Giuseppe Becce

Giuseppe Becce (3 February 1877 – 5 October 1973) was an Italian-born film score composer who enriched the German cinema. Biography Becce was born in Lonigo, province of Vicenza, Italy. He showed his musical talents early and was named the director of the student musical orchestra at the Pollini Conservatoire in Padua where he studied ‘cello and flute, along with geography and philology. In 1906 he moved to Germany and studied musical composition with Arthur Nikisch and Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin. In the 1913 silent movie Richard Wagner, directed by Carl Froelich, Becce played the title role and wrote the accompanying music (see also List of films about Richard Wagner.) He continued to write such music for a series of subsequent movies. A collection of these pieces, the so-called “Kinothek” was published between 1919 and 1933 by the Verlag Schlesinger’sche Buchhandlung in Berlin. From 1915 to 1923, Becce was the director of the little orchestra of the Berlin Mozartsaal cinema, located upstairs at the Neues Schauspielhaus in the Nollendorfplatz. After World War I, he was named to direct the music department of the Decla-Bioscop AG and chief director of its movie orchestra, later to