Victor Baravalle

Victor Baravalle (1885–1939) was an Italian born composer and conductor. He conducted the orchestra for the Broadway premiere production of Show Boat in 1927, as well as for the original stage productions of nine other Jerome Kern shows, among them The Cat and the Fiddle, Music in the Air, and Roberta. Among the other stage musicals that he conducted was the first American production of White Horse Inn.

He also conducted the orchestra for the sound prologue for the early sound version of Show Boat (1929), and for the entire 1936 film version of the show. He was music director for the Rudy Vallée vehicle The Vagabond Lover (1929).

He was the musical director for two of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films, Carefree (1938) -- which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Musical Scoring, although it was Irving Berlin who wrote the actual songs in the film -- and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), which is the last film Astaire and Rogers made together at RKO. He also worked on A Damsel in Distress (1937), another RKO musical production that starred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.