66 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
Korngold, a child prodigy in Vienna, ended up writing scores in Hollywood.
MUSICAL EVENTS
SURROUND SOUND
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, long dismissed as a Hollywood relic, has a resurgence.
BY ALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY SETH
“
T
hat sounds like film music” is a
put-down that deserves to be re-
tired. The usual intention is to dismiss
a work as splashy kitsch. Over the past
century, though, enough first-rate music
has been written for the movies that the
charge rings false. Hollywood compos-
ers have employed so many different
styles that the term “film music” has lit-
tle descriptive value. Worst is when the
pejorative is used to discount figures who
brought distinctive personalities to the
scoring business, thereby elevating it.
Such was the fate of the composer Erich
Wolfgang Korngold, who began his ca-
reer, in Vienna, as one of the most as-
tonishing child prodigies in musical his-
tory and who reached maximum fame
writing film scores, in Los Angeles, in
the nineteen-thirties and forties. A mas-
ter of late-Romantic opulence, Korngold
shaped the sonic texture of Golden Age
Hollywood. To say that his work sounds
like movie music is an elementary fal-
lacy, a confusion of cause and effect.
The Bard Music Festival, which has
been exploring neglected corners of the
repertory for the past three decades, is
honoring Korngold in this year’s edition,
which began on August 9th, at Bard Col-
lege, in upstate New York. In addition,
Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and mu-
sical ringleader, recently conducted the
American première of “Das Wunder der
Heliane” (“The Miracle of Heliane”),
Korngold’s second full-length opera, on
the campus. These performances echo
an ongoing Korngold revival in Europe.
“Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”), the
composer’s first mature opera, had a pro-
duction at La Scala earlier this year, and
in the fall it will be staged at the Bavar-
ian State Opera, with the star tenor Jonas
Kaufmann heading the cast. The miss-
ing link is the Met, which presented “Die
Tote Stadt” in the early nineteen-twen-
ties but has yet to return to it. I cannot
fathom why that opera is not as popu-
lar as anything by Puccini—its melodic
writing is no less indelible, its expressive
urgency no less intense.
Korngold, the son of a leading Vi-
ennese music critic, was himself some-
thing of a miracle. By his mid-teens, he
had not only acquired total technical
command of the art of composition but
had also developed an unmistakable
voice. Although he knew his Puccini,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss, he was
far more than a clever imitator. In the
Scherzo of his Sinfonietta—completed
in 1913, when he was sixteen—Korn-
gold is speaking his own language: mel-
odies bound along with rhythmic free-
dom, harmonies ricochet from one major
triad to another, a full-strength orches-
tra glitters and dances before the ears.
Even more astounding are the one-act
operas “Der Ring des Polykrates” (1914)
and “Violanta” (1916), which overflow
with effortlessly effective vocal writing.
In the annals of composing prodigies,
Korngold’s only serious rival is Felix
Mendelssohn. Mozart’s youthful pieces
lack comparable individuality.
Like many wunderkinder, Korngold
had a bumpy transition to adulthood.
“Die Tote Stadt,” which had its première
in 1920, when the composer was twenty-
three, promised a long and triumphant
operatic career. The work had the benefit
of a deliciously decadent story, based
on Georges Rodenbach’s Symbolist
novel “Bruges-la-Morte”: a widower is
wandering through the Flemish city,
obsessively mourning his wife, when he
meets a dancer who uncannily resembles
the dead woman. (Alfred Hitchcock’s
“Vertigo” offers another variation on
Rodenbach’s scenario.) Korngold alter-
nates between tunes of indelible potency
and shimmering, dreamlike textures.
“Das Wunder,” which was first per-
