Just Music

He was a guy that we all sniffed at, because look, he wrote for the movies. And so he wasn’t serious—not like us, who were real musicians and composers and…

…snobs.

But the movies saved Erich Korngold’s life—literally. A Jew born into a musical family, he once stated, “we thought of ourselves as Viennese; Hitler made us Jewish.” It was a lucky break when Warner Brothers asked him, in 1938, to come to Hollywood to write the film score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” starring Errol Flynn.

Korngold hadn’t set out to write movie music—in fact, he was composing by age eleven, and both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss praised him highly. Oh, and later Puccini. By 13, he had composed a ballet that became a hit at the Vienna Court Opera. By the time he was 17, he had an opera, a sinfonietta, two piano sonatas, and a piano trio behind him. He then turned to conducting opera until 1934, when he was asked to adapt Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And so for roughly a decade, Korngold turned out film music, and did a fine job of it. Here’s what one scholar, Brendon G. Carroll, said about his work:

Treating each film as an 'opera without singing' (each character has his or her own leitmotif) [Korngold] created intensely romantic, richly melodic and contrapuntally intricate scores, the best of which are a cinematic paradigm for the tone poems of Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt. He intended that, when divorced from the moving image, these scores could stand alone in the concert hall. His style exerted a profound influence on modern film music.

And what is his style? Well, he’s not ashamed to be late Romantic, at a time when it was out of style. And of course, somebody had to crack the remark—Korngold’s is more corn than gold. And so for the last ten years of his life, he gave up film work and returned to “serious” composition. The two concerti below stem from this period.

The only question is why aren’t these works—especially the cello concerto—better known? And why did the label “film score composer” get stuck on Korngold, but not on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both of whom also composed for film? Is it because the Russian film industry has cachet, but not Hollywood?

Whatever; it still lingers. Consider the following comment, from the YouTube clip of Hilary Hahn playing the violin concerto:

Hahn is a fine player and Nagano (as usual) leads a high-quality performance. But, gang, I gotta tell you: This is not one of the great 20th century violin concertos -- not even close, despite a number of lovely passages. In no way does it stand up to the Walton and Barber concertos, which it roughly parallels chronologically. Sorry.

And then the response:

"parallels chronologically"? Perhaps you mean "the Walton and Barber concertos, which are roughly contemporaneous." But that's only your view. Personally, I think this concerto is fully the equal of the Walton, which is nowhere near the quality of his more famous concerto for viola. Do I detect some snobishness on the grounds that Korngold "sold out" to Hollywood (gasp)?

Well, a later commentator makes the point that if “selling out” meant writing the scores that Korngold did, it was a good move. Maybe it’s time to say it—there’s no film music or serious music.

Just music….