Underrated Classical Musicians: Erich Wolfgang Korngold

 

Korngold was supposed to have been a new Mozart - having written masterful compositions as an eleven year old. When auditioning for Mahler, Mahler is said to have exclaimed 'GENIUS!' The new direction of Europe rendered a new Mozart an impossibility, and many potental Mozarts were not as lucky as Korngold to have found themselves in a new land with a prosperous manner of making a living.

It's all too common to dismiss Korngold as a compromised talent, a composer who sold out because he made his living by writing movie scores. But while other composers scored hundreds of films, Korngold scored exactly nineteen - clearly taking what by Hollywood standards would be considered extreme amounts of time with each project.

Korngold is a 'universal composer'. A composer who excelled in every genre - everything from film to opera to chamber music to symphonic work. Only the greatest composers can do it, and no compromised talent could write such a symphony as this. Is it a masterpiece? No, it isn't, but it's frankly as close to mastery as much higher rated symphonies like Rachmaninov 2 and Saint-Saens 3.

It's true, Korngold created the modern language of film composition - and perhaps you had to be a Mozart-level genius to invent a whole new musical language. If Korngold's film music might sound cliche by now, it's because his film compositions were so effective that they had to be duplicated; and even today, you can hear the Korngold method utilized all the time by John Williams in plumage full.

But the Symphony in F-sharp is of a language quite a bit more advanced than film music. Nobody will mistaken it for Schoenberg, but it is a true piece of the 20th century that sounds like literally no one else. It may go through all the orthodoxies of symphonic form, but there is not a single composer who sounds like this. The metier falls somewhere between Mahler and Berg, but sounds like neither. There is, of course, a hint of John Williams, but only a hint, and integrated with far more formal sophistication than Williams ever had.

Korngold was nearly as good as composers get, and whether for film, stage, or concert hall, there is plenty of his music to testify. Every revival of his music seems to be a huge hit - one can only speculate about why it doesn't happen more often. Perhaps we still have residual shame about composers writing for film, but even if we do, Erich Korngold was never a 'mere film composer.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVLVCJU6c3U