Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35

Erich Korngold was a man out of time. Had he been born a century earlier, his romantic sensibilities would have aligned perfectly with the musical and artistic aesthetics of the 19th century. Instead, Korngold grew up in the tumult of the early 20th century, when his tonal, lyrical style had been eclipsed by the horrors of WWI and the stark modernist trends promulgated by fellow Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern.

Korngold’s prodigious compositional talent emerged early. At age ten, he performed his cantata Gold for Gustav Mahler, whereupon the older composer called him “a genius.” When Korngold was 13, just after his bar mitzvah, the Austrian Imperial Ballet staged his pantomime The Snowman. In his teens, Korngold received commissions from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; pianist Artur Schnabel performed Korngold’s Op. 2 Piano Sonata on tour, and Korngold also began writing operas, completing two full-scale works by age eighteen. At 23, Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) brought him international renown; it was performed in 83 different opera houses.

But by the 1920s, composers had fully embraced modernism. The music of Korngold’s contemporaries bristled with dissonance, unexpected rhythms, and often little that resembled a recognizable melody. Korngold’s music reflected an earlier, bygone era, and his unabashed Romanticism was dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Fortunately for Korngold, around this same time a new forum for his lush expressiveness emerged: film scores. In 1934, director Max Reinhardt invited Korngold to write a score for his film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Korngold subsequently moved to Hollywood, where he spent the next dozen years composing scores for 18 films, including his Oscar-winning music for Anthony Adverse (1936), and The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Claude Rains (1938).

While some composers and critics, then as now, regard film music as less significant than works written for the concert hall, Korngold did not. “I have never drawn a distinction between music for films and for operas or concerts,” he stated, and his violin concerto bears this out. The concerto is a compilation of themes from several Korngold scores, including Another Dawn (1937), Juárez (1939), Anthony Adverse, and The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Korngold’s Violin Concerto has been a favorite of both violinists and audiences everywhere since its premiere, although the New York Sun famously dismissed it as “more corn than gold.”

It was a running joke in the Korngold family that every time their family friend Bronisław Huberman saw Korngold, the Polish violinist would demand, “Erich! Where’s my concerto?” At dinner one evening in Korngold’s house in Los Angeles, Korngold responded to Huberman’s mock-serious question by going to his piano and playing the theme from Another Dawn. Huberman exclaimed, “That’s it! That will be my concerto. Promise me you’ll write it.” Korngold complied, but it was Jascha Heifetz, another child prodigy, who gave the first performance. In the program notes for the premiere, Korngold wrote, “In spite of its demand for virtuosity in the finale, the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini. It is needless to say how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz

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