Jessica Duchen: The Ending of an era?

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 (Easy 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

musicians of the day, Carl Flesch and Arthur Schnabel. The latter had already championed Korngold’s remarkable Piano Sonata No. 2; the suggestion for a sonata for violin and piano may have come from him. Presented with artists who could rise to any challenge, Korngold did not stint on his musical demands. The Violin Sonata is a giant, ripe fruit of a work, bursting with ideas and pushing both players to the limits of their technique. Like Richard Strauss, one of his major influences, Korngold treats the violin rather like a soprano voice and the piano like an orchestra.

The first movement is an almost symphonic sonata-form allegro, unfolding at high intensity and filled with ambitious and wildly far-ranging harmonic adventures. The second movement is a scherzo almost in the Brahmsian sense – a seemingly mercurial yet extremely substantial part of the work, its trio section transforming the ideas of the ‘Manzi’ Waltz into a mysterious, otherworldly contrast. Third comes a rich-textured adagio full of Korngold’s characteristic written-out sense of ebb and flow, with harmonies comparable to composers such as Schreker and even Berg; it suggests that the young Korngold harboured a yearning to push away the boundaries of tonality (which Julius was intent that his son should not cross). The final movement is a set of inventive variations on Schneeglöckchen: the idea of an exchange between Lieder and chamber music had been evident in Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet and was also espoused by Schumann and Brahms. Korngold used the concept again in his Piano Quintet a few years later. Although after its 1913 premiere the sonata became popular with violin virtuosi of the time, among them Paul Kochanski, George Enescu and Adolf Busch, Hitler’s ban on the music of Jewish composers finally stamped it – along with a vast output by a great many other fine creators – out of central Europe’s concert repertoire altogether.

Extraordinary promise and heinous backlash was the story of Korngold’s life. From an assimilated Jewish family, he was naïve enough politically not to realise at first that Hitler’s racist laws would catch up with him. It was sheer good fortune that his colleague, the theatre director Max Reinhardt, moved to America upon Hitler’s accession and in 1934 invited Korngold to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a film of his famous stage production of the play. Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers, was quick to spot Korngold’s potential as a composer of film scores; and thus Korngold was in Hollywood, tackling The Adventures of Robin Hood (which starred Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland), at the time of the Anschluss.

Korngold managed to rescue his parents and his elder son, who was still in Vienna at school, but the ensuing years of exile proved arduous and depressing, despite his outward success. By the time he returned to concert works after the War, his romantic style – that personal voice in which he had written consistently all his life – was regarded as old-fashioned. Meanwhile much of the musical ‘establishment’ looked down its nose at the notion of film music. Hollywood had saved Korngold’s life, and enabled him to save some of his relatives, friends and neighbours from certain death at the

hands of the Nazis. Yet now it seemed he was to be judged adversely for this move as an artistic decision.

Korngold died of a brain haemorrhage in 1957 at the age of 60. His elder son, Ernst, told the present writer that his father had felt as if his early successes had “happened to someone else”. The venom spewed at Korngold and his generation carried on for decades – whether because of fashion, snobbery, ignorance or active anti-Semitism (America was more resistant to taking in Jewish refugees than is often admitted, while in Austria many Nazis went on to hold high-placed jobs in the post-war years). In a letter of 1952, Korngold wrote: “I believe that my newly completed symphony [in F sharp] will show the world that atonality and ugly dissonance at the price of giving up inspiration, form, expression, melody and beauty will result in ultimate disaster for the art of music.” With adequate distance, it is gradually becoming possible to look back and ask whether he was, perhaps, right.

Text by Jessica Duchen / Odradek Records, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.odradek-records.com.

Korngold age 4 in 1901