Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Vienna, Austria, on May 29, 1897, and died in Hollywood, California, on November 29, 1957. He composed his only symphony in 1951-52; it was premiered on a radio broadcast in Vienna on October 17, 1954, with Harold Byrns conducting the Vienna Symphony, but was not heard in concert until Rudolf Kempe led the Munich Philharmonic in a performance that November. The score — “Dedicated to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” — calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, gong, bass drum, glockenspiel, xylophone, marimbaphone, harp, piano, celesta, and strings.
When Erich Wolfgang Korngold was ten, his father took him to Mahler so that the boy could play over on the piano his recently composed cantata, Gold. As the music unfolded, Mahler stalked up and down the room muttering, “A genius—a genius.” By eleven, Korngold wrote a pantomime, Der Schneemann (The Snowman), which, after it was orchestrated by Zemlinsky, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera on October 4, 1911—the composer was thirteen years old! There were suspicions that this music had actually been composed by the boy’s father, one of the best-known music critics of his day, but Julius Korngold replied—sensibly and humorously—that if he could write music of such quality, he would not spend his life writing articles about other people’s music!
First-rate musicians were fascinated with the talented boy. Arthur Nikisch commissioned a work for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra—the first orchestra work that Korngold himself orchestrated, the Schauspiel-Ouvertüre (Overture to a Drama). He began to write operas, two of them at eighteen; when he was twenty-three, Die tote Stadt made him famous all over the world, with productions in eighty-three opera houses. He wrote two more operas after that, and his last Die Kathrin, was scheduled for performance in 1938 when the Nazi Anschluss meant that the same racial attacks on the art of Jewish musicians would take place in Vienna as in Berlin—so the performance was cancelled.
By the mid-’20s, though still regarded as a prodigious talent, Korngold was also considered a representative of the past; his devotion to the romantic style of the turn of the century gave him a retrospective position in the Vienna of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. He arranged operettas, including some of Strauss’ (A Night in Vienna and Cagliostro in Vienna); Max Reinhardt invited him to Berlin for productions of Fledermaus and La belle Hélène. By this time Korngold had already found a new métier, one in which he was to become a preeminent master—as a composer of scores for films in Hollywood. He visited first in 1933, accompanying the great German director Max Reinhardt, who was set to film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and who wanted Korngold to adapt Mendelssohn’s score of incidental music for the film. He began to compose original scores, too, and immediately discovered that he had a special flair for this kind of work. Two of his scores (Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) received Oscars. When the Nazis overran Austria, Korngold found a welcoming home in California, where, by 1947, he had composed eighteen film scores of great distinction.
He vowed not to write any more concert music until “the monster in Europe is removed from the world.” After the war, he gave up writing film music and returned to the concert hall, with his Violin Concerto in D Major (written for Jascha Heifetz), his Symphonic Serenade for Strings, and his Symphony in F-sharp Major. Dmitri Mitropoulos planned to include the symphony in his 1959-60 season with the New York Philharmonic, but the conductor’s death prevented that performance. (He had said, “All my life I have searched for the perfect modern work...In this symphony I have found it.”).
The premiere on a Viennese radio broadcast in 1954 was poorly rehearsed and badly played, by a conductor and musicians who had little respect for a composer whose work had been “tainted” with the Hollywood connection. The day after the performance, Korngold requested Austrian Radio to suppress the tape of the performance—which it did not do. A fine performance in Munich a few weeks later under the baton of Rudolf Kempe, and a recording helped salvage the experience from disaster. But the symphony still remains little known, though Korngold’s music has gradually overcome the unfair stigma of coming from the hand of a film composer as more and more of his orchestral and chamber music has begun to be heard again.
The symphony unfolds in the traditional four movements, with the scherzo coming second. The first movement (Moderato ma energico) begins with a clarinet melody of considerable dark power. It is dramatic in its forward thrust before ending with a halo of strings. The second movement (Scherzo) moves quickly, like a great tarantella, but it is often powerful and weighty, not simply humorous. The Adagio is a lushly-textured, extended slow movement of high specific gravity, like Bruckner’s, though the colors here are, clearly, Korngold’s own (he even makes passing reference to his music for The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex).
If the first three movements are largely somber, even dark in character, the finale is bright, and filled with vigorous rhythms and melodic transformations. But it is worth also noting a thoughtful reference to one of his finest film scores, for King’s Row. It is a passage taken from the scene in which the protagonist’s grandmother, who was born in Europe and who always embodied the refinement and values of the Old World, lies near death. During this scene in the film, the musical score is played behind the words of a friend, words that might equally well have applied to Korngold’s own life and the tradition he represented: “When she passes, how much passes with her. A whole way of life—a way of gentleness, and honor, and dignity. These things are going…and they may never come back to this world.”
© Steven Ledbetter