“That sounds like film music” is a put-down that deserves to be retired. The usual intention is to dismiss a work as splashy kitsch. Over the past century, though, enough first-rate music has been written for the movies that the charge rings false. Hollywood composers have employed so many different styles that the term “film music” has little descriptive value. Worst is when the pejorative is used to discount figures who brought distinctive personalities to the scoring business, thereby elevating it. Such was the fate of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who began his career, in Vienna, as one of the most astonishing child prodigies in musical history and who reached maximum fame writing film scores, in Los Angeles, in the nineteen-thirties and forties. A master of late-Romantic opulence, Korngold shaped the sonic texture of Golden Age Hollywood. To say that his work sounds like movie music is an elementary fallacy, a confusion of cause and effect.
The Bard Music Festival, which has been exploring neglected corners of the repertory for the past three decades, is honoring Korngold in this year’s edition, which began on August 9th, at Bard College, in upstate New York. In addition, Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and musical ringleader, recently conducted the American première of “Das Wunder der Heliane” (“The Miracle of Heliane”), Korngold’s second full-length opera, on the campus. These performances echo an ongoing Korngold revival in Europe. “Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”), the composer’s first mature opera, had a production at La Scala earlier this year, and in the fall it will be staged at the Bavarian State Opera, with the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann heading the cast. The missing link is the Met, which presented “Die Tote Stadt” in the early nineteen-twenties but has yet to return to it. I cannot fathom why that opera is not as popular as anything by Puccini—its melodic writing is no less indelible, its expressive urgency no less intense.
Korngold, the son of a leading Viennese music critic, was himself something of a miracle. By his mid-teens, he had not only acquired total technical command of the art of composition but had also developed an unmistakable voice. Although he knew his Puccini, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, he was far more than a clever imitator. In the Scherzo of his Sinfonietta—completed in 1913, when he was sixteen—Korngold is speaking his own language: melodies bound along with rhythmic freedom, harmonies ricochet from one major triad to another, a full-strength orchestra glitters and dances before the ears. Even more astounding are the one-act operas “Der Ring des Polykrates” (1914) and “Violanta” (1916), which overflow with effortlessly effective vocal writing. In the annals of composing prodigies, Korngold’s only serious rival is Felix Mendelssohn. Mozart’s youthful pieces lack comparable individuality.
Like many wunderkinder, Korngold had a bumpy transition to adulthood. “Die Tote Stadt,” which had its première in 1920, when the composer was twenty-three, promised a long and triumphant operatic career. The work had the benefit of a deliciously decadent story, based on Georges Rodenbach’s Symbolist novel “Bruges-la-Morte”: a widower is wandering through the Flemish city, obsessively mourning his wife, when he meets a dancer who uncannily resembles the dead woman. (Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” offers another variation on Rodenbach’s scenario.) Korngold alternates between tunes of indelible potency and shimmering, dreamlike textures.
“Das Wunder,” which was first performed in 1927, met an unhappier fate. Although the initial response was strong, the composer’s Art Nouveau aesthetic came to seem dated amid the rapidly moving trends of the twenties: twelve-tone music, Stravinskyan neoclassicism, the music theatre of Kurt Weill. Julius Korngold, the composer’s father, did not help matters by waging an obnoxious campaign against Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inflected opera “Jonny Spielt Auf,” which made the rounds in the same period. Performances of “Das Wunder” in Berlin aroused a savage press reaction. Korngold completed only one more opera—the entrancing but dramatically weak “Die Kathrin,” from 1937.
Korngold was Jewish, and the Nazi takeover of Austria forced him into exile. He had begun establishing himself in Hollywood as early as 1934, and therefore never faced the economic struggles that other émigrés encountered. Still, his vitality as a film composer, evident in such Errol Flynn swashbucklers as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk,” damaged his reputation as a “serious” talent. After the Second World War, when Korngold attempted to resume his concert career, he was deemed hopelessly retrograde by the modernist standards of the day. He died young, at the age of sixty, in 1957. Only in the nineteen-seventies did interest in his work reawaken—in part because John Williams paid homage to him in the main-title theme of “Star Wars,” a magnificently Korngoldesque invention.
I got to know “Das Wunder der Heliane” through a 1993 recording on the Decca label—part of an invaluable series, called Entartete Musik, or Degenerate Music, honoring composers who suffered under the Nazis. My initial sense was of a ravishing score that had little chance of finding a place in the modern repertory. The libretto, by Hans Müller, is based on a 1917 play by the Austrian dramatist Hans Kaltneker, who specialized in Expressionist mysticism. The Ruler, a harsh governor of an unnamed realm, is confronted by the charismatic, Christlike Stranger, who enters into an ambiguous relationship with the Ruler’s wife, Heliane. The miracle of the title consists of Heliane bringing about the resurrection of the Stranger, who has killed himself in an effort to save her from accusations of adultery. Love wins out in the end, to put it briefly.
At Bard, the director Christian Räth and the designer Esther Bialas dealt with the overwrought libretto by transplanting the action to a vaguely futuristic, dystopian setting. Steel-gray tones predominate; the judges of the Ruler’s kingdom wear Inquisitorial scarlet robes, and the Stranger is dressed in an orange jumpsuit as he undergoes interrogation. Botstein, conducting the American Symphony, reined in the ecstatic excesses of Korngold’s orchestration, establishing a more sober, clear-cut sound. The result was a surprisingly stage-worthy parable of totalitarian oppression and spiritual resistance.
The Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė, a rising star in Europe, sang the role of Heliane. Although she lacks an ideal shining timbre, she is a piercingly expressive singer-actor who kept the audience engaged in Heliane’s obscure predicament. Daniel Brenna, as the Stranger, struggled with the lyrical aspects of Korngold’s writing but delivered the part with vigor. Alfred Walker brought a rugged Wagnerian sound to the Ruler, suggesting that agony lay behind the character’s imperious poses. The young bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee stood out in the smaller role of the Porter, filling the auditorium with a handsome mahogany tone. On the 1993 recording, this part was sung by the young René Pape; a similarly starry future may be in store for Brownlee.
The Bard festival, entitled “Korngold and His World,” includes a semi-staged rendition of “Die Tote Stadt,” a survey of the composer’s chamber music, a sampling of his film scores, and a performance of his Symphony in F-Sharp, which he completed in 1952. The symphony pivots on an Adagio of almost shocking tragic power—a funeral rite for the destroyed world of the composer’s youth. In that movement, Korngold quotes from his scores for “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” “Captain Blood,” and “Anthony Adverse,” but he alters the material almost beyond recognition, as if to demonstrate that the Hollywood stereotype cannot confine him. Out of the stuff of film music, he fashions what may be the last great symphony in the German Romantic tradition. ♦
