Composer
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
The Viennese child prodigy who invented the sound of the Hollywood film score.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the most astonishing child prodigies since Mozart, and a celebrated opera composer in Vienna by the age of twenty-three. Then, in Hollywood, he helped create the lush, symphonic sound of the classic film score, an influence that can still be heard in the music of John Williams.
Life in brief
Korngold was born in 1897 in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, and grew up in Vienna, where his father, Julius, was the city's most powerful music critic. As a boy of nine he played his cantata Gold to Mahler, who declared him a genius. His ballet The Snowman was staged at the Vienna Court Opera when he was thirteen, and he was soon admired by Richard Strauss and Puccini.
His opera Die tote Stadt ("The Dead City"), premiered in 1920 when he was twenty-three, was one of the most successful operas of its time. In 1934 the director Max Reinhardt invited him to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn's music for a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he began writing scores for Warner Bros. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Korngold, who was Jewish, was working in Hollywood; he stayed in America, which saved his life.
He wrote some sixteen film scores, two of which won Academy Awards. After the war he returned to concert music, but his lush style was now considered old-fashioned, and his later works were coolly received. He died in Hollywood in 1957.
Music and style
Korngold's music is unashamedly Romantic: soaring melodies, rich harmony in the tradition of Strauss and Mahler, and brilliant orchestration. In Hollywood he treated each film like an opera without words, using recurring themes for characters and writing full symphonic scores to match the action, from swashbuckling sea battles to love scenes.
Key works
- Violin Concerto in D major (1945) - a gorgeous, lyrical concerto, built from themes in his film scores, premiered by Jascha Heifetz. See concerto.
- Die tote Stadt (1920) - an opera of grief and obsession, his greatest stage success. See opera.
- "Marietta's Song" ("Glück, das mir verblieb") - the opera's most famous number, a haunting song later reprised as a duet.
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) - his Oscar-winning swashbuckler score. See film score.
- The Sea Hawk (1940) - a rousing score of pirate adventure.
- Kings Row (1942) - with a noble main theme that anticipates the sound of later blockbuster scores.
Legacy
For decades Korngold was dismissed as merely a film composer, but his concert works and operas have been rediscovered since the 1970s, and the Violin Concerto is now a repertoire staple. His film scores set the standard for Hollywood's golden age. See also our guide to film scores and classical music.
Where to start listening: the Violin Concerto, then "Marietta's Song" and the main title from The Adventures of Robin Hood.