The lone symphony by a composer whose film music helped define the Hollywood sound is now the star of a landmark recording.
The Korngold Symphony (Supertrain Records) showcases two historically important performances of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F#—the first commercial release of the piano recording Korngold himself made of his symphony in the early 1950s, and the first orchestral recording of the symphony to be informed by Korngold’s piano recording. John Mauceri, founding conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, leads the Orchestra of Italian Switzerland in Korngold’s towering work.
When Mauceri learned of Korngold’s piano performance of the symphony, that recording had lain in oblivion since the mid-1950s. In the first decade of this century, while preparing to perform Korngold’s symphony with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Mauceri learned from Erich Korngold’s grandson Leslie Korngold that the composer had also made a piano recording of his symphony in the early 1950s, likely for conductors to use as a guide in interpreting the work.
As Mauceri notes in a recent video interview, the history of Korngold’s only symphony is intertwined with the advent of sound films and with the massive upheaval of World War II. Born in Czechoslovakia, Korngold grew up a child prodigy in Austria. While still a child, he attracted the attention of the major composers of the day, including the noted symphonist Gustav Mahler, who declared Korngold a musical genius.
“(Korngold) was considered the greatest Wunderkind since Mozart,” Mauceri said. “You have Sibelius and Puccini and Richard Strauss and even Mahler, who died when Korngold was quite young, you’ve got those people all talking about Erich Korngold as the great hope of German music.”
Korngold became best known as an opera composer, and his success in this realm prompted the Austrian-born film director Max Reinhardt, then with Warner Brothers, to invite him to come to the United States to create music for a new kind of music drama—sound films. Korngold accepted the invitation and left Europe for Hollywood in 1934 to craft Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with some of his own original music, into the score for a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy.
During the early years of Korngold’s Hollywood career, the political situation in Europe turned deadly, as the Nazis gathered power by force across the continent. In 1938 Korngold, who was Jewish, was in Austria conducting one of his operas when he was invited to return to America to work on a film project. In March 1938, Austria was annexed into the Third Reich. Korngold returned to the U.S. with his wife, his father and his children.
Once stateside, the Korngold family was at a safe remove from the Nazi threat. But Korngold came to see the destruction the war wrought, including the horrors of the Holocaust. He completed his Symphony in F# in 1952, as a musical response, Mauceri says, to World War II.
“He wrote it dedicated to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he believed had saved his life and the life of his wife and elder son—in fact, his family. It is, I believe, without doubt a portrait of World War II,” Mauceri said. “And the more I delved into that, I could understand and create for myself and maybe for an audience, even if I don’t speak to them, what the intentionality of those notes are.”
In his notes to The Korngold Symphony, Mauceri describes Korngold’s Symphony in F# as “a masterpiece that is inextricably connected to its time and its political intent.” The work’s striking musical impressions of the trauma of World War II and wall-to-wall technical prowess and emotional depth, Mauceri says, help set the work apart.
“It becomes not only an important symphony, but a great one because of the greatness of the composer himself and also because of what was the underlying reason that I feel he wrote that symphony.”
Transcript of interview:
Jennifer Hambrick: Korngold composed his Symphony in F# in 1952, and you’ve called it “one of the great symphonies of the 20th century.” So, to begin, why so?
John Mauceri: Well, first of all, it is great music, and at a time when people think that the symphony had stopped being relevant. You know, who was writing symphonies in 1952? And maybe someone will say, well, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and there you go. Two Soviet composers, but who else was writing symphonies? It’s good to be reminded that there was an American citizen named Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who was born Brno, but he grew up in Vienna, and who was one of the great composers of the last century. And who, because of the twentieth century and because of a central tragedy of World War II and its attack on music and on musicians, wrote his first symphony so late in his life. I mean, after all, he was born in the 1890s, and by the time he was a teenager, he was already writing operas that were being produced all over the world and he was considered the greatest Wunderkind since Mozart. And he wrote operas and had written some symphonic works, but now he had finally, after World War II living in Los Angeles and Toluca Lake, wrote his first symphony. And he wrote it dedicated to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he believed had saved his life and the life of his wife and elder son, in fact his family. It becomes not only an important symphony, but a great one because of the greatness of the composer himself an also because of what was the underlying reason that I feel he wrote that symphony.
Jennifer Hambrick: Right, okay. So let’s talk about your journey with Korngold’s symphony. That journey starts, it seems in the early 1990s. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was founded in 1990s, and you not long thereafter reached out to Leslie Korngold, the grandson of composer Erich Korngold, the legendary composer who, among other things, in his career in Los Angeles really helped define the sound of Hollywood film music. Pick up the thread from here, if you would.
John Mauceri: Like most people, and certainly people of my generation, we were taught that film music wasn’t good music. Generally, the word on the street, as it were, or in intellectual communities – I think a lot of people who go to the movies don’t think about music at all, and they started thinking about music around 1977, when John Williams wrote Star Wars. But in the 1950s and ’60s people weren’t really serious about film music or film composers. And I was under the impression – you know, as the snob that I was. I was probably born sneering, the quote from The Mikado, which was I thought I knew a lot about music. And so one day I was listening to WQXR, which in those days was the radio station of The New York Times. And I came in in the middle of a cello concerto. And I went, Wow, this is great music. Who wrote it? And I’m really very good at placing a composer or a composer’s influences or who a composer studied with. I couldn’t place it. It sounded sort of like Richard Strauss, but I knew Strauss hadn’t written a cello concerto. And when it was over, the voice said, “That was a cello concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold from the movie Deception, which starred Bette Davis.” And I said, “Okay, John, you’ve got to go back to the table here and actually throw out that idea. And who was this Erich Korngold, anyway?” But I knew that there was something fishy in my learning, general knowledge of film composers. And the moment that it really shifts is when the Los Angeles Philharmonic creates the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra for me, and at the same time in Berlin, the Decca Record Company creates a series of recordings to record music banned by Adolf Hitler. So, I had this steep learning curve. Who were the Hollywood composers? So you put names you might have heard to some story about them, but also what was their music. So suddenly I was inundated and learning about Franz Waxman or Dmitri Tiomkin or Miklos Rozsa—the Hollywood people. And then you got the list of names of composers that were banned by Adolf Hitler, and that was the eureka moment where I found the same names on both lists. I had never heard these names. I’d never heard the story. My God, I was teaching at Yale when I was 22 years old and taught there for 15 years – I never heard, as an undergraduate, the names of these people, the names of composers whose music has been heard by more people than any composers in history, hundreds of millions of people, because of the medium of film, sound film. So I start to learn about Korngold, and I’m recording and preparing music from The Adventures of Robin Hood, on one hand, in Hollywood, and the same composer’s music in Berlin—Das Wunder der Heliana, for example, the opera he wrote in 1927, under very different circumstances. This is an opera that he thought of as his masterpiece. It had never been recorded. In fact, it had rarely been performed ever since the late 1920s, when it was being performed simultaneously its world premiere in various cities. So that’s where it all started. And I learned that Korngold had been invited only once—during all the years he lived in Los Angeles – to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he did at the Bowl. So, I decided it was high time to play his music again in the 1900s and I invited the living Korngolds to come to that concert. Getting to know Les Korngold meant I had a direct line to the family now. I learned that Leslie Korngold’s father—who was the younger of the two sons, who was a record producer—that Leslie had kept all of the recordings, the private recordings, that his dad had when his dad passed away. And so that first thing I was recording was the Symphonic Serenade, which I recorded for Decca on an album called Between Two Worlds. And it turned out that Erich Korngold had played it on the piano and recorded it as a guide to Wilhelm Furtwängler when Furtwängler was planning to conduct the world premiere of it. Korngold, by that point in his life, had a heart condition and was not able to conduct anymore. And this was the Symphonic Serenade, it’s four movements for strings, written after World War II. And so I got this recording of Korngold at the piano playing the Symphonic Serenade, which I used as a model for when I recorded it in Berlin. Now a few years later, I was given the opportunity to do an all-Korngold program in Hanover Germany with the North German Radio Orchestra, the NDR. An d so I put together a program in which the second half was this symphony. And I called Leslie and I said, “I know this is crazy, Leslie, but did your grandfather make a recording of the symphony?” And he said, “John, no, that’s not possible. I’ve got all this stuff. It’s all been catalogued.” So I said, “Okay,” and I went on to learn it the way you would learn any piece of music. Nd then I got a call from him. He said, “You’ve not going to believe this.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, I looked at the top of a shelf and there was a box that didn’t have any name on it. And in that box was a recording of my grandfather playing the symphony.” So, I was the first person—well, I and Leslie because who know if anybody every listened to it. It was made, obviously, in 1952, around that time. And why it was made? Well, probably for the same reason Korngold made the other recording: as a guide to conductors. And as the result of hearing that recording, which has been released now with the recording of a performance I conducted, it opened the door to understanding what that symphony was about.
Jennifer Hambrick: And so, in February 1995, as you say, you conducted the Korngold Symphony for the first time with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Hanover. And then, I gather, it was in 1997 that you conducted Korngold’s symphony in the performance that we hear on this recently released recording that you made with the Orchestra of Italian Switzerland. You write in your notes to the recording, “The mysterious journey of reading music can never be easily explained. The notes and expressive markings tell us a composer’s truth, albeit compromised by the limitations of notation. However, what Korngold was demonstrating was so specific that he felt it necessary to create a guide.” So, can you put into words what it was that was so specific that you believe Korngold was trying to convey in his piano recording of the symphony?
John Mauceri: Well, the overall impact and anyone listening to the release of this recording of Korngold at the piano – is the passion, I mean, the almost wild passion with which he plays it. Those who heard him play, including of course his eldest son, Ernst, who is a dear, dear colleague of mine, and his widow, Helen, said you cannot believe how he played the piano. It was overwhelming. I mean, his technique was astounding. So listening to this recording he plays is in ways where he cannot even play his own notes, it’s so passionate, so overwhelmingly committed in a way that you realize that the symphony is bigger than his fingers. What he wants to say is bigger than 88 keys. So listening to the ebb and flow of how he presents the symphony, from the opening with its strange non-tonal complement and the sound which becomes, then, a clarinet and the violence of some of its rhythmic interjections, and then the sweetness of the second melody in the first movement—you realize that there’s something going on here that is so big that he can’t even express it himself. So, I listened to the panic of the scherzo and the unbelievable sadness of the third movement and then the building of something, this kind of constructivistic fourth movement, and that’s when I realized that this symphony was about something. It wasn’t just a series of notes. It wasn’t just a four-movement symphony. It’s dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt. It is, I believe, without doubt a portrait of World War II. And the more I delved into that I could understand and create for myself and maybe for an audience, even if I don’t speak to them, what the intentionality of those notes are. And when I brought that up to Ernst Korngold—now, let’s back up a bit. Ernst Korngold was in high school when the Anschulss was signed and the Nazis had taken over Austria and it was clear that he had to get out of Austria along with Korngold’s parents, because Korngold and Mrs. Korngold, Luzi, and their younger son were in Hollywood. That’s when Erich Korngold was asked to wire the music for The Adventures of Robin Hood, in 1938. And it was clear from a phone call that Korngold’s wife had with (Erich Korngold’s father) Julius Korngold’s wife, that they could not return. But more importantly, we had to get Julius and his wife and Ernst out of Austria. Luckily the passport was set up so that grandparents could take Ernst out of Vienna. And the three of them got out of Vienna on the very last train before the borders were closed, and Ernst sat on the lap of a Nazi soldier. True story. And there’s a letter form Ernst Korngold’s father, Julius—great musician, great musicologist, great music critic—from Switzerland, saying he cannot believe how fast all of Austria changed, within a week—the way people were being treated, the way Jews were being rounded up, the way life had changed. He couldn’t believe the ferocity and the velocity of that change. And he wrote he was sick, he had diabetes, he just wanted to die. And I believe that when for example, I address the scherzo, the second movement of the symphony and having heard Erich Korngold play it, that is a movement of panic. That’s not a scherzo in the sense of a light little Mendelssohn movement of a symphony. It is “We have to get out of here. How do we get out of here? The borders are closed. How do we sneak out?” And so that, with its moments of heroism that come out, almost pre-John Williams melodies that come out of the horns and then the trio section, which is a lullaby, but it’s a ghostly lullaby. And therein I heard the peaceful sadness of the dead. And so, we go back and forth in that scherzo as people who know how symphonies are constructed would expect. By the way the basic structure of the symphony is absolutely normal […] Now it’s the last movement that really is the key here, because that second theme in the first movement, which is played on the flutes, becomes the march music. And when I saw that that second theme of the first movement becomes the basic melody of the last movement, which is constructivistic, full of counterpoint, full of positive energy, I realized that this was music of reconstructing Europe. This is the optimistic Korngold. Okay, it’s the 1950s. A lot of Europe is in rubble, but now we’re going to rebuild it. And brilliantly, somewhere in the middle of that unbelievable construction, the music slows down and we hear the music of the adagio. For me it’s like the opening of the concentration camps. It’s the oh-my-God moment of such profound sadness. Okay. It goes back into the fast music when—when happens?—the opening theme by the clarinet, that ugly, serpentine, what I call “the bad idea,” comes back. Just before the end, which ends up happily, as if Korngold’s saying, “It’s not over. Hitler didn’t invent it. This is something that can happen.” So, it’s a warning.
Jennifer Hambrick: As you say, every symphony is about something. If we can say this symphony is about anything, it’s about World War II and the experience that is so close to the heart of Korngold and his family. Thank you so much, again, for your time today.
John Mauceri: My pleasure, Jennifer.
