A Forgotten Treasure from Korngold

When I was young I was very impressed by music from “big” motion pictures. There was Miklos Rozsa (Ben Hur, El Cid, Quo Vadis), Alex North (Spartacus), Bernard Hermann (Vertigo and other Hitchcockian delights), Dimitri Tiomkin (Giant, Lost Horizon, High Noon), and others. Aaron Copland, Prokofiev, and other “classical” composers also wrote music for films. But the most remarkable composer for films was probably Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), and he only did the music for sixteen of them.

When he was a child Korngold was writing music that impressed everyone. Mahler called him a genius and Strauss marvelled at how such totally adult music could be composed by a boy.

He was a successful opera and concert composer in Vienna, but spent some time in Hollywood writing music for a few Warner Brothers films. He made the final move to Hollywood while escaping with his family just as their home was being confiscated by the Nazis. Luckily he’d been tapped to do the music for “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” making the trip possible.

In 1918, Korngold was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing (Viel Lärm um Nichts) that received its first hearing at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Castle in may 1920.

Korngold was just 15 when he wrote the Sinfonietta, first performed by Felix Weingartner and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1913. It earned the praise of no less than Richard Strauss. 

Korngold is most impressive to me for his absolutely gorgeous dramatic melodies, and his amazing orchestrations, even in these two early works. John Storgards and the Helsinki Philharmonic are excellent in this music, and the recording is first class!

This was definitely an overlooked treasure for me– A true “discovery!”

You may be interested….

And here’s a YouTube BBC Documentary with Leonard Slatkin talking about his family and Korngold.