Victor Baravalle (1885–1939) was an Italian-born[1] composer, music director, and conductor, best known for his work on both the stage and film productions of the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musical Show Boat.
[2] He conducted 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.
[3] Among the other stage musicals that he conducted was the first American production of White Horse Inn.
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,[7] 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.