Victory at Sea is a documentary television series about warfare in general during World War II, and naval warfare in particular, as well as the use of industry in warfare. It was originally broadcast by NBC in the United States in 1952–1953. It was condensed into a film released in 1954. Excerpts from the music soundtrack, by Richard Rodgers and Robert Russell Bennett, were re-recorded for record albums.
The original TV broadcasts comprised 26 half-hour segments—Sunday afternoons at 3pm (EST) in most markets—starting on October 26, 1952 and ending on May 3, 1953. The series, which won an Emmy award in 1954 as “best public affairs program”, played an important part in establishing historic “compilation” documentaries as a viable television genre.
The project was conceived by Henry Salomon…
Salomon also signed Richard Rodgers, fresh off several successful Broadway musicals, to compose the musical score. Rodgers contributed 12 “themes”—short piano compositions a minute or two in length; these may be examined in the Rodgers Collection at the Library of Congress. Robert Russell Bennett did the orchestrating, transforming Rodgers’s themes for a variety of moods, and composing much more original material than Rodgers, as may be observed in Bennett’s holograph scores, archived with his papers at Northwestern University and microfilmed at the Library of Congress. Episode No. 18, for example, is entirely of Bennett’s creation, and uses none of Rodgers’s twelve themes. Bennett nonetheless received credit only for arranging the score and conducting NBC Symphony Orchestra members on the soundtrack recording sessions, and many writers still refer erroneously to “Rodgers’s thirteen-hour score”. In 1954, Rodgers recorded the VAS “Symphonic Scenario” medley (scored by Bennett) with the New York Philharmonic for Columbia Records, but it was Bennett who conducted the much more familiar RCA Victor recordings—the first (1953) with NBC Symphony Orchestra musicians who played for the soundtrack sessions, and later with members of the Symphony of the Air, an orchestra created in the autumn of 1954 from former NBC Symphony members, identified on the albums as the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra.
Opening Theme To TV Show: https://youtu.be/sto3p3eozg8?si=AkpHppXEmvu0ODlC
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