in films and as early as 1922 he produced his first composition to accompany a silent film. He performed many of his new pieces himself on the piano during films. He was also already responsible at this period for the sound tracks of a number of German classic films, for example Alraune (1928), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) and Hokuspokus (1930)
With the arrival of sound films he quickly became one of the most sought-after filmscore composers in Germany, so that for a time he was scoring up to 10 films a year.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110030. VIAF identifies the subject as 22408295. The Library of Congress control number is nb99134195. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1964, 1933 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willy Schmidt-Gentner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.