THE ENDING OF AN ERA? Jessica Duchen
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born in 1897 in Brno, started his musical life as an extraordinary child prodigy composer. Lauded by Mahler at the age of nine, dumbfounding the likes of Humperdinck, Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss by 11 and seeing his ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann performed at the Vienna Hofoper in front of royalty aged 13, Korngold possessed a natural talent that often drew comparisons with Mendelssohn and Mozart. Sometimes it raised consternation. The New York Times critic heard the Op. 1 Piano Trio, written when Korngold was only 12 and wrote: “If we had a little boy of twelve who preferred writing this sort of music to hearing a good folk tune or going out and playing in the park, we should consult a specialist”. Unfortunately for the wunderkind, his father, Julius Korngold, was the most powerful music critic in Vienna. He was appointed successor to Eduard Hanslick at the influential newspaper Neue freie Presse when his gifted son was four, and held the post for the rest of his professional life – a situation which subjected the young composer to frequent backlashes and scandals, caught as he was in the fallout around his father’s excoriating reviews. Vienna coffee-house chatter accused the father of praising only those musicians who performed his son’s works, and, worse, of giving bad reviews to the ones who did not. This may, distressingly, have been true. Others wondered if Julius had written the pieces himself – to which Julius pithily retorted, “If I could write such music, I would not be a critic.” Julius Korngold’s censorious attitudes extended
to his son’s compositions, to say nothing of his personal life. Determined to keep the teenaged young Erich away from “crafty” girls who might distract him from writing music, he squashed Erich’s hope of publishing Vier Kleine Fröhliche Walzer – four little early waltzes – each of which portrayed a different friend who happened to be a girl. The second, Margit, was ‘Manzi’ Ganz, daughter of the journalist Hugo Ganz. The waltzes were written in 1911, when the composer was all of 14. Korngold cleverly recycled the ‘Manzi’ Waltz in the Violin Sonata scherzo’s trio section. The waltz itself is therefore included in this recording, along with the song Schneeglöckchen, on which Korngold based the variations of the sonata’s final movement. This too was from a set effectively suppressed by Julius. Erich had presented his father with 12 settings of poems by Eichendorff as a birthday present on 24 December 1911, inscribed: “So Gott und Papa will…” (If God and Papa will allow). Julius did not allow. Five years later Erich revised three of the songs, including Schneeglöckchen, as part of his Op. 9 Einfache Lieder (Simple Songs), in which their melodic charm worked wonders. Korngold’s highly practical approach to recycling his own musical ideas dates back therefore to these teenage years; much later, the exchange of material between his concert works and his film scores often worked both ways. Korngold’s sole Violin Sonata, Op. 6, was published in 1913. It was written for two of the most famous
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