Louis Gruenberg emigrated from Russia with his family when he was just a few months old. He studied with Busoni in Vienna and gained fleeting fame in America with the success of his 1933 opera The Emperor Jones at the Met. Gruenberg moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and worked as a film composer. He received several Academy Award nominations and at least 39 movie score credits, though his credits stop in the late 1950s, possibly as a result of blacklisting. Heifetz commissioned a Violin Concerto, which he debuted and recorded in 1944, marking a second high point in Gruenberg’s career as a composer.