Erich Wolfgang Korngold

2016 ◽  
pp. 6-7

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, this book provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. The book examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. It also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold.


Author(s):  
Erich Wolfgang Korngold ◽  
David Brodbeck

This chapter contains Erich Korngold's personal reflections on his former teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. Zemlinksy was an Austrian composer and conductor who enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a private music teacher in late Habsburg Vienna. He is perhaps best remembered in this capacity for the counterpoint instruction he gave to his future brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. For a brief time, beginning in 1900, Zemlinsky taught Alma Schindler, with whom he had a love affair in the period before she began the relationship that would lead, in March 1902, to her marriage to Gustav Mahler. Among the last—and certainly the most precocious—of Zemlinsky's Viennese students was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose lessons were initiated in 1908 and continued for upward of two years until Zemlinsky departed Vienna to become the music director of Prague's New German Theater.


Author(s):  
Alan K. Rode

Curtiz finished Marked Woman for Lloyd Bacon and directed Mountain Justice, a fact-based drama about the Edith Maxwell murder case, followed by Kid Galahad, an all-star Warner melodrama. Curtiz was denied the assignment of The Adventures of Robin Hood when Errol Flynn begged Warner and Wallis not to let Curtiz direct him. William Keighley was assigned instead.The hugely budgeted production began to founder, andWallis eventually removedKeighley and appointed Curtiz to rescue the picture. He imbuedwhat is clearly one of his greatest films with his energetic creativity. The chapter provides an in-depth accounting of the Robin Hood production, including the action sequences and the Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The picture was one of Warner Bros.’ biggest triumphs, and Curtiz was then the leading director at the studio.


2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Kogler

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. McKee

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-236
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte

Abstract In his first film score, Erich Wolfgang Korngold adapted the works of Felix Mendelssohn so that the music seemed to interact and respond with the visual editing of the film, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner Bros., 1935). By detailing the facets of this unusual production, which range from Korngold's presence on the set to the publicity department's efforts to spotlight Mendelssohn's music and Korngold's arrangements, I argue that the score for Dream played an important role in elevating film music and film composers within the hierarchy of Hollywood production and publicity. Not only was the Mendelssohn-Korngold score given greater consideration during the film's making, but also audiences were reminded to listen to the film's music, a facet rarely acknowledged in other contemporaneous publicity drives. Importantly, these changes were effected and rationalized through the self-conscious foregrounding of the music, principles, and rhetoric of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Documents at the Warner Bros. Archive reveal how the confluence of these factors not only established the unusual tenor of Korngold's career within the Hollywood studio system but also helped construct the film composer's public image as an incongruously independent artist working within an otherwise collaborative medium.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-149
Author(s):  
David E. Anderson

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