The Tuesday noon concert is on hiatus for the remainder of the summer. So I’ll have a blank slate this afternoon, on The Classical Network.
With another stormpocalypse bearing down on the Trenton-Princeton area (maybe), I’ll present, among my featured highlights, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp, the composer’s emotional and artistic reaction to war-torn Vienna.
As a Jew, Korngold lived as an exile in Hollywood following the Anschluss, earning fame and fortune through his film scores for Errol Flynn. In fact, he once quipped that Robin Hood had saved his life. Korngold may have survived the war, but by 1945 the world he had known was gone forever. When he attempted to reestablish his career back home, he found himself regarded as an uncomfortable reminder of shame, guilt, and destruction, and the late Romantic syntax of his music had come to seem like the product of a bygone era. To lend perspective, John Cage unveiled his 4’33” in 1952, the same year that Korngold completed his symphony.
The Symphony in F-sharp is not by any means “film music,” though it does allude to some of the scores he wrote for Warner Brothers – “Juarez,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” “Captain Blood,” and “Kings Row.” The work includes an obligatory Korngoldian happy ending, but the overall mood is one of loss and ruination. It was performed only thrice during the composer’s lifetime. The first performance was so under-rehearsed that the composer tried (unsuccessfully) to put a halt to it.
Over a decade after Korngold’s death, the score was rediscovered by conductor Rudolf Kempe in the library of the Munich Philharmonic. Kempe set down the world-premiere recording for RCA in 1972. Alongside RCA’s Classic Film Scores Series and a new recording of “Die Tote Stadt,” it set the ball rolling, slowly but inexorably, toward a reassessment of Korngold’s music, which gradually picked up pace in the 1990s, as musicians and record companies began to look further afield with the realization that everyone had already replaced their LPs of the standard repertoire on compact disc.
The conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos once wrote of Korngold’s symphony, “All my life I have searched for the perfect modern work. In this symphony I have found it.” Unfortunately, Mitropoulos died before he could realize his plan to perform it.
Korngold was a good man – he shared the wealth of his success in Hollywood to help family and displaced friends in need – but he was not a religious man. Nor was he very much tied up in his heritage. He commented that he and his family had always thought of themselves as Viennese; it was Hitler who made them Jewish. Korngold dedicated his symphony to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the country that had become his second home. Korngold died in Los Angeles in 1957.
Tune in this afternoon to hear Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp, among my featured works, between 12 and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
NOTE: The symphony will be performed on Saturday night at the Fisher Center at Bard, as part of the second weekend of this year’s Bard Music Festival, held at Bard College, “Korngold and His World.” More information is available at fishercenter.bard.edu.
