The Calidore Quartet Returns: Part Two, Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1944)

Now that it’s officially Autumn, it’s time to begin our New Season with the Calidore Quartet’s performance at Temple Ohev Sholom on Front Street in uptown Harrisburg on Wednesday at 7:30. The program opens with the third of Mozart’s Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, continues with the last quartet written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold after a decade spent writing film scores for Hollywood, and then, after intermission, concludes with the first of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets. You can read about Mozart and Beethoven in Part One, here; this post is about Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Given names like Mozart and Beethoven on the program, much less their music, it’s safe to say Korngold and his music, especially for the concert hall, will be unfamiliar to many listeners today. So I’ll offer a little more background to his biography in hopes it may help you enjoy “where the music comes from.”

First, the music. His String Quartet No. 3, the last he would compose, was completed in the summer of 1945. The date is important but I’ll get to that later. It came after a decade of writing almost nothing but film scores for Hollywood where he completely changed the idea of a “sound track” (along with several other composers who’d arrive from Europe in the ‘30s to escape the rise of Hitler). Disillusioned with his work for Warner Brothers studios – “When I first arrived,” he explained, “I didn’t understand the dialogue – now, I do” – he wanted to get back to writing “concert music” and in the fall of 1944 “secretly” began work on a new string quartet which he completed in July of 1945, just two months after the Fall of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II. Also in that year, he completed his famous Violin Concerto sometime in September, 1945. While he wrote a few more film scores (rather lackluster by comparison to his earlier fame), he tried to pick up his earlier career but found so many things had changed with the War, his musical style – which hadn’t – was now out-moded.

The quartet is in the traditional four movements of a “classical” quartet except the slow movement is in third place. It opens as if he’s attempting to sound “more modern” than he had been in the years before arriving in Hollywood but after the first two movements seemingly coming to terms with the “modern” world, the last two movements return to the lush melodies and harmonies of his earlier (and apparently more natural) “romantic” world. This also can be seen as the difference between the “serious” world of his concert music and the “popular” world of his operetta arrangements of the ‘20s and the 18 films he would score between 1935 and 1946. His father Julius Korngold, the famous and formidable critic who dominated Viennese musical life while the composer was growing up, considered his son was wasting his time on such trivial music.

A theme from his recently completed score for Between Two Worlds (appropriately enough) found its way into the middle section of the 2nd Movement’s scherzo. The main theme of the haunting slow movement is taken from the 1940 film, The Sea Wolf, while the main theme from the finale would later be used in one of three films he would compose in 1946, Devotion.

Rather naive about Hitler’s rise to power, he was in Hollywood to work on the film The Adventures of Robin Hood when the Nazi’s occupied Austria in 1933. Friends at his publisher’s office in Vienna broke into the Korngold house to retrieve various scores and manuscripts and managed to ship them to America (bundled in between Beethoven and Brahms which he figured the inspecting officials would not tell from the others). Days later, the Gestapo raided the house and ransacked it, looking to destroy Korngold’s manuscripts, now that his music was banned by the authorities.

By 1944, with the Nazis in retreat, Korngold’s spirits may have been revived. Certainly the last movement reflects the feeling of impending joy at the end of the war. The Nazis surrendered in Berlin on May 8th, 1945, and the final page of the quartet is dated July 31st, 1945.

Here is a performance of each of the four movements of Korngold’s String Quartet No. 3. I wanted to use a performance by a quartet who’ve appeared before with Market Square Concerts and I’ve always enjoyed the Doric Quartet’s recording of Korngold’s quartets. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a single video of them performing it, so here are four individual clips, two from their Chandos recording, and the last two from a live performance at the Library of Congress in 2010:

1^st Movement, Allegro moderato:

2^nd Movement, Scherzo, Allegro molto (very lively):

3^rd Movement, Sostenuto (sustained), Like a Folk Song:

4^th Movement, Allegro con fuoco (lively, with fire): 

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD’S WORLD THAT LED TO HIS 3rd STRING QUARTET?

One might as well start the story of Erich Wolfgang Korngold at the beginning. His father would become the leading music critic in Vienna between 1904 and 1934. But before that, he was born in Brno (now in Moravia, Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1860 where his second son, named Erich Wolfang (partly in tribute to Mozart), was born in 1897. By 1900, Julius Korngold had arrived in Vienna, writing for the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s only newspaper with an international significance, where he wrote feuilletons or short articles (though some of them ran to 2-3 pages of newsprint – my kind of “short articles”!) about music designed primarily to entertain (think “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker magazine). Two years later, he was handpicked by the chief critic, the famous (or, if you’re a fan of Wagner, infamous) Eduard Hanslick, Friend of Brahms and champion of conservative causes, to be his successor. Then, when Hanslick died suddenly from heart failure, he was thrust into the limelight.

As a relative new-comer in a close-knit field of long-established staff critics, he fielded a great deal of opposition – the critic had his critics – but essentially Korngold continued Hanslick’s preference for “abstract” music (like Brahms’ symphonies and chamber music) over “program” music (especially Wagner and his operas, but also the Romantic fancy for symphonies telling detailed stories) with its lack of structural development.

While one of his early reviews castigated Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande in 1905, a nearly hour-long symphonic poem, Korngold soon became a champion of Gustav Mahler (more as the conductor at the Vienna Opera than as a composer) which displeased a lot of his conservative friends and colleagues. Considering Vienna was always a hotbed of antisemitism, too complex to go into, here, this created controversy around the partiality of a Jewish-born critic’s support for a Jewish-born composer (not that it had helped Schoenberg, earlier). In fact, Richard Strauss would later accuse Korngold of “only being interested in promoting Fellow Israelites” (Strauss would have his own problems under the Nazis, but that’s another long and difficult story). But, as Korngold would later point out, he spared no punches when it came to the Modernes he loathed, many of whom were also Jewish (like Schoenberg) and one, the pianist Moritz Rosenthal, sued Korngold’s newspaper for defamation of character.

But as the Senior Korngold’s reputation solidified, he was able to afford his young son, Erich, a battery of connections which Leopold Mozart was incapable of handing to his young son, Wolfgang: well-placed, influential connections who could actually offer his son much needed support, especially when it came to performances.

On June 11th, 1906 (not 1909 as several sources state), Korngold the critic took his son, Erich the composer, two weeks after his 9th birthday, to meet Mahler at his home, shortly after the premiere of his 6th Symphony, The boy played his newly composed cantata, “Gold,” and Mahler “pronounced him a musical genius,” and suggested he study with Alexander von Zemlinsky rather than the “dry-as-dust” Robert Fuchs at the Conservatory who had been a friend of Brahms and Mahler’s own teacher. This must have surprised Julius who never missed an opportunity to trash Zemlinsky for sacrificing melody on the altar of French Impression. Besides, he was also the brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg whom Julius considered the maddest of all composers – and this was two years before he’d written his first attempts at atonal music in his 2nd String Quartet. Julius became very concerned about protecting his son from the “undue influences” of The Moderns.

In this caricature which appeared in a rival newspaper, the child, Korngold, given a head suggestive of a man much older than his years, is attentively if not skeptically examined by some of the leading musicians of the day: Siegfried Wagner (Richard Wagner’s son), composer Max Reger, conductor Arthur Nikisch, Richard Strauss, and pianist-composer Eugen d’Albert. Of course, many insisted a child of those tender years was incapable of such creative maturity and accused the father of hiring a famous composer to write the pieces for him.

A two-act ballet pantomime, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”) with its original story something of a cross between comedia dell’arte and Hans Christian Andersen, was premiered in April of 1910 when Erich was still 12. Originally for piano duet, an orchestral version was premiered in October for the Emperor’s Name Day celebrations.

His first published piece had been completed that same month, April 1910, a piano trio which premiered in November. In the general amazement a boy of 12 could write such a piece, it’s easy to lose sight of what he’s actually accomplished musically: the harmonic flexibility and rhythmic subtlety, not to mention his melodic inventiveness and ability to expand his material into a work a half-hour long. Small wonder one commentator thought Korngold must have spent a lifetime in the womb in order to produce music of such maturity at such an early age. To anyone familiar with Korngold’s later music, this immediately sounds recognizably like Korngold, not some childish imitation of a favorite model. The performers for that premiere, by the way, included Mahler’s brother-in-law and concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, Arnold Rosé, and Mahler’s assistant, conductor and pianist Bruno Walter.

Both Erich and his teacher wrote separately about their working together: Zemlinsky wrote Erich “admired Puccini to a point of near obsession” while Korngold gives us an account of Zemlinsky directing his musical gifts along a non-disciplinarian route, and also improving his piano technique. Meanwhile, Korngold Sr. expressed concern over some of the more daring harmonies and modulations his son was writing, no doubt concerned where exactly all this chromaticism might lead.

His first orchestral work was his Schauspiel-Overture (Drama Overture) premiered in November of 1911, dedicated to its conductor, Arthur Nikisch, followed shortly by a Sinfonietta, Op. 5, completed in 1912 (Sinfonietta implies a “short symphony,” yet – perhaps inspired by his father’s not-so-short feuilletons – this one is about 45 minutes long). Begun when he was still 15, the first draft was completed in August but the process of orchestrating it too until September of the following year, by which time he’d written the first of two one-act operas, The Ring of Polycrates, a modern-day adaptation of an ancient myth, soon to be premiered in Munich by Bruno Walter.

Two important events had occurred, however, by the time Felix Weingartner conducted the premiere of the Sinfonietta: Gustav Mahler left the Vienna Court Opera in 1907 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, creating a scandal that outraged Julius Korngold, that this had been allowed to happen. Anyone succeeding him was not good enough for Korngold the critic and apparently, as one source put it, “Felix Weingartner and Richard Strauss were hounded out of the Opera.” Then, when Mahler died in 1911 at the early age of 50, Korngold became something of an “avenging angel” and alienated a great many prominent artists in Vienna. The only conductor good enough to succeed Mahler was Bruno Walter, his former assistant. One of the challenges of the young prodigy then was to somehow remain loyal to his father while still seeking the support of those his father attacked in his reviews!

The political and social situation in Vienna is another long and complicated story. The Austrian Empire, later becoming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a polyglot entity ranging from Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) across Hungary to southern Poland and parts of modern Romania and south into the Balkans. By the time World War I finally erupted after the 1914 assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo (now in Bosnia which Austria-Hungary annexed in 1908), the collapse of the dominating culture of Austria and its imperial capital Vienna was imminent. (For literary-minded readers, I’d recommend Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, one of the great but unfortunately unfinished novels of the 20th Century which chronicles the mindset of a handful of characters in Vienna in the year before the war.)

And here we have a 17-year-old composer navigating the creative challenges above and beyond the usual problems any teenager has to deal with. Attempts to protect the young composer from military service, despite the efforts of his famous father, failed, but a helpful recruitment doctor at least kept him from being sent to the front. Instead, held down a kind of desk job composing, arranging, and conducting his regiment’s military band. This also allowed him time to compose “privately,” among other things incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 1918. After the war, the production was revived and expanded in 1920. Korngold conducted the chamber orchestra in the pit but when the play’s success extended the run and most of his musicians had to honor previous commitments, Korngold arranged the entire orchestral music for violin and piano. Later, he created both an orchestral suite and a suite for violin and piano. The famous “Garden Scene” (Intermezzo) occurs only in the violin suite. Take a few minutes to listen to this performance – a private recording made years later in Hollywood – with violinist Toscha Seidl and Korngold at the piano.

Another project Korngold began during his military service in 1916 would become his most famous work (outside of Hollywood), the three-act opera that was premiered until 1920, Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) with its famous aria “Marietta’s Lied” (in the opera, it becomes a duet) as the tenor’s late wife appears to him as a ghost. It’s easy to hear where the Korngold of all those Hollywood films “would come from”: he was already there.

To gloss over other works he composed once he was past the age of being regarded as a child prodigy and had to make the transition to an adult composer needing to make a living, I’d rather take a quick look at why he decided to leave all this success in Vienna behind.

His father’s generation dealt with an on-going anti-Semitism even against those who, like the Korngolds, were not religious, or even those who converted to the state-sanctioned Catholic church as Mahler had to do in order to be offered the job as music director at the Court Opera. In post-war Vienna, this quickly devolved into a kind of “Jewish apartheid” where the world of wealthy and talented Jewish families revolved around their own social universe, parallel to the social world of non-Jewish Viennese bourgeois.

Eventually, along with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the long-held hatreds against “foreigners” from the rest of the Empire – if they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, how could they be “foreigners” or immigrants? -- began to boil over in what remained of a once glorious empire in the tiny, land-locked Austrian Republic. It had existed long before Antonin Dvořak, a provincial Bohemian, felt Viennese prejudice, requiring Brahms’ seal-of-approval to get his music accepted by the Vienna Philharmonic.

There was also the split between Julius’ world of the concert hall and the world of popular music. An older son, Robert, was ignored (in favor of the talented Erich) long before the family moved to Vienna (from provincial Moravia, btw) and, a talented musician in his own right, started a (horrors!) jazz band. Given the increasing friction between Erich and his father, the now independent composer chose to extricate himself from his father’s world by turning to a career in operetta. First, he managed arrangements of popular Johann Strauss works and re-orchestrated several other, established pieces in the repertoire before writing his own. This apparently was successful: not only had he made enough money to buy an expensive house in a fashionable district in Vienna, he bought a “small palace” in the Austrian Alps, and married the love-of-his-life, Louisa (nicknamed “Luzi”), daughter of a famous theatrical family, against his father’s wishes – and in the process completely alienated his father.

Now, does all of this sound familiar? Remember Mozart and the problems he had with his father, Leopold, and the issue of his wanting to marry Constanze Weber over his father’s objections? The only thing that would complete the parallel was the equivalent of a move from Salzburg to Vienna to get out from under Leopold’s domination. 

Oh wait: Korngold left Vienna for Hollywood. Does that count? Except he took his father with him. By the way, Korngold Sr.'s full name was Leopold Julius Korngold, but I digress...

Julius had not entirely succeeded in protecting his “fragile” son from the dissonance of Modern Music both before the war and after. While Puccini may be a major influence behind works like Die tote Stadt, there is also a great deal of composers like Richard Strauss or Franz Schreker, both of whom Julius the Critic detested. Erich understood the Viennese need to be entertained – it had been the status quo in Mozart’s, Beethoven’s and Brahms’ days – especially after the disastrous impact of losing the war and going from being a Major Political Power in Europe to a small, backwater republic (even without a seacoast, Austria still maintained a navy). What the public wanted was an escape from reality of the times, not music with social and political agendas or that reflected the dismal times people didn’t want to face.

What Korngold the Composer managed to do was write “serious” music that was popular. He avoided the “New Objectivity” of contemporary composers like Hindemith, and especially Schoenberg as his style began to evolve into what we call “serialism” (his “composing with twelve-tones”). When Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf (“an African-American jazz musician steals the violin of a European classical concert artist, and in the end comes away victorious”) drew intense criticism across Germany from the National Socialists when it premiered in 1927 and by Nazi-sympathizers when it appeared in Vienna later that year, calling on “Christian Viennese” to come out and protest the “Jewish Filth” being put on “at our Staatsoper” (the former more elitist Court Opera, the Hofoper, was now the State Opera). Korngold’s new mythologically inspired opera, Das Wunder des Heliane (“The Miracle of Helen”), dovetailed with performances of Jonny spielt auf. Curiously, Krenek wasn’t Jewish – but Korngold was. While a success, Korngold’s opera made its way across Germany, but it was viewed as entirely irrelevant: many singers avoided performing it; Bruno Walter, conducting it in Berlin, began to distance himself from Korngold as a result.

Korngold realized the public – his public – was going in a different direction. So, between the premiere of Heliane and the rise of Adolf Hitler, Korngold turned to more abstract music and wrote his first string quartet, a third piano sonata, and a suite for piano left-hand (for Paul Wittgenstein who’d also commissioned Ravel’s concerto) and strings. In the mid-1920s, he’d met the famous (and fabulously wealthy) director Max Reinhardt who married a childhood friend of Erich’s wife Luzi. They embarked on some projects to “up-scale” some operettas like Offenbach’s La belle Helene and Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (renamed “Rosalinda”). Both became financial and artistic successes far beyond Germany and Austria.

Then, in January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Hindenburg. The Nazi Party was now in control of the German government.

In 1934, Reinhardt produced a staged version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Hollywood Bowl, using Mendelssohn famous music. Not much a “straight theater” town, nonetheless Hollywood producers wanted Reinhardt to turn it into a film and he insisted Korngold be brought over from Vienna to re-work Mendelssohn’s music and add his own touches. And so he did.

But he didn’t stay: he returned to Vienna despite the increasing political and social tension (and against the advice of his father) to work on a new opera, Die Kathrin, which turned a politically charged plot into a harmless love-story. It premiered in March, 1938, which coincided with the Nazi Occupation of Austria, the Anschluss, and so the performances were canceled by the new government. The work was eventually dismissed after its premiere it Sweden as “outdated.” One later writer said it “reflected the same irresponsible blindness to world events” that almost stranded Korngold’s family after Hitler’s take-over.

After the success of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Korngold accepted an invitation from Hollywood to write the music for a new film, a swashbuckling pirate romance featuring a new actor, Erroll Flynn, called Captain Blood. Initially, the idea of the story did not appeal to him. Even though he wrote almost an hour’s worth of music for it, because he had only three weeks to do it in, Korngold ended up culling bits from Liszt tone poems to save time and only wanted to be credited with “musical adaptations.” A huge success, it tempted him to accept their next offer, Anthony Adverse, his fourth original film score, which eventually won him his first Oscar. The first half-hour of the film contains “continuous scoring” and Korngold found himself approaching his film scores as “operas without singing.” Ever a fan of Puccini, he once described Tosca as “the best film score ever written.”

In all, Korngold produced 18 film scores for Hollywood. If his father had thought his orchestrating and arranging 9 operettas to be beneath his talents, he thought even less of his film work (not that he minded the lifestyle it afforded him). Julius Korngold had joined his son in Hollywood soon after the Anschluss – leaving Erich’s older son with his sister-in-law so he could finish his school exams but, badly miscalculating local events, barely getting him out of the country before it was too late. Julius, once the fiercely independent critic who dominated Viennese musical life as Hanslick had ruled it during the age of Brahms and Wagner, now found himself without purpose in a strange environment, especially considering his prejudice against “popular culture,” and, perhaps in a twist of irony, now neighbors with some of the musicians he'd attacked in the press decades before! But thirty years and the times being what they were, he found himself becoming friends with another Los Angeles resident, Arnold Schoenberg (who lived across the street from Shirley Temple and whose frequent tennis partner was George Gershwin).

Given the number of films Korngold scored, it’s surprising this occupied only ten years of his life. In the midst of this busy schedule, Korngold and his wife became American citizens in 1943. They lived in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, close to the Warner Brothers Studios (later on, the house would later be owned by Boris Karloff, then Roy Disney; it sold in 2019 for $5.2 million), and it was there Korngold toyed with the idea of a violin concerto, which he'd already begun sketching in 1937, using a theme from Anthony Adverse but the project went nowhere and after two years, he put it aside. 

Then, in 1945, his friend, violinist Bronislaw Hubermann requested a concerto – apparently, something he’d been asking Korngold for decades, though there's some doubt about that; it appears to be a family legend – and this time Korngold decided to dig out those old sketches and this time finish it. Each movement made use of various themes he’d written for some of his film scores. It would seem to be the first concert work he’d composed since he began immersing himself in the movie business, but he'd already written a substantial amount of a new string quartet, his third. Incidentally, it’s probably no coincidence he dedicated the newly completed Violin Concerto to Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, who was herself also now living in Los Angeles. Apparently, at some point before he finalized the piece, he played through it for her on his piano at Toluca Lake.

Julius Korngold (1942)

What his father thought of this sudden change in Erich's musical life, I’m not sure. I would assume he’d’ve been overjoyed, finally, his son back to composing the kind of music he was born to write. But Julius Korngold, never comfortable with life in California, died in Hollywood at the age of 85 on September 20th, 1945, after a long illness. His son had, however, completed now two pieces of "concert music."

The new quartet would not be premiered, for some reason, until 1949, though there is some confusion since it’s usually listed as 1946. Turns out, the Roth Quartet was giving the American premiere of his Second String Quartet on that 1946 program.

As for Korngold’s career after that, he did write, reluctantly, a few more film scores, nothing that was successful, and he realized not only his new concert music but even his once well-received works like Die tote Stadt were being dismissed as “out-of-date.” Following a near-fatal heart attack in 1947, a delayed return to Vienna proved disappointing both musically and emotionally. Aside from one last attempt at a film score, arranging Wagner’s music for a film biography, his last work, an inconsequential set of variations for orchestra, was dated 1953, following the dismal reception of his Symphony in F-Sharp, completed the year before. 

Following a stroke in 1956, Korngold "endured several physical and emotional difficulties" as he recuperated, and died the following year at the age of 60, disappointed his star had already set.

The Composer composing

Without his film scores or the eleven operetta arrangements on the list. since they weren’t technically published, there are only 42 opus numbers in his output, a rather small legacy in the end for a composer who had such a promising start. If this is his legacy, was he, as his father complained, “wasting his time” dabbling in the popular world just to achieve a temporary success? Ironically, the Violin Concerto aside, he is best remembered as a film composer today, and even though many of the films have been forgotten, orchestral suites from several of them appear regularly in concert halls around the world.

But in Korngold’s personal life, this particular string quartet holds a very important place. He’d had begun it in secret in 1944 (before or, perhaps, as a result of his father’s illness? – he was, after all, 85). He presented the sketches to his wife as a Christmas present in 1944, catching her by surprise: “I had suspected nothing about the quartet,” she wrote to a friend. “He had avoided the subject, and had not struck even a single note on the piano.” He completed it the following summer, dating the manuscript July 31st, 1945, marking his return to writing concert (“serious”) music after a decade’s hiatus in Hollywood. World War II had ended in Europe in May, 1945, so what was begun under the seemingly never-ending shadow of Hitler and his war, ended with a sense of relief.

– Dick Strawser