Erich Wolfgang Korngold - Not Just A Hollywood Film Composer
If you've ever seen certain classic Hollywood films, such as The Sea Hawk, The Advendutes Of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex, The Sea Wolf, the colorful music for these films no doubt added to your enjoyment of them. And the composer was the once famous Erich Wolfgang Korngold, an Austrian Jew born in what is now the Czech republic, who was boen on this date, May 29 in 1897, and lived until 1957.
He was a child prodigy , and famous composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were amazed by his comosing talent starting from when he was only ten years old. He was also a virtuoso pianist, and later became active as a conductor.
He was the son of the distinguished music critic Julius Korngold, who wrote for the New Free Press in Vienna, the leading newspaper in that legendary musical city . His rise as a composer was meteoric; his opera Die Tote Stadt(The Dead City) was a smash hit at top European opera houses when he was only 23 years old.
Korngold wrote other once popular operas such as Violanta and Das Wunder Der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane), which went out of favor when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in the 30s because the composer was Jewish, and much music for solo piano, chamber music, concertos and orchestral music.
But Korngold had settled in Hollywood to write film scores just before Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and had to remain there and become a US citizen. He won an academy award for best film score for the classic film The Advenutes of Robin Hood with Erroll Flynn.
But because of his success in Hollywood, it seemed that no one would take him seriously as a classical composer any more. His lush, colorful late romantic music was considered passe by modernists. And Arnold Schoenberg, his great countryman and founder of atonal composition , also lived in Los Angeles. Korngold died in 1957 at the age of only 60, considered a has been by many.
But in recent years interest in his music has grown, and his classic film scores have even been recorded to be heard on their own as serious music. Several of his operas have been recorded and even performed live; Die Tote Stadt was recently performed successfully in London, and his orchestral works have been championed by leading conductors and recorded. There are two Korngold biographies, by the English novelist and classical music fan Jessica Duchen, and Korngold scholar Brendan G Carroll.
But some critics and commentators just won't take Korngold seriously; one made the famous(or infamous) quip that his music is"More Korn Than Gold". But any one who enjoys lush,late Romantic music should find his music highly attractive. Try his single symphony, the violin concerto, which has been recorded by Jascha Heifetz and other great violinists, or the recordings of his operas, Die Tote Stadt, Violanta, and Das Wunder, although they may not be easy to find at the moment. Check arkivmusic.com for recordings ; you won't be disappointed.