Ernst Sigmund Goldner (July 13, 1921 – March 17, 1999), known professionally as Ernest Gold, was an Austrian-born American composer. He is most noted for his work on the film Exodus produced in 1960. Early life Gold was born in 1921 in Vienna, the son of Elisabeth (Stransky) and Gustav Goldner. Gold came from a musical family. His father played the violin, and his mother sang. His father also studied under Richard Heuberger. Gold said that he learned to read music before he had learned to read words. He studied the violin and the piano when he was six years old and began composing music at eight. By age 13, he had written an entire opera. As a child, he said he wanted to go to Hollywood and be a composer. Gold would go to movie theaters as a teenager not only to watch the films but also to listen to the musical score. Among prominent film composers of the time he admired Max Steiner. In 1938, Gold attended the Viennese Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst, but he moved to the U.S. after the Anschluss of Austria, because of the family's Jewish heritage. In the United States, Gold earned money by working as an accompanist and writing popular songs in New York City. He also studied with Otto Cesana and Léon Barzin at the National Orchestra Association. Career NBC Orchestra performed Gold's first symphony in 1939, only a year after he moved to the United States. In 1941, he composed a symphony that was later played at Carnegie Hall in 1945. Gold moved to Hollywood in the same year to work with Columbia Pictures, his first significant role being the score for the melodrama Girl of the Limberlost (1945). After this opportunity, Gold wrote scores for other minor films. For the next ten years, he continued to work on B movies, mainly orchestrating and arranging music for western movies and melodramas. He was asked by Stanley Kramer to orchestrate Not as a Stranger (1955). The music for the film was written by George Antheil. This production opened the door for Gold to work with other scores written by Antheil and to orchestrate more of Kramer's films. Gold worked on almost every film Kramer made, including A Child Is Waiting and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Gold produced his first original film score in 1958 for Too Much,