Erich Wolfgang Korngold

His full name is Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the New Groves doesn't make the 'Wolfgang' bit optional. If you look at the manuscripts of some of his scores (for example, [https://petruccimusiclibrary.ca/files/imglnks/caimg/a/a1/IMSLP592214-PMLP198308-The_Adventures_of_Robin_Hood.pdf this one of his film music for Robin Hood]), his middle name is given in full on the front page: so it seems Erich was not minded to regard it as optional either! He accordingly gets catalogued under the full triple-barrelled name here.

He was born in 1897 in what is now the Czech town of Brno, just 100kms away from Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire of which it was a part at the time. Presumably, this is why he is usually called an 'Austrian' composer by the likes of Wikipedia and The Oxford Companion to Music, though the New Groves has the decency to refer to him as being 'of Austro-Hungarian birth'.

His father was a famous music critic of the time and perhaps this helped Erich develop precocious compositional talent: at aged just 10, he wrote a vocal composition which Mahler was impressed by: it earned a recommendation from Mahler that Erich should study music composition with Zemlinsky. Aged 11, he wrote a ballet which was then premiered at the Vienna Court Opera in 1910. Two one-act operas were similarly well-received in 1916 (when he was 19). In 1920, his 3-Act opera Die tote Stadt was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne: it's generally regarded as his finest opera. Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini heaped praise upon him. In 1928, a newspaper poll in Vienna had Korngold recognised as one of the top two Viennese composers (Schönberg being the other). So we are talking serious talent, expressed from a ridiculously early age, but well-regarded by contemporary composers everyone's heard of.

So why is Erich himself not so well-known today? Because (in one view, at least) he sold out: in 1934, faced with the rise of the Nazis in Europe (Korngold was Jewish), he sailed to America and began writing film scores for Hollywood studios. He spent the rest of his life in Hollywood, becoming an American citizen in 1943. As the New Groves puts it, “He suffered neglect and savage criticism, largely because of changing trends and his association with Hollywood”. Musical snobbery got him, I guess. Nevertheless, two of his film scores (Robin Hood and Anthony Adverse) won Oscars, so it's not as if the talent just fizzled.

He grew disillusioned with Hollywood, though, and looked forward to getting back to writing 'serious' music -but he then suffered a debilitating stroke in 1956 and died a year later, in November 1957, aged just 60, so he never got the chance to get back to what had first made his name in Europe.

Revivals of his opera Die tote Stadt in the mid-1970s and beyond have, however, restored his reputation of being, as the New Groves puts it, “One of the last great Romantic composers”,  with his music full of “late Romantic harmony, melodic gift and vibrant sensuousness”.

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