Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
Erich Wolfgang Korngold  (1897-1957)

THE STORY

The son of a prominent Austrian music critic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold began his music studies at a very young age. At age seven he even performed his own works at the piano for Gustav Mahler, who pronounced him a genius! In the decades to follow, the musical prodigy established his reputation primarily as a composer of opera, composing four before 1930, all of which enjoyed frequent performance in German-speaking countries. Korngold’s other musical activities involved conducting and arranging nineteenth century operettas, which thrust him into fortuitous collaborations with film and theatre director Max Reinhardt. Pleased with their work together, Reinhardt asked Korngold to join him in Hollywood to produce a film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); Korngold accepted the offer, setting in motion his career as a film score composer.

Korngold was a pioneer of the lush symphonic film score associated with the golden age of Hollywood, a direct result of his late-Romantic style training and operatic experience. By using leitmotifs, or musical themes that represent specific characters, and vivid orchestration, he established a new means of matching music with the silver screen. With Hitler’s rise to power, Korngold was not able to return home to Austria. Instead, he chose to remain safely in Hollywood, composing dozens of film scores, two of which won Academy Awards for Best Music (Anthony Adverse, 1936; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938). As his wife Luzi recalled, “It was as if he had taken a vow not to compose a single note outside the genre of film music for as long as the horror was raging throughout the world.” However, when the war ended, Korngold allowed himself to return to the composition of absolute music for the concert hall. He began that new season of life with his Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 (1945).

Korngold’s Violin Concerto blurs the boundaries between film score and concert piece: each movement of the Violin Concerto contains the themes from five different movies Korngold scored beginning in 1937, sometimes earning it the name the “Hollywood Concerto.” But Korngold’s film themes are not simply strung together; Korngold intricately revised the themes into cohesive long-form movements. In this sense, the Violin Concerto stands as a heartfelt dedication to his film scoring career while remaining a work of demanding violin technique in the late-Romantic concert style of his youth—a synthesis of a lifetime devoted to music. 

LISTEN FOR

• The Lydian mode of the first theme, given at the outset by the solo violin—this bold altered major scale produces an uplifting quality that is prominently utilized by subsequent generations of film composers, including John Williams and Thomas Newman
• The virtuosic fireworks in the violin cadenza, featuring double stops, motoric rhythmic figurations, and rapid register changes
• The second movement’s rich, sustained accompaniment textures over which the solo violin increasingly shines, carrying much of the movement’s melodic content
• The return of the Lydian mode in the heroic second theme of the third movement, extensively based on Korngold’s theme of his film score for The Prince and the Pauper (1937)

INSTRUMENTATION

Solo violin; two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, strings