I’ve been a fan of Erich Wolfgang Korngold ever since the quarterstaff music got stuck in my head while watching “The Adventures of Robin Hood” on TV when I was a kid and my best friend and I took down the curtain rods and started dueling all over the house. A few years later, I discovered the Classic Flim Scores series conducted by Charles Gerhardt, and I loved the Korngold albums best.
But before the mass-exposure he enjoyed as one of the great composers of Hollywood’s golden age, and in fact one of the progenitors of the Hollywood sound, he was enormously successful in Europe. Whenever you listen to music in an old movie and think that it sounds like Richard Strauss, there’s a reason for that, as Korngold and Max Steiner and many of their colleagues had their origins in that world, driven from their homes and across the Atlantic by fascism, the Holocaust, and World War II.
As a wunderkind in Vienna, Korngold was declared a genius by Gustav Mahler. In his teens, he shared a box with Strauss for the premiere of his own “Schauspiel Overture.” Afterwards, Strauss confessed he found such talent in one so young terrifying. Korngold composed a ballet-pantomime, “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”), when he was 12. He wrote his first opera, “Der Ring des Polykrates” (“The Ring of Polykrates”), when he was 17. His greatest hit was the opera “Die tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”), given a double premiere (with Otto Klemperer conducting at one of the venues) when he was 23. By then, he was one of the most famous composers in the world.
The great tragedy of Korngold’s life was that by the time the war ended, the world had changed so much, it was impossible for him to regain his former prominence. His style, rooted in fin-de-siècle post-Romanticism, seemed hopelessly old fashioned after Hitler and Hiroshima. He died in 1957, at the age of 60, believing himself basically forgotten.
That would all change in the early 1970s, as a few well-received albums, especially the Gerhardt series, sparked a renewed interest in the composer. There was also a strongly-argued performance of the post-war Symphony in F-sharp, conducted by Rudolf Kempe, and the world premiere recording of “Die tote Stadt,” what might still be the work’s best, with Erich Leinsdorf at the helm.
As it occurred in real time, progress seemed very slow. In the 1980s, it was still difficult to hear any of the concert pieces. They were seldom programmed and recordings were few. But I acquired what I could, and with the advent of compact disc, I rode the Korngold wave, as record companies looked beyond the standard repertoire to stake out new, hopefully lucrative territory, with attractive, slightly off-the-beaten path, opulently-scored music that would exploit the fidelity and dynamic range of the new technology. I literally bought every single Korngold recording that appeared on CD until the duplications became so frequent I just couldn’t do it anymore.
And what a difference the last 40 years have made. I remember making big plans to hear the Korngold Violin Concerto live back in 1990. Now it’s part of the active repertoire of virtually every major violinist. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard it now. But things were very different then.
Recorded explorations of the composer’s output have been so successful it had seemed there was very little left to revive. Surely the major works have been exhausted? Not so!
It was but a few years ago that I was bouncing around the internet and I stumbled across some music I had never heard. It was a Korngold operetta called “Die stumme Serenade” (“The Silent Serenade”). Again, it was written after the war, at a time when “serious” composers like Marc Blitzstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Leonard Bernstein were gaining a toehold on Broadway with accessible operas.
Korngold composed a romantic farce with elements of Viennese operetta, a tradition he knew well, as the arranger of several such works by Johann Strauss II for successful revivals in the 1920s and from having completed Leo Fall’s “Roses from Florida” after Fall’s death toward the end of the decade. In the intervening years, he had assimilated a few Americanisms he surely hoped would endear him to producers and audiences on the Great White Way.
He also must have realized the practicality of smaller forces. The work was conceived for eight singers, eight actors, and a chamber orchestra consisting of two pianos, the first doubling on celesta, two violins, cello, flute, clarinet or saxophone, trumpet, and percussion.
Korngold tried it out in Europe in the early ‘50s, only to have it tank badly. There are two recordings of the piece, one taken from a Viennese radio broadcast in 1951 and more recently a 2009 recording, with a lot of German dialogue, released in 2011 on the CPO label.
“The Silent Serenade” has never been performed in the United States. But that’s about to change, as Mannes Opera of the Mannes School of Music will host two performances, this Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m., at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues), in New York City.
I am sorry to say, for anyone who didn’t hop on it, tickets – which were free – are no longer available. However, the production will be streamed later this month, from what I understand, on March 23 at 4 p.m. If I were you, I would monitor Mannes’ website and social media. Good luck!
https://event.newschool.edu/mannesoperadiestummeserenadeth
Here’s the CPO recording of the piece, shorn of most of the spoken dialogue. The Mannes performances will be in English.
