This Week on Intermezzo: Korngold the Film Composer

Tune in every day at 1PM when host Chris Wolf will feature a different score by the German composer. Only on Winnipeg's Classic 107!

In June of last year, Gramophone's Andrew Farach-Colton wrote a wonderful article about the three pioneers of film music: Shostakovich, Korngold and Copland. Here is what he wrote about Korngold:

For Erich Wolfgang Korngold, scoring films would become a matter of survival. The son of Vienna’s most powerful music critic, Korngold was a wunderkind of Mozartian proportions. Mahler heard a cantata by the 10-year-old composer and declared the boy a genius; soon thereafter, Richard Strauss had a similar reaction. At 13, his ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann was produced at the Vienna Court Opera, and by the time he was in his early twenties, Korngold’s works were in demand across Europe and in the United States.

Korngold’s first foray into film came in 1934 at the behest of fellow Austrian Max Reinhardt, who was in Hollywood to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The composer quickly proved himself to be a natural at dealing with the myriad complications of film production, and was immediately invited back for other projects, including his first original score, Captain Blood (1935), starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.

Although he had just three weeks to complete Captain Blood, the epic, swashbuckling character of the score wowed Hollywood insiders and moviegoers alike. Brendan G Carroll, Korngold’s biographer, writes: ‘Film music more or less came of age with Korngold, who in this one film showed what could really be achieved with a symphonic score...His music was designed to elevate the sometimes cardboard events on the screen and to flesh out the romantic dream that he instinctively recognised as underlying the story.’

Recognition came swiftly. The following year, his score for Anthony Adverse (1936) won an Oscar. Despite his instant celebrity, Korngold felt out of place in Los Angeles and longed to remain in Vienna. But the Anschluss of 1938 left the composer and his family, who were Jewish, no choice but to make a new home in California. It wasn’t such a terrible proposition, really. Korngold’s worth was recognised by the studio moguls, and his contract was the most generous and flexible in the business. At first, Korngold seemed genuinely excited by the medium, too, telling an interviewer, ‘music is music whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema’. Not only that, he also saw an opportunity to educate. ‘Fine symphonic scores for motion pictures cannot help but influence mass acceptance of finer music,’ he said. ‘The cinema is a direct avenue to the ears and hearts of the great public.’

Korngold pulled out yet another Oscar-winner: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), whose heady mix of pomp, passion and playfulness is surely worthy of Strauss. Not surprisingly, given the superlative quality of the film as a whole, Robin Hood is widely regarded as one of Korngold’s finest creations, alongside The Sea Hawk (1940) and Kings Row (1941). Yet there are other lesser-known works of equal stature. The Sea Wolf (1941), for instance, is the composer’s darkest and most modern-sounding score. It’s also one of his most coherent. With an unrelentingly tense, fog-shrouded atmosphere, it plays like a tone-poem and makes gripping listening from first note to last.

But, as always in Hollywood, fashions come and go. After the war, Korngold was no longer being offered top-grade films. He nurtured hopes of returning to Europe and re-establishing his position in the world of opera and concert music. Now, however, he was branded as a movie composer (and a passé one, at that), and thus not to be taken seriously. Korngold’s sublimely lyrical Violin Concerto was written off by critics as ‘a Hollywood concerto’, and described snidely as ‘more corn than gold’. And his superbly wrought Symphony (1952) received only one performance before his death in 1957.

To read Andrew Farach-Colton's complete Gramophone article Three Pioneers of Film Music: Shostakovich, Korngold and Copland go HERE.

On Intermezzo this week, Chris will feature the following scores:

Monday - The Sea Hawk (1940)