One of classical music’s most astonishing composer prodigies – sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, as it were – Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the toast of Vienna. His opera “Die tote Stadt” was probably his greatest success, receiving double-premieres in Hamburg and Cologne. It became one of the most popular operas by a living composer during the 1920s.
With the rise of the Nazis, Korngold and his family found refuge in Hollywood, where he wrote film scores for such classics as “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Prince and the Pauper” (1937), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939), “The Sea Hawk” (1940), and “Kings Row” (1942).
Even as a boy, Korngold had amazed audiences with such works as the ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann,” or “The Snowman,” composed at the tender age of 11 and first performed at the Vienna Court Opera in the presence of Emperor Franz Josef. His Piano Trio was composed at 13 and given its premiere by Artur Schnabel and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Sinfonietta, a symphony-in-all-but-name, was composed at 15 and first conducted by Felix Weingartner, while Korngold shared a box with an admiring (and, by his own admission, somewhat intimidated) Richard Strauss.
With the premiere of his opera “Die tote Stadt,” or “The Dead City,” in 1920, at age 23, Korngold’s reputation seemed assured. He wrote a piano concerto for Paul Wittgenstein, undertook a revival of the operettas of Johann Strauss II, and was publicly honored by the president of Austria.
However, the trajectory of his career took an unexpected turn with the ascendancy of Hitler. To escape the creep of fascism, Korngold embarked on a second career, settling in Hollywood to write film scores for Warner Brothers.
The first of these was composed at the invitation of famed impresario Max Reinhardt, with whom Korngold had collaborated on the Strauss revivals. Reinhardt was in the process of adapting Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the big screen, and he enlisted Korngold to rework Felix Mendelssohn’s famous incidental music.
In true Korngoldian fashion, the composer went well beyond what was expected, weaving in passages from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and “Songs Without Words,” writing his own connective material, and sprinkling the whole with fairy dust.
Korngold’s work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) led to an exclusive contract at Warner’s, where the composer revolutionized the language of film music, applying the kind of opulence, pageantry and romance characteristic of his operas to silver screen historical dramas and swashbucklers.
The result was kind of a pop cultural immortality, but to the detriment of his reputation as a serious composer. The center of European musical culture was off-limits, indeed severely limited by Nazi strictures, and the language of musical modernism, as exemplified by the output of his contemporary and compatriot Arnold Schoenberg, made Korngold seem positively old-fashioned. It would be decades before his reputation would recover, and unfortunately by then he was long dead.
I feel like I was in on the ground floor of the Korngold revival, snapping up everything available, though a mere fraction of his output, shortly after it appeared on LP during the 1970s. Then came a veritable Korngold bumper crop during the compact disc era, especially in 1990s. Since then, we’ve been blessed especially with multiple recordings of the Violin Concerto, now in the repertoire of practically every major violinist.
It’s been very exciting for me, personally, to live through the comeback of one of my favorite composers, and one who has been so important to me for most of my existence. Well before I knew anything about music, my best friend and I used to “sing” the music from “Robin Hood,” after the film’s television broadcasts, while executing curtain rod duels around the house.
With gratitude to Erich Wolfgang Korngold on his birthday. May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!
Good nine-minute primer on E.W.K.
Violin Concerto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsyMFDGvgBI
Sinfonietta, composed at 15
Marietta’s Lied from “Die tote Stadt”
“The Sea Hawk”
What say you to that, Baron of Loxley?
