The Bard Music Festival

Daniel Goldmark, Kevin C. Karnes, Daniel Goldmark, Kevin C. Karnes

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691198736
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold 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, Korngold and His World 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. This collection 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. The volume also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music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.The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans.Bard Music Festival 2019
Korngold and His World
Bard College
August 9–11 and 16–18, 2019

Essays

Korngold Father and Son in Vienna’s Prewar Public Eye

DAVID BRODBECK

In what year did I meet your late husband? Unfortunately, I can’t say with certainty. I only know that he had come with his parents and that he was a boy. He was probably around eleven, at most thirteen. We all had the impression that he was a great talent!

—Paul Wittgenstein to Luzi Korngold, February 1958

In a feuilleton published in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt on 24 April 1910, Max Kalbeck, the paper’s longtime music critic, wrote in celebration and appreciation of the Vienna Philharmonic, which was then completing its fiftieth season of subscription concerts. Although most of the essay was concerned with the orchestra’s glorious past, toward the end Kalbeck looked into its future: “We can wish for nothing better for the members of the Philharmonic on their Golden Jubilee than that, in this latest, so grandly inaugurated era, there might ripen a young, truly creative genius worthy of being introduced by them to the musical world.”¹ We cannot be certain, but Kalbeck may well have been thinking here of the twelve-year-old son of his friend and colleague Julius Korngold, music critic of the city’s Neue freie Presse. After all, Vienna was at this very moment in the grip of reports telling of “the astounding talent of little Erich Wolfgang Korngold,” a wunderkind who had recently “caused quite a stir.”²

It is not difficult to see why. The boy was a prodigy the likes of which had scarcely been encountered before. He was not only an accomplished pianist but also a composer of preternaturally mature and astonishingly modern-sounding music.³ Eduard Hanslick, who heard Erich perform at the piano at least once before his death in 1904, declared him “the little Mozart.”⁴ In 1907, at the age of ten, the boy began contrapuntal studies with Robert Fuchs, a venerable teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. In June of that year Julius arranged for Erich to show Gustav Mahler one of his original compositions, a cantata entitled Gold. (To avoid confusion, hereafter I will generally refer to the father and son by their given names.) Such was Mahler’s astonishment that he reportedly exclaimed, “Send the boy to Zemlinsky. No Conservatory, no drill!! Zemlinsky will give him everything he needs in a free way!”⁵

That Julius sought Mahler’s opinion is no surprise; he was among the composer’s staunchest supporters in Vienna and had very much regretted Mahler’s recent decision to resign his position as director of the Court Opera.⁶ As Mahler had hoped, the counterpoint lessons with Fuchs were supplemented in due course by instruction with Alexander Zemlinsky, beginning in 1908 and continuing until Zemlinsky’s departure for Prague in 1911 to become First Kapellmeister at that city’s German Provincial Theater. During these years, Erich composed, albeit for the most part without Zemlinsky’s knowledge, the compositions for piano by which he would first become known to the public—the Piano Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, a set of six characteristic pieces after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Der Schneemann (The Snowman), a ballet-pantomime based on figures from commedia dell’arte.⁷

Not only Mahler, but also the composer Carl Goldmark and other leading musicians in Vienna came to know some of these early compositional efforts through domestic performances by Erich at the piano. One such occasion took place in mid-1909, when Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s successor at the Court Opera, heard the boy perform Der Schneemann and a recently composed passacaglia with twenty variations. Duly impressed, Weingartner went so far as offer to perform Der Schneemann at the Court Opera were it to be orchestrated. Citing the boy’s unreadiness to make such a grand debut, Julius refused this offer in no uncertain terms.⁸ In fact, he took pains at first to keep his son’s extraordinary musical gifts out of the public eye in Vienna. As Hanslick’s handpicked successor at the music desk of the city’s only newspaper of international repute, and as a critic of strong and often acerbic opinions, Julius Korngold was both a powerful and polarizing figure in Vienna’s musical scene. He thus had good reason to worry about how his many adversaries would respond to the presentation of Erich’s music in his own bailiwick. Would the boy, because of the father’s position, be thought to be the beneficiary of undeserved favored treatment? Would the spite opponents felt toward the father be taken out unfairly on the son?

In December 1909 Julius hit upon the idea of seeking expert opinion on Erich’s abilities from persons living outside Vienna, neutral parties who would presumably have no reason to take a biased position one way or the other. He quietly arranged for the piano sonata, Don Quixote pieces, and Der Schneemann to be printed and distributed to a select number of musicians and musical experts in cities ranging from Berlin and Leipzig in the German Reich to Budapest and Graz in Austria-Hungary, with each being asked to reply with a written evaluation. The reviews soon began to pour in, perhaps as many as forty altogether, from the likes of the composers Richard Strauss and Engelbert Humperdinck, the conductors Artur Nikisch and Anton Seidl, the historical musicologists Hermann Kretzschmar and Hugo Leichtentritt, the systematic musicologists Erich von Hornbostel and Carl Stumpf, and the critics Ferdinand Pfohl and Paul Marsop. From within Vienna came at least one evaluation, by family friend Goldmark, who seems to have asked to see the scores himself.⁹

Figure 1. Erich in 1910.

Not surprisingly, Erich’s remarkable story did not remain off the record for long. On 16 February 1910, the Budapest music critic August Beer broke the news in an effusive article entitled “Ein musikalisches Phänomen”:

You have to go back far in the history of music, to the young Mozart, to encounter a similar musical phenomenon. Equally inconceivable in the piano music of the little composer are the mature and imaginative design, the mastery of the form, the extraordinary rhythmic variety and, what is probably most notable of all, the complete familiarity with the latest possibilities in harmony. How rapidly must this twelve-year-old have made the monstrous journey in order to arrive already at the ultramoderns, mixing it up—well past Brahms and Wagner—in the dissonant domains of a Richard Strauss, a Max Reger, a Debussy!¹⁰

Nine days later, on 25 February, came a report by Richard Specht published in Der Merker, a new Viennese journal for music and theater.¹¹ Finally, on 29 February, there appeared an article, written in the form of an extended anecdote, in Julius’s Neue freie Presse. This was not written by the composer’s father, of course, but by Ernst Decsey, a music writer from Graz and one of the experts to whom the scores had originally been sent. It was probably this colorful account, more than anything else, that was responsible for setting off the Korngold sensation that swept through the city’s educated classes.¹²

Things now moved quickly—and largely out of Julius Korngold’s control. With Erich at his side, Zemlinsky undertook to teach his student the basics of orchestration by transcribing Der Schneemann for orchestra: the cover page of an incomplete manuscript full score carries the initials “A.v.Z./E.W.K,” and is dated “Mitte März” (middle of March).¹³ Around the same time, Ludwig Winter, the secretary to the General Intendant of the Court Theaters, arranged for the work to be performed in a benefit concert in the Palais Modena, the residence of the Austrian prime minister. In the event, two private performances took place there, both hosted by the prime minister’s wife, Baroness Anka von Bienerth. The first, on April 14, was given during a soirée to which members of both the first society of the old established aristocracy and the second society of “movers and shakers,” disproportionately Jewish and Protestant, “from the world of officialdom, finance, and industry” were invited; the second, on April 26, was the benefit concert itself. On both occasions, Erich was joined by Richard Pahlen, Mahler’s favorite pianist, in playing a hastily made two-piano arrangement. Fritz Brunner of the Vienna Philharmonic played the violin solos, and dancers and sets were brought in from the Court Ballet.¹⁴

Meanwhile Emil Hertzka, head of Universal Edition, made a bid to publish the sonata and ballet-pantomime. Julius agreed on the condition that the latter would not be released to any theater without his express permission. Ignoring this stipulation, Herztka immediately offered Der Schneemann to Weingartner, who readily accepted, confident that Zemlinsky’s orchestration would be effective. All this put Julius in a difficult spot. He had long targeted Weingartner with barbed reviews, not, as the conductor saw things, primarily on account of artistic differences, but merely for having been the person appointed to replace the critic’s beloved Mahler at the head of the institution that lay at the center of Viennese musical culture.¹⁵ Julius reasonably assumed that people would think Weingartner had agreed to perform Erich’s work only as a way of making peace with his father and therefore of securing better notices from him in the future. Accordingly, he tried, to no avail, to put a stop to things then and there.

As Weingartner later recalled the matter:

I had already heard of the great talent of the eleven-year-old Erich. Perusal of the ballet confirmed the rumors and led me to conclude the performance contract with Universal Edition. I later reassured Dr. Julius Korngold that he had had no influence on this decision. He even appeared in my office and asked me not to perform the work because it would put him in an awkward position. I could only tell him what I already had told Director Hertzka, namely, that the father and son are completely separate persons for me. The publisher offered me Der Schneemann, along with other new works, and I accepted it only after objective examination. Dr. Korngold did not change his attitude toward me; he was and remained the opponent of the successor of Gustav Mahler. If attentive observers nevertheless wanted to see the halfhearted appearance of a benevolent glimmer in his critiques of me, it would only have been human to understand things this way, for I was well disposed toward his talented, precocious, and thoroughly pleasant boy, which, by the way, I considered a duty, not a credit to me.¹⁶

That Julius had correctly anticipated the public reaction is seen in contemporary press reports such as this one from 23 May: “You see, that’s how people are. They get all worked up because the Court Opera Director has made peace with Herr Korngold at the price of a performance of his little child prodigy’s Schneemann. . . . How was the director of the Court Opera supposed to find the courage to be hostile to the critic of a newspaper of international renown?”¹⁷ This suspicion gained credence when, in the prospectus of the 1910–11 season made public a month later, the premiere of Der Schneemann was announced for October 4, the emperor’s name day, along with Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s intermezzo Susannens Geheimnis (Il secreto di Susanna), on a double bill of short new works under the direction of Kapellmeister Franz Schalk.¹⁸

The premiere was by every measure a resounding success with the public, no doubt in part because of the composer’s tender age and all the buildup preceding it. The critical response, however, was mixed. Very much in Erich’s corner was Max Kalbeck, who began his review of the concert by attempting to inoculate his friend Julius Korngold from charges that he had used his influence to bring i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Permissions and Credits
• ESSAYS
• DOCUMENTS
• CODA
• Index
• Notes on Contributors