KORNGOLD’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS

In music, the child prodigy who performs is common enough, but the prodigy who composes — as Mozart and Mendelssohn did, to the wonderment of all Europe — is rare enough to astonish the heavens. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born at the end of the nineteenth century, was such a child. Before he reached his teens, he was an extravagantly celebrated composer, heralded as the successor to Schumann, Brahms, and Wagner — the capstone of the Romantic tradition. One leading conductor, Arthur Nikisch, wrote, “My God, to think of all the treasures that this genius will give to the world! May the Almighty grant good health to this blessed being. Nothing else is needed.” The musicologist Ernest Newman judged that the case of Korngold was “quite without parallel,” the only question being, “Will the brain last out to ripe manhood?”

It did not, exactly. Korngold is known today only for a handful of works: an opera aria, a violin concerto, and scattered scores for Hollywood films. He whom Sibelius had once dubbed “music’s young eagle” spent his final, feeble years in Los Angeles, trying to convince an orchestra, any orchestra, to program his only symphony. Never building significantly on his early achievements, Korngold died an impressive, inventive composer, but not an immortal — a Bizet, say, rather than a Brahms. His life, one of the most fascinating in music, was ultimately a tragedy, and all the more so because he knew it and felt it keenly.

Brendan G. Carroll’s new biography of the composer carries the presumptuous title The Last Prodigy. (The first biography of Korngold appeared when the subject was only twenty-two, a mark of the hopes that surrounded him.) Carroll has devoted twenty-five years to his book, choosing as his mission the restoration of Korngold’s reputation. No musical biography can accomplish this, of course, but Carroll has at least picked the irresistible, old story of great expectations never quite fulfilled. It is the kind of story for which, once filmed, Korngold could have effortlessly written the music.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Vienna in 1897 (his middle name a tribute to Mozart). His father, Julius Korngold, was the most powerful music critic in the city, possibly on the entire continent. By the time Erich was seven, he had filled notebook after notebook with the most complex musical sketches. Julius was cautious at first about telling anyone about them, but in 1906, he took his son to Mahler, who, examining a cantata that the boy had written, repeatedly exclaimed, “A genius! A genius!” Mahler recommended that Erich skip traditional musical schooling and study instead with Alexander von Zemlinsky, one of the foremost pedagogues of the day. “No conservatory! No drill!” said Mahler. “He will learn everything he needs to know from Zemlinsky.” Later, Zemlinsky recalled that his little charge absorbed his teachings with “uncanny speed,” and “I was able to communicate with him as with a musician who had already learned these things.”

Young Korngold never composed in the manner of a child. He is responsible for no juvenilia, in the commonly accepted sense of the term. He had a prodigious memory, a capacity for high mathematics, and an easy, almost nonchalant grasp of musical theory. Wrote one dumb-founded critic, “One looks in vain for the traces of youthful uncertainty, for exaggeration and clumsiness.” But there was “nothing borrowed, nothing imitated” — only music of “totally original coinage.” The conductor Felix von Weingartner gasped, ” It seems as if Nature has gathered together all the accomplishments of modern musical language for which others have to struggle step by step and placed them in the cradle of this extraordinary child.”

At eleven, Erich composed a ballet-pantomime that caused a sensation at the Vienna Opera. Two years later, he wrote a piano sonata that Artur Schnabel, an acclaimed and thoughtful performer, immediately incorporated into his repertory. The English scholar Edward Dent declared, “We shall have to burn our books on harmony and counterpoint.” Richard Strauss as well took note of this “arch-musician,” expressing the wish that “so precocious a genius” be able “to follow its normal development.” The two were to become mutually valued colleagues, if not fast friends (Julius Korngold’s position seldom allowed for this, and, indeed, father and son complicated each other’s life enormously).

In the 1920s, however, the young man’s star began to dim, as serial, atonal music (such as that composed by Arnold Schoenberg) gained the ascendancy. Korngold, who had once seemed daring and revolutionary, began to seem somewhat quaint — particularly as he dabbled in operetta and other light music, much to the distress of his father, who wanted him to concentrate on higher art. In addition, political trouble, of the ugliest sort, was brewing: Korngold had his first taste of the Nazis in 1922, when a Munich production of his opera Die tote Stadt was disrupted by a cadre bearing torches and swastikas. Korngold must have been puzzled by the attack, having only the barest concept of himself as a Jew. (He never set foot in a synagogue and was brought up to revere and emulate everything Germanic.)

In 1934, Korngold received a fateful telegram from the theatrical director Max Reinhardt, asking him to come to Los Angeles to supervise the music for the Warner Brothers version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Korngold accepted, thus ensuring his income but, as Carroll writes, sounding the ” death-knell of his reputation as a serious composer.” Korngold traveled between California and Europe until late January 1939, days before the Germans annexed Austria, when he received in Vienna another critical telegram, this one urging him back to America for The Adventures of Robin Hood, an Errol Flynn vehicle. It was a summons that may have saved his life. His parents managed to escape, too, boarding the last unrestricted train out of Vienna. Other family members, and innumerable friends and colleagues, perished in the gas chambers.

In Hollywood, Korngold was part of a formidable community of German- speaking emigres that included the novelists Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel, and the composers Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, and his old nemesis Schoenberg. As Carroll points out, the 1939 Los Angeles telephone directory makes for ” amazing reading.” Even so, Korngold and the rest of them suffered from a degree of cultural starvation, stuck with a cultural milieu in which the hostess Elsa Maxwell could say to Schoenberg at a party, “Come along, Arnold, and give us a tune.” (It was, to be sure, preferable to dying.)

Why did Korngold turn to films? There was, naturally, the matter of money; he received few royalties from Europe, his works having been banned in Germany, for example, since 1933. Also, his wife, Luzi, observed that he was glum and distracted, “almost as if he had made a vow not to write anymore until Hitler was defeated.”

But perhaps most important, he found the movies a hospitable outlet for his talents, his knack for theatrical composition undeniable. He invented the ” symphonic film score” and is widely imitated even today. He was the first to compose in the projection room, watching the film unfold before him and scribbling the accompaniment. “It is not true,” he once said, emphatically, ” that the cinema places a restraint on musical expression.” His scores for The Sea Hawk, Anthony Adverse, and Kings Row stand on their own, quite apart from the images for which they were composed.

Nonetheless, the feeling persisted that Korngold — in whom so many hopes had been invested — was wasting his time: Surely this was a man destined for greater things than accepting “Best Original Score” Oscars from Jerome Kern at the Biltmore Hotel. His disconsolate father hectored him incessantly to return to more lasting composition. When the war was over, Korngold confided to an interviewer, “Fifty is very old for a child prodigy. I feel I have to make a decision now if I don’t want to be a Hollywood composer for the rest of my life.”

He indeed made a decision to reject further film offers and to aim for the pantheon of the masters. To this end, he composed his violin concerto (which employs several of his movie themes) and his lone symphony. He never fully regained his form, however, dying melancholy and wistfill in 1957, aged sixty. His elder son remarked that Korngold’s had been a “tale of Horatio Alger in reverse, with a brilliant beginning and an unsatisfying ending.” The musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky described Korngold as “the very last breath of the Romantic spirit in Vienna.” A black flag hung from the Vienna Opera House (“Too late,” grumbled Mrs. Korngold). A memorial concert was organized in Los Angeles — ironically, in Arnold Schoenberg Hall.

Brendan Carroll has produced a valuable book. He gives us the lost world of old Vienna, as Korngold and his circle skip from salon to salon, from soiree to soiree. He tracks down elderly survivors of the period, including a woman, interviewed when she was one hundred and five, who tutored the young Korngold in French. The images of a rich, varied life hurry by: Korngold, terrified, in the back seat of George Szell’s car as the conductor whips around Berlin; Korngold and Jascha Heifetz glued to a television set in Hollywood, astounded at professional wrestling.

Korngold is in no danger of oblivion. He is remembered and esteemed by many, and there are even signs of a Korngold resurgence (as witness a few recent recordings). But he had held out the promise of infinitely more, and that — no matter how interesting and gifted a character he was — is his tragedy.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.