When I was six years old I took three or four piano lessons a week. I hated it. Bach,
Beethoven, Czemey [sic] and five-fingered exercises bored me. I rebelled and my father
had to give me a Kronen for every lesson I took. . . . To escape from the boredom of my
lessons with my first teacher I often improvised at the piano with more modern music of
my own. Papa would always encourage me by saying "Write it down. Write it down!" ⁶

Steiner goes on to suggest that his experience of improvisation may have
prepared his musical tastes: "[p]erhaps this is why some years later in my early
teens I was able to understand and appreciate the music of Debussy which was
Avant Garde [sic] for those days." ⁷

Steiner's musical training was both academic and circumstantial: on a
formal level he was admitted to the Vienna Imperial Academy of Music ⁸ at the
age of 15, "where by the Grace of God and excellent instruction I completed the
required four years in one and was accorded the honor of being the best student
in the academy." ⁹ He lists his teachers as: Herman Graedner, harmony and
orchestration; Robert Fuchs, counterpoint; Felix Weingartner, composition;
Professor Josef Brenner, organ; Professor Wottawa, brass; Edmund Eysler,
piano. ¹⁰ Steiner notes that his instrumental strength was the piano, although there
is a sense of the broader advantage of other instrumental lessons: "it was enough
for me to know what the instrument could do." ¹¹ An early influence over
Steiner's melodic style could be found in the music of Eysler, whose first
operetta, Bruder Straubinger, was produced at the Theater an der Wien in 1903,
the same year Steiner began at the Imperial Academy. Traubner describes
Eysler's operettas as often having poor libretti, in a simple style, with songs often
drawing on another popular Viennese form, the waltz. ¹² In his later attempts at
writing works for musical theatre, Steiner was keen to try his hand at libretto
writing, often with minimal success; more significantly the waltz is a recurrent
melodic form in the themes of his film scores -- for example Dark Victory
( 1939), In This Our Life ( 1941) and Now, Voyager ( 1942).

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