Background
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born on May 29, 1897 in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic). He was the son of Julius Korngold, a music critic, and Jose fine Witrofsky. In 1901 the family moved to Vienna.
(Erich Korngold's interesting story is told, with lots of ...)
Erich Korngold's interesting story is told, with lots of music included, in Barrie Gavin's documentary. Korngold was a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, an overnight sensation as a composer with the opera "Die Todte Stadt"; he emigrated to Hollywood and
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born on May 29, 1897 in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic). He was the son of Julius Korngold, a music critic, and Jose fine Witrofsky. In 1901 the family moved to Vienna.
Korngold received his earliest musical training from his father and began to compose at the age of nine. He studied with Robert Fuchs, Hermann Grädener, and Karl Weigl.
Korngold played one of his piano pieces for Gustav Mahler, who (according to Alma Mahler) listened attentively. "A genius!" he exclaimed, suggesting the Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky as a teacher.
Korngold attracted serious attention with the publication of a piano trio written when he was thirteen. So astonishing was the work's craftsmanship that rumors spread attributing it to Richard Strauss or another well-known composer. Facetiously dubbed "L'affaire Korngold, " the controversy was given further impetus with the production of Korngold's pantomime Der Schneemann at the Vienna Opera on October 4, 1910. The following year Arthur Nikisch, director of the Gewandhaus Concerts in Leipzig, commissioned Korngold to write an orchestral overture. By then, the Korngold legend, commingling fantasy and fact, had become a sensation.
Ernest Newman, an otherwise sober-minded critic, equated Korngold with Mozart--a comparison helped by the fact that Korngold's father had named him Wolfgang after Mozart. "Why does Mozart spontaneously lisp music in the simple idiom of his own day, " Newman asked rhetorically, "while Korngold lisps in the complex idiom of his?" Newman described Korngold's music as "the spontaneous product of a most subtly organized brain that embraces practically all we know and feel today in the way of harmonic relation. " The German critic Paul Bekker went one step further, suggesting that Korngold anticipated the music of the future, and the American critic Philip Hale wondered, "If Master Korngold could make such a noise at fourteen, what will he not do when he is twenty-eight?" These judgments are perplexing; Korngold's pieces written in adolescence seem no more remarkable than the works of any gifted thirteen-year-old. Neither a Mozart nor a modernistic noisemaker, he never deviated from the basic principles of tonality throughout his career.
Nevertheless, Korngold's success was impressive. He was barely eighteen when his two one-act operas, Der Ring des Polykrates and Violanta, were produced in Munich under the direction of Bruno Walter; Korngold himself conducted them at the Vienna Opera the following year. By 1920 he had filled several engagements at the Hamburg City Theater and had appeared as a pianist in programs of his own works. On December 4, 1920, Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt was produced simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne; a Vienna performance followed shortly afterward, with the soprano Maria Jeritza in the leading role. The libretto, based on Georges Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-Morte, was written by the composer's father, under the pseudonym Paul Schott. The enormously successful opera was performed throughout Europe and was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on November 19, 1921, again with Jeritza in the leading role. (Die tote Stadt was revived by the New York City Opera in 1975, in a spectacular production in which the techniques of film montage were used with great effect. The production was praised for its originality, but the score was almost unanimously condemned as stylistically derivative and dramatically weak. )
His next opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (1928), was produced in Hamburg and Vienna with almost excessive lavishness but little success. Two years later he became professor at the Wiener Staatsakademie für Musik. In 1934 Korngold interrupted work on a new opera to follow the director Max Reinhardt to Hollywood as musical arranger for Reinhardt's film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hired by Warner Brothers to compose music for the film Give Us This Night (1936), Korngold soon became one of the most successful Hollywood composers. His romantic flair suited the medium perfectly. Not satisfied merely with writing background music, he organized his scores in the manner of symphonic suites. The superiority of his craft was unmistakable, and the suites that he arranged from his film scores became independently popular through numerous recordings.
His last opera, Die Kathrin, was given its premiere in October 1939 in Stockholm after its first performance in Vienna, scheduled for the spring of 1938, had been canceled by the invading Nazis.
On February 15, 1947, his Violin Concerto in D Major, commissioned by Jascha Heifetz, was first performed, in St. Louis. Once hailed as the twentieth-century Mozart, Korngold had lived to see the popularity of his music succumb to the vicissitudes of time and taste. "In this Concerto, " Irving Kolodin worte in the Saturday Review of Literature, "there was more corn than gold. "
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(Erich Korngold's interesting story is told, with lots of ...)
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On April 30, 1924, Korngold married Luise von Sonnenthal. They had two children.