From Concert to Screen Gem: The Last Romantic Composer

Marlis Petersen and Jonas Kaufmann in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opera "Die tote Stadt" at the Bayerische Staatsoper Opera House in Munich, Germany. MarcelloXo/CC BY-SA 4.0

Erich Wolfgang Korngold didn’t need Hollywood, but it saved his life.

A celebrated musical prodigy in his native Austria, 23-year-old Korngold (1897–1957) composed an opera so expansive in its dramatic beauty that it ensured his future career. This was “Die Tote Stadt,” and while it is not widely produced today, one of its arias, “Marietta’s Lied,” is acknowledged as indispensable in the soprano repertoire. Numerous YouTube videos featuring stellar talent such as Leontyne Price and Renee Fleming attest to this.

A young teenage Korngold, a child prodigy who grew up to compose scores for many Hollywood movies. Public Domain

Throughout the 1920s, Korngold received commission after commission from the Viennese musical community. His work there encompassed two string quartets, a piano quintet, a second full-length opera (“Das Wunder der Heliane”), and numerous other pieces—including a piano concerto for the left hand alone. The latter, only the second such work ever composed, was written for pianist Paul Wittgenstein (brother of philosopher Ludwig) whose right arm had been blown off in combat during World War I.

A Hollywood Dalliance

Then, in 1934, in an otherwise inconsequential detour from his classical career, Korngold was invited to Hollywood. Stage director Max Reinhardt wanted him to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as the soundtrack to a film of Shakespeare’s comedy. It would be Reinhardt’s only movie.

Thus began for Korngold what was at first an off-and-on relationship with American cinema. Korngold scored “Captain Blood” (1935) and “Anthony Adverse” (1936) on visits to Hollywood made between long stretches in Vienna composing new classical scores, including a third opera, “Die Kathrin.”

Korngold found himself once more in Hollywood in 1938, this time to work on “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Before he finished the job, news arrived that the Nazis had annexed Austria and confiscated his Vienna home, denouncing him as a “degenerate Jewish” composer. It was no longer safe to be a Jew in Europe. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,” Korngold once said of himself and his compatriots. “Hitler made us Jewish.”

Korngold completed his heroic score for “Robin Hood,” which won him the first Oscar given exclusively to the composer of a movie soundtrack. Previous Oscars were awarded to sound departments, including composers, sound designers, and recording engineers. (“Anthony Adverse” won one of these.)

Korngold took up permanent residence in California and started down a path that led to U.S. citizenship in 1943.

The theatrical poster for 1938's "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Korngold wrote the score. Public Domain

Movies and More Movies

After “Robin Hood,” Korngold wrote scores for the films “Juarez” (1939), “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939), “The Sea Hawk” (1940), “The Sea Wolf” (1941), and “Kings Row” (1942). The latter is of especial interest to “Star Wars” fans. Listen to the “Kings Row” theme and mark the first five notes. They are identical to the first five notes of the “Star Wars” main theme. Composer John Williams has acknowledged his debt to Korngold, and not just to the “Kings Row” theme but to Korngold’s symphonic approach to film music in general.

Korngold continued to compose film scores exclusively through 1946, when he returned to composing for the concert stage. His first work of this period overlapped the two worlds. For one of his last films, “Deception” (1946), he had written a short cello concerto, which he expanded into a full-blown piece the same year. In 1947 came the premiere of what would become Korngold’s best-known concert composition, his Violin Concerto. Then came “Symphonic Serenade for Strings” (1950) and his first and only symphony, the Symphony in F-sharp major (premiered 1954). At his death in 1957, Korngold was working on a second symphony and another opera, which were left incomplete.

"Violanta" was Erich Wolfgang Korngold's second opera, written when he was just 17 years old. Public Domain

Korngold Today

Korngold’s current reputation rests largely on his movie music and the Violin Concerto. Both exemplify the virtues of the Romantic era, which had passed long before Korngold’s career. A major characteristic of Romantic music is the opposition of masculine and feminine musical traits. Masculine music exhibits a strong rhythmic profile, with an emphasis on the downbeat, or first beat of the measure. Watch “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and note the main theme’s opening two notes. They swoop upward to land firmly on the downbeat. That swoop is the distance of a rising octave, one of the most assertive gestures in the composer’s arsenal. A second masculine theme, associated with Robin and used in his fight with Friar Tuck, features three strongly accented beats, one after the other, a pattern that is immediately repeated—twice.

In contrast, the theme for Robin’s meeting with Marian, while it does start on the downbeat, is unstressed. It fits the musical idea of “anacrusis,” meaning a group of unstressed notes that lead to stress on a subsequent note. In this case, it’s the high note of the opening phrase.

Korngold’s Violin Concerto is a masterpiece, and if you haven’t heard it before, you are in for an amazing musical experience. His sole symphony deserves much greater exposure, but its Romantic character, which is no longer in vogue, works against it. After a rare performance in New York in 2019, critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker grasped its significance as being “what may be the last great symphony in the German Romantic tradition.”

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Austrian-American composer, may have passed on, but his Romantic music lives on in his movie scores and his other works. Arrowdynamics/CC BY-SA 4.0

I expand that observation to apply to Korngold’s whole life and career. He was the last Romantic composer—an artist of power and integrity whose style, while it has all but disappeared from the concert hall, lives on in the symphonic scores composed even today for the big screen.

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