Happy birthday, Erich Wolfgang Korngold!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll celebrate one of the most influential composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, by way of two of his most popular scores, both of them for film adaptations of the novels of Rafael Sabatini.

Though Sabatini’s own popularity has faded somewhat with the passage of time, in his day the Italian-English writer might have been regarded as heir apparent to Alexandre Dumas. His bestselling novels are full of romance and derring-do. However, I’m not sure if any of them have really endured in the consciousness of the wider public.

Sabatini’s incident-filled pages seem ready-made for the silver screen. Film adaptations of “Scaramouche,” “The Sea Hawk” and “Captain Blood” were made during the silent era. A long-lost John Gilbert classic, adapted from Sabatini’s “Bardelys the Magnificent,” has only recently been rediscovered. Several of these, of course, were remade, more or less, to great success during the era of talking pictures.

We’ll hear Korngold’s music for the Errol Flynn classics “Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Sea Hawk” (1940). The former provided Flynn with his breakout role; the latter actually has nothing at all to do with Sabatini’s original plot, despite the writer’s prominent onscreen credit.

We’ll also enjoy Alfred Newman’s rollicking main title music for the pirate opus “The Black Swan” (1942), which starred Tyrone Power, and one of Victor Young’s most rousing and melodically inventive scores, for “Scaramouche” (1952), which featured Stewart Granger in probably the best swashbuckler of the 1950s.

Polish up those seven-league boots and don your gaudiest plumage. Then join me, as we set sail with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and friends, and the novels of Rafael Sabatini, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.