ERICH KORNGOLD Composer of the Week Is Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Weekdays at POST-ROMANTIC 12 Noon-1Pm and Repeated at 8.45Pm-9.45Pm FILM MUSIC PIONEER
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COMPOSER OF THE MONTH RADIO ERICH KORNGOLD Composer of the Week is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 weekdays at POST-ROMANTIC 12 noon-1pm and repeated at 8.45pm-9.45pm FILM MUSIC PIONEER ATMOSPHERE AND ACTION As a child prodigy, Korngold looked set Korngold's instinct for portraying narrative in music, replete with to become one of Austria's most prized atmosphere and action, was evident when he was only 11, writing his composers, but that was before he crossed enchanting Don Quixote Character the Atlantic to find success in Hollywood Pieces for piano. His rhythmic flexibility, observant eye and gift for capturing instead, as Jessica Duchen explains personality paid off in Hollywood. rich Wolfgang Korngold was long Korngold was born in Brno in 1897, AMBITION AND CONTROL remembered chiefly as the man theyoungersonof Julius Korngold, an Korngold's music can sometimes seem who took Mahler's lush style to eminent music critic who had been almost too ambitious for its own good. E the cinema. He was one of the principal helped into his first post by Brahms. He applies dense textures, complex composers who, during the 1930s and When Erich was four, Julius became flights of chromaticism and polytonality '40s, made film music an integral part second-in-command to Eduard and changes of time signature. The latter are often part of his eager bid of a movie, replete with the techniques Hanslick at the Neue Freie Presse and for control and often amount to of the great German Romantics. But moved his family to Vienna. As snake- written-out rubatos. there was far more to Korngold - as tongued in print as his boss, whose job proved by a tremendous recent surge he later inherited-thus becoming the THE MOTIF OF THE of interest in his concert works and most powerful music critic in the city CHEERFUL HEART operas, culminating in occasions from -Julius shared Hanslick's conservative As a teenager, Korngold invented a London to Australia this year to mark outlook. Mesmerised by Mahler, snide signature tune for himself which he the 50th anniversary of his death. about Strauss and utterly outraged by named 'The Motif of the Cheerful Heart'. Korngold's life story reads rather the Second Viennese School, his anti- It is based on two interlocking, rising like a filmscript itself. First, it falls progressive stance would hobble his fourths and a rising fifth and appears as into a neatthree-act scenario, each gifted son for the rest of his life. early as his Marchenbilder for solo piano involving a compelling setting: By the time Erich was ten, his talent (1910). In 1937, when he scored a turkey turn-of-the-century Vienna, the was so evident that Julius took him of a movie called Another Dawn, he Golden Age of Hollywood and the to play to Mahler. On the great man's transformed the motif with an aching, arid disappointments of post-war advice, Korngold became the pupil of homesick tritone instead of the fifth; Europe and America. Next, conflict the melody, reused to open his Violin Zemlinsky who could hardly believe Concerto, is now world famous. abounds, with two world wars, the the flair with which his young charge antagonism between Korngold and completed his Schauspiel Overture, NEVER SHY OF SENTIMENT his impossible father, and Korngold's premiered when he was only 14. His While the 20th century reacted against inner conflicts as he grew from child ballet-pantomime DerSchneemann Romanticism by refuting overt emotion prodigy phenomenon to controversial (The Snowman), which Zemlinsky in music, Korngold's big heart and superstar and thence to depressive, orchestrated, had already been generous nature often found him overweight exile. Add Korngold's performed at the Vienna Hofoper and wearing his heart on both sleeves rapid-firing wit, instinct for musical musicians such as the Arthurs Nikisch at once. His fondness for lyrical, timing, long love story with his wife, and Schnabel were gladly taking on his operetta-like melody sometimes Luzi, and a supporting cast that works. Influences on Korngold ranged mingled with his distinctly futuristic included Mahler, Strauss, Maria Jeritza from Mahlerto Puccini and Stravinsky. over-ambition to startling effect, and Errol Flynn, and the stage is set, Interestingly, at first his music was notably in Das Wunder der Heliane. the cameras ready to roll. distinctly in touch with its times. 46 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2007 COMPOSER OF THE MONTH KORNGOLD music DOWNLOAD CLUB Join the BBC Music Download Club today at www. bbcmusicmagazine. com, claim your free 35 downloads, and enjoy our exclusive monthly playlist of music featured in Composer of the Month. This issue, until 21 Nov, download some of Korngold's film and orchestral music. His first full-length stage work, Die tote Stadt, could only have come from the Viennese melting pot of late Romanticism and burgeoning Expressionism. Premiered in 1920, it was based on a violent novella by the Belgian Symbolist poet Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, and the opera's extended dream sequence and final catharsis -the inventions of the librettist 'Paul Schott', a pseudonym for Julius and Erich working together - betray awareness of Freud. The opera was widely performed in the interwar years: its atmosphere of doomed nostalgia matched the Zeitgeist. Korngold's next and most ambitious opera, Das Wunder der Heliane, was the work he always regarded as his greatest. Dedicated to his bride, Luzi, whom he married after a long, fraught courtship hampered by his father's disapproval, it's a heady extravaganza celebrating the transcendental power of love, mingling the futurism of Lang's Metropolis with the Romantic excesses of Wagner's'Liebestod'. Heliane was its composer's greatest hope, but became his greatest tragedy, largely because of his father. Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf- a jazzy fantasy opera about a black violinist-was scheduled for premiere at the same time, autumn 1927, threatening to make Heliane look outdated. Julius promptly wrote the kind of tirades against Jonny that could only produce the opposite effect.Jonny sold out; Heliane bore the backlash. In the tough economic climate of the late 1920s, Korngold had a young family to feed. To his father's disappointment, he took a job at the Theater an der Wien, arranging and conducting operettas - he revered BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2007 47 COMPOSER OF THE MONTH KORNGOLD Johann Strauss as much as Richard. (Union) of March 1938, King Kong and Gone With Through this, he met the great director when he was fortuitously the Wind among others, Max Reinhardt, who became one of in America composing the remarked: 'Erich, since his closest friends. With the rise of the score for The Adventures you came to Hollywood, Nazis in Germany, the Jewish Korngold of Robin Hood. He your music has got worse ran into problems: his music was brought hisfamily to and mine has got better. banned there after Hitler took power safety-including Julius - How do you account in 1933, and his German publishers but is said to have vowed for that?' 'That's easy,' were evasive about his opera, Die to compose no more quipped Korngold: 'you've Kathrin, which originally concerned a serious music until Hitler been stealing from me romance between a German girl and had been defeated. and I've been stealing a French soldier (Korngold attempted At first, Korngold from you!' In 1949, after to skirt the awkwardness by making was idealistic about recovering from a heart Kathrin Swiss). In 1933, Reinhardt left films, treating them attack, Korngold returned for America; the followingyear, making as if they were operas to Vienna for the first a film of Shakespeare's A Midsummer and envisaging a day time. 'When I first came Night's Dream for Warner Brothers, he when entire operas would be written SAILING TO SAFETY: to Hollywood, I couldn't understand invited Korngold to join him to arrange specially for the screen. He won Oscars Korngold arrives in the dialogue. Now I can,' he told an Mendelssohn's music for the project. for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The New York with his Americanjournalist. Korngold's unerring instinct forthe Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). But family in 1936 Julius died in 1945. He had never relationship of time, sound and vision in time, as the novelty wore off and ceased berating his son for abandoning made him the perfect film composer. the moralising Hayes Commission high art and, in a piece of typically Offered unprecedented privileges wrecked plotline after plotline, the questionable advice, he had pointed by Jack Warner, head of the studio, quality of the films Korngold was out that when Korngold's films Korngold commuted between Europe assigned began to decline. His fellow vanished, so did the music; perhaps and Hollywood until the Anschluss immigrant Max Steiner, who scored Korngold should recycle the best of those scores in concert works. haemorrhage- and, perhaps, grief KORNGOLD Korngold obeyed. His Violin Concerto, - back in Hollywood, aged only 60. RECOMMENDED DISCS premiered by Jascha Heifetz in 1947, Today, film music is regarded as an was based on music from Another art and Korngold has proved ripe for DIE TOTE STADT Dawn, The Prince and the Pauper and reassessment. With a flood of new Carole Neblett (Marietta), Rene Kollo (Paul), others; his Symphony in F sharp, his recordings and a major celebration at Hermann Prey (Franz/Pierrot); Munich Radio last major work, also drew on film the Southbank Centre this autumn, Symphony Orchestra/Erich Leinsdorf RCA Cold Seal CD 87767 £17.99 scores, notably The Private Lives of The Adventures of Erich Wolfgang A feast of melody, fantasy and high emotion.