THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 N C5
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Erich Wolf-
gang Korngold’s rarely heard opera “Das
Wunder der Heliane” is an artifact from a
high period of Viennese style: specifically,
the 1920s.
This was a time made vivid by experi-
mental, yet still crowd-pleasing, harmonies,
as well as salacious themes that — in a post-
Freudian atmosphere — could also lay a
claim to seriousness. Those touches were
all present in the extremely belated Ameri-
can premiere of “Das Wunder der Heliane”
on Friday at the Fisher Center for the Per-
forming Arts here.
And yet there was another era’s musical
style stepping into the light for a close-up.
The scoring for one scene in “Heliane,”
between a condemned man and a jailer, at
first leans appropriately hard on the
strings. Bursts of col legno announce politi-
cal gravity — and suggest the prisoner’s
need for a savior, which the title character of
Heliane will become — before giving way to
brooding lines. But unexpected jolts ring
out: Harps ascend quickly, breaking free of
tutti passages that have submerged the
sound world in sadness; a mystical celesta
accompanies the ambiguous moment when
the man’s chains are loosened.
Played brightly and adroitly by the
American Symphony Orchestra and con-
ducted by its music director, Leon Botstein,
these rapid changes of color didn’t seem like
embers of dying Romanticism so much as
the first stirrings of the Hollywood epic.
Korngold, of course, would go on to
achieve his most lasting fame as a film-
score composer. His swiftly surging themes
for movies like “The Adventures of Robin
Hood” and “Kings Row” have long been
cited as an influence on John Williams’s mu-
sic for “Star Wars” and “Superman.”
With “Heliane,” Korngold was sharp-
ening the talents he would use later in the
United States. Yet these facets of his biogra-
phy — grand opera composer of interwar
Europe and elder statesman of Hollywood
— are often treated like separate halves of
an exile artist’s life.
If the connection between the early mo-
ments of “Heliane” and Korngold’s later
work in film was clear on Friday, that was in
part because of how his music is being
presented at Bard SummerScape. In addi-
tion to “Heliane,” which continues through
Sunday, Bard is taking a two-week deep
dive into Korngold’s broader catalog as well
(through Aug. 18). Tying the programs to-
gether is a new collection of scholarship,
“Korngold and His World.”
“This is a complete discovery for all of
us,” Mr. Botstein said in an interview. “The
whole idea: Where does this film music
come from, and how did he put it together?
And why did he succeed like no one else?”
In addition to conducting “Heliane,” Mr.
Botstein is a contributor to “Korngold andHis World,” with an essay taking stock of a
common charge against Korngold by critics
like Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler: that
by writing film scores, Korngold had made
music subservient to the moving image.
Mr. Botstein duly admits, in his essay,
that Korngold struggled to repurpose music
from his films for stand-alone scores
(though he says the 1950s Symphony in F
sharp is Korngold’s “most successful trans-
fer” back into the concert hall). But he also
disagrees with Eisler and Adorno, who, he
writes, “were wrong that the music in Korn-
gold’s films was not meant to be heard.”
“The music actually was heard,” he adds,
“but as an integral part of the film experi-
ence.”
Recently, while watching a succession of
films scored by Korngold, I found myself in
broad agreement with Mr. Botstein’s take.
Korngold’s imaginative imprint is all over
otherwise strong, though not quite brilliant,
Warner Bros. movies like the noirish “De-
ception” and the melodrama “The Constant
Nymph.”
Not surprisingly, both of those films fea-
ture fictional composers and performers in
their narratives — opportunities that Korn-
gold often seized to dramatize his own feel-
ing that modernism without melody is ruin-
ous. (In the interview, Mr. Botstein said, “If
you want to get under the skin of Korngold,
what he thought he was doing, ‘The Con-
stant Nymph’ is the thing to watch.”)
But, despite Korngold’s distaste for the
12-tone music favored by modernists, heSETH COLTER WALLS CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Nine Decades On, an Opera Finally Finds America
“Das Wunder der Heliane”
is having its American
premiere, nearly a century
after it was written, at the
Bard SummerScape festival.
Below, its creator, Erich
Wolfgang Korngold.ABOVE, STEPHANIE BERGER; BELOW, AKG-IMAGESDas Wunder der Heliane
Through Sunday at Fisher
Center for the Performing Arts
at Bard College, Annandale-
on-Hudson, N.Y.;
fishercenter.bard.edu
/summerscape.A work by Erich Wolfgang
Korngold gets the spotlight.
was not averse to experimental touches. In
my favorite of his film scores — for “Be-
tween Two Worlds,” a wartime movie with
touches of a morality play and a thriller —
Korngold provides the material for a multi-
media approach to leitmotif: As the scholar
Ben Winters points out in “Korngold and
His World,” a piano solo played by one char-
acter also appears in a version for a jazz-
tinged ensemble, heard through a phono-
graph. “That’s a very unusual score,” Mr.
Botstein said. “There’s something postmod-
ern in it.”
Bard isn’t the only place where you can
see “Heliane” this summer. Naxos recently
released a DVD and Blu-ray from a produc-
tion of it by the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.
That staging takes a more sedate approach
to the political violence of the story, and of-
fers Heliane a way out at the end.
At Bard, Christian Räth’s production is
more literal, with a clearer broadcasting of
the libretto’s dated obsessions, like sexual
purity and the eternal feminine. But, for an
opera not seen in this country until now, the
staging is valuably crisp, the singing solid.
Even though Korngold’s most enduring leg-
acy may be in film, his take on 1920s Vien-
nese opera is well worth a trip to take in.
“What you learn from ‘Heliane’ is that his
particular, very distinctive melodic and har-
monic language was there already before
he went to Hollywood,” Mr. Botstein said.
“There is something naïvely optimistic
about his music, subconsciously beautiful.
And winningly so.”owned property and 32 others that receive
city money. But while the study showed, for
example, that 11 percent of arts workers
surveyed are Hispanic, compared with 29
percent of New York’s population, and that
10 percent are black (compared with 22 per-
cent), the city does not know which organi-
zations have the biggest diversity prob-
lems. The study was based on employees’
self-reporting, and the institutions them-
selves were not required to submit their
comprehensive data to the city.
Tom Finkelpearl, the cultural affairs com-
missioner, said in an interview that the goal
was not to force organizations to divulge
their own demographics but to get a “good
faith effort” out of the groups. “We are very
careful about the idea that we are not en-
couraging quotas,” he said. “We are encour-
aging practices that are going to result in di-
verse workforces.”
So MoMA PS1, for example, said it had
ended unpaid internships, which are often a
barrier to low-income workers; Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts said it would
analyze salary equity; the Wildlife Conser-
vation Society, which runs four zoos and the
New York Aquarium, said it planned to cre-
ate a mentoring program for employees
seeking to move up.
The plans, often use vague corporate
terms like “strategic pillar” and “recruiting
pipeline.” Some groups took a more analyt-
ical approach, drawing up specific numer-
ical goals for diversity in the coming years.
The Public Theater, which puts on Shake-
speare in the Park, noted a racial disparity
at the top echelon. Currently, 23 percent of
its trustees are people of color; the group
set a goal of at least 35 percent by 2023.
The Brooklyn Children’s Museum in
Crown Heights was attuned to whether the
leadership reflected a significant portion of
its audience: families from Central Brook-
lyn, who are predominantly people of color.
Within six years, the group said, it wanted
to ensure that more than half of the mem-
bers of the museum’s executive team are
people of color and more than 75 percent of
its business contracts are with vendors
based in Brooklyn.
Stephanie Wilchfort, the chief executive
of the children’s museum, said that for
many organizations, the challenge is that
the managers at the top often have trouble
recognizing systemic flaws in their institu-
tions and agreeing to share power with oth-
ers.
“We have a hierarchical structure,” Ms.
Wilchfort said. “That structure has been in
place, in our case, for 120 years. Some of
these plans need to reflect that power is
more diffuse than it was.”At the American Museum of Natural His-
tory, 12 percent of board members were
people of color in 2014, before the city’s di-
versity push. That number climbed as the
museum focused on increasing that per-
centage, setting a goal of at least 20 percent.
(When asked what percentage of current
board members are people of color, the mu-
seum said it had actually surpassed its goal
and reached 21 percent.)
Ellen Futter, the president of the mu-
seum, said that although the museum set an
initial percentage goal, its leaders “don’t
think the numerical approach is key here.”
Their plan invests in developing and sup-
porting a pipeline of diverse scientists, she
said.
Part of the museum’s diversity problem
has long been apparent in the content of its
halls. In its plan, the museum admitted that
many of its cultural displays include “pre-
sentations of non-Western cultures from co-
lonialist or imperialist perspectives” that
“do not reflect the values” of the museum.
At the same time that the museum is work-
ing to improve problematic exhibits — like
the Northwest Coast Hall, which opened in
1899 and has been criticized for failing to in-
clude context about how its artifacts were
taken from Indigenous people — Futter said
it was committed to hiring people with di-
verse cultural identities. Those efforts natu-rally align, she said.
In 2017, Mr. de Blasio pledged to link fu-
ture funding for museums and arts groups
to the diversity of their employees and
board members. None are facing a loss of
funding right now, but could in the future if
they don’t follow through on their plans,
said Mr. Finkelpearl, the cultural affairs
commissioner.
For the groups with smaller staffs, there
was some concern about a lack of resources
to respond to the city’s requests. Cathy
Hung, the executive director of the Jamaica
Center for Arts and Learning in Queens,
said the group has nine full-time staff mem-
bers and that producing a diversity plan of
several pages was easier to achieve at a
large organization with a budget many
times its own.
A spokesman for the Cultural Affairs De-
partment said that city officials recognized
that their demands were more of a burden
on smaller organizations, and the city pro-
vided $130,000 to consortiums of groups
based in Queens and Staten Island.
“My feeling — and I’ve been to many
board meetings — is that this is being em-
braced,” Mr. Finkelpearl said of the diversi-
ty push. “Everyone has the right to have the
expectation that the cultural life of New
York City should be reflective of the com-
munities.”PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEENAH MOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESSeeking Diversity, the Art World Falls Short
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1 From left, the Brooklyn
Children’s Museum created
numerical targets for
diversity and inclusion; the
Public Theater was among
the organizations
participating in a survey of
its employees and
volunteers; the Museum of
Natural History worked on
problems with the framing
of its cultural halls.