Erich Wolfgang Korngold stood out as one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished musicians across two distinct domains. From the age of seven he emerged as a celebrated performing prodigy whose technical command and musical insight astonished established masters including Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, both of whom took particular pleasure in his extraordinary gifts. Widely hailed in those circles as a new Mozart, he produced between his teenage years and his thirties a sequence of orchestral pieces, operas (above all Die Tote Stadt), and chamber works that enjoyed exceptional popularity and ranked among the period’s most highly praised creations. Beginning in 1935 and continuing well beyond his withdrawal from the medium in 1946, he also ranked among Hollywood’s foremost film composers, supplying the scores for Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Anthony Adverse, Kings Row, Between Two Worlds, The Sea Wolf, Escape Me Never, and The Constant Nymph.
He was the son of Julius Korngold, one of Vienna’s most influential music critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Displaying prodigious ability from earliest childhood, the younger Korngold—whose middle name reflected his father’s homage to Mozart—had already mastered the piano by age five and was performing duets with his father at seven. He had begun improvising accompaniments at the keyboard for scenes drawn from imagined narratives, and at ten he presented Gustav Mahler, then Vienna’s leading conductor, with an excerpt from his own cantata Gold. Mahler concluded that conventional conservatory training would be pointless for a boy already more knowledgeable than most instructors he might meet, and instead placed him with composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who later orchestrated the ballet The Snowman. At thirteen that ballet received a command performance at the Vienna Court Opera before Emperor Franz Josef. The Snowman met with immediate success and appeared on the stages of forty opera houses during the ensuing years.
Korngold’s reputation was now secure, and Mahler’s endorsement was soon echoed by others. After examining the boy’s early scores, Richard Strauss remarked, “One shudders with awe to realize these compositions were written by a boy.” Following performances of two Korngold operas, Giacomo Puccini observed, “The boy has so much talent he could easily give us some and still have enough left for himself.”
Even at this stage, however, Korngold’s music revealed traits that foreshadowed later difficulties. It remained unapologetically Romantic, replete with memorable lyrical melodies that invited humming, repetition, and imitation. To many observers the composer already seemed a relic of a late-nineteenth-century sensibility that was vanishing together with the empires of that era. His writing stayed resolutely tonal and melodic at a moment when Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern were advancing into the new century by repudiating tonality and, with it, melody itself. The large-scale tunes, emphatic melodic gestures, and expansive, deliberately beautiful orchestrations of Korngold’s scores stood in direct opposition to the modernist camp.
Korngold paid no heed to such objections and continued composing in his chosen manner, sustained by the advocacy of Bruno Walter, Arthur Nikisch, Felix Weingartner, and Arthur Schnabel, all of whom performed his music with enthusiasm. In 1920 he attained his greatest operatic triumph with Die Tote Stadt, which achieved instant critical and popular acclaim in Germany and became the first German opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York after the First World War.
An ardent admirer of Johann Strauss, Korngold spent the 1920s revising both the libretto and the score of the composer’s unsuccessful operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig, whose original failure had stemmed largely from a weak book. Korngold’s edition restored the work to viability and secured its place in the twentieth-century repertory; the version performed today is his. He also collaborated with producer Max Reinhardt in assembling a program of lesser-known Strauss pieces under the title Walzer aus Wien, which toured widely in Europe before reaching America as The Great Waltz—the title under which MGM filmed it in 1938.
Korngold’s first visit to Hollywood came in partnership with Reinhardt, to oversee the music for the latter’s 1934 Warner Bros. adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although the studio’s ambitious “prestige” production proved a commercial disappointment (as did every filmed Shakespeare until Olivier’s Henry V), Korngold’s arrangement of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental score was warmly received by both audiences and studio executives.
He appeared ideally suited to motion-picture work. His own idiom, steeped in late-Romantic lyricism, combined the melodic grace of Johann Strauss, the emotional depth of Mahler, and the rhetorical power of Richard Strauss—precisely the qualities the studios sought. Hollywood had for years drawn covertly on this same tradition; Korngold supplied the genuine article, a Viennese composer who wrote in an earlier century’s manner and could swiftly adapt and orchestrate existing music as well. His established fame, especially in Europe and among discerning American listeners, promised to enhance any studio’s prestige. Warner Bros. offered a contract, yet prior commitments in Vienna, including the premiere of a new opera, led him to decline.
Mid-1930s Central Europe offered little security to individuals of Jewish ancestry. Because Korngold held Austrian citizenship, Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany posed no immediate danger, so he confined his activities to his native country after 1933. He eventually accepted several studio offers and returned to Warner Bros. in 1935; his initial assignment was the costume adventure Captain Blood.
That picture launched the stardom of Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn, became one of the decade’s major studio successes, and revived the swashbuckler genre for the first time since the silent era. Observers credited Korngold’s richly atmospheric score with a substantial share of the film’s impact, and further assignments followed. He continued shuttling between Europe and Hollywood under an agreement that permitted him to reject projects, to reuse his film music in concert works, and to score as few as three pictures every two years (five per year being the contemporary norm). Among the resulting scores were Anthony Adverse, for which he received an Academy Award, and The Prince and the Pauper.
These obligations increasingly encroached upon his concert compositions, prompting him in 1937 to begin a Violin Concerto in D Major. A preliminary reading with a violinist colleague discouraged him so thoroughly that he set the concerto aside until 1946, when his wife urged him to complete it. The finished work is frequently noted for thematic material already familiar from films such as The Prince and the Pauper, yet Brendan G. Carroll has observed that the themes may equally have originated in the concerto and been repurposed for the screen after the concert project was abandoned.
Korngold was offered The Adventures of Robin Hood yet initially declined, planning a return to Vienna in the spring of 1938. Just before departure he learned from his father that Germany had annexed Austria and that it was unsafe for him to return or for his family to remain. He accepted the Robin Hood assignment and enlisted the studio’s help in securing his family’s passage to the United States. For the next eight years he remained in Hollywood, scoring swashbucklers (Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk), dramas (Kings Row, Escape Me Never), fantasy films (Between Two Worlds), and historical biographies (Juarez, Devotion), among other genres.
Korngold became one of Hollywood’s most esteemed and highly compensated musicians; the financial stability he attained was especially welcome amid the uncertainties of the late 1930s and early 1940s. His separation from the concert world nevertheless exacted a cost, which became evident when he attempted to resume his serious career after the war.
He discovered that he had become even more of an anomaly in the serious-music sphere of the late 1940s than he had been in the late 1920s. The problem was compounded by the war’s destruction of much of his former audience. Postwar Austrian critics and commentators openly disdained his decision to work in America and, worse, to lend his talents to Hollywood. His 1949 return to Austria ended in disappointment; his music was either neglected or derided.
The Symphonic Serenade, his most significant concert work in a decade, received a poorly prepared premiere by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1949 and was received unfavorably. The Symphony in F-Sharp, finished in 1950, likewise failed at first to attract listeners. After a new production of Die Tote Stadt also faltered, Korngold recognized that he had no future in Europe. He returned to Hollywood and a life of involuntary semi-retirement; declining health led to his death in 1957 at age sixty. Ironically, conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos discovered the Symphony in 1959 and announced plans to perform it, yet Mitropoulos himself died suddenly in the autumn of 1960. Only in the early 1970s did Rudolf Kempe, leading the Munich Philharmonic, revive the work, after which a recording soon appeared.
Korngold’s film scores ultimately sparked a comprehensive reappraisal of his concert music. The latter was seldom heard, yet his movie music had never lost its hold on audiences or on an older generation of producers and directors who regarded him, alongside Miklós Rózsa and Max Steiner, as emblematic of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The first commercial re-recording of his major film scores was made at the close of the 1950s by Lionel Newman conducting the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra. The album sold modestly and later became a collector’s item, but it demonstrated to those who heard it how Korngold’s music could sound apart from the cinema when entrusted to a capable ensemble. In the early 1970s RCA issued a new collection performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra of London (drawn largely from the London Philharmonic, London Symphony, and Royal Philharmonic) under Charles Gerhardt and produced by Korngold’s son George. Titled The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the release ignited a broad revival of interest, at least within film scholarship.
Korngold’s name thereby reached a wider circle of enthusiasts alongside those of the stars he had worked with—Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, and Basil Rathbone. The pictures themselves—Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Kings Row, Between Two Worlds, The Sea Wolf—had become among the most durable films of the century, repeatedly broadcast on television, revived in theaters, cited in later works (including Star Wars), marketed in home-video editions, and eventually colorized for new generations of viewers.
Korngold had also retained a following among serious musicians. In addition to Kempe’s recording of the Symphony, RCA issued a complete Die Tote Stadt in 1975 conducted by Erich Leinsdorf and featuring René Kollo, Carol Neblett, Hermann Prey, and Benjamin Luxon; the set has remained a staple of the catalog. By the early 1980s further labels and orchestras were exploring his output, including a second Symphony recording. The revival gained momentum on disc by the end of the decade as conductors sought out neglected Romantic masterpieces. By the mid-1990s another Die Tote Stadt recording had appeared, and the Symphonic Serenade received its New York Philharmonic premiere in 1995. Early in 1996 Rhino Records released Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Warner Bros. Years, presenting the original soundtrack recordings he conducted between 1935 and 1946, restored and arranged chronologically on two compact discs.
