About this Piece

“A long melody of thirty-two bars is still a gift from heaven,” Erich Wolfgang Korngold told The New York Times in 1946. The Austrian wunderkind, who as a Jewish composer was forced to abandon his flourishing career in Vienna to escape Hitler’s scythe and who then became one of the principal architects of Hollywood film scoring, stubbornly held on to his love of melody—sentimental, tonal, sincere—even as that attitude put him further and further out of step with his times. Whether it was the influence of his father, the eminent music critic Julius Korngold, whose aversion to Modernism held considerable sway over his son, or whether it was the composer’s own tune-loving heart, this melodious philosophy served Korngold very well in Viennese opera houses in the early 1900s and in the cinemas of wartime America—where swooning love themes and heroic anthems, all sumptuously orchestrated, helped whisk the ordinary congregant away from their troubles and into a realm of fantasy and romance.

But by 1946, among the classical elite, it was anathema. “To get a performance in New York, music has to be ugly, programmatic, serious,” Korngold lamented in that same interview. “If it’s beautiful it is only tolerated if the composer has been dead for fifty years.” And although he had a hard time tuning out critics who dismissed him for his affiliation with Errol Flynn’s derring-do in films like The Adventures of Robin Hood, he ignored them completely on the pages of his concert music. So much so that he repurposed tunes from several of his Warner Bros. scores in the string quartet, concertos, and symphony that he composed in the latter part of his career. Still, there was a tension within even Korngold. A reason he finally returned to writing “absolute music” was because he’d grown tired of the structural limitations and increasingly weak pictures he was presented with as a film composer. “When I first came to Hollywood, I could not understand the dialogue,” he once quipped—“now I can.”

He began working on his violin concerto in 1937, at the beginning of his film career. There was always the dream that he would one day return victoriously to Vienna and the concert world, the onetime prodigy making good as a mature composer. Instead he spent the next 10 years—the war years—making a better living at the pictures. A Polish violinist friend, Bronisław Huberman, would playfully ask, “Where’s my violin concerto?” whenever he visited the Korngolds for dinner. In 1945, after Huberman made his signature remark, Korngold stunned him by going over to the piano and playing an opening passage he had secretly composed. When Huberman learned that Korngold was “flirting” with other violinists, he expressed his displeasure—yet he kept procrastinating on learning the score himself. In the meantime Korngold was introduced to Jascha Heifetz, the starriest violin player on the scene. When Heifetz took the score home and then played it with virtuosic perfection for Korngold, Huberman knew he couldn’t stand in their way.

Korngold wrote his concerto while his father, who lived with him in Toluca Lake, was dying, and its emotionality and melodicism can be seen partly as a love letter to Julius. It was also a valentine to the violin and to beauty in music, an unabashedly romantic story told in the style of Korngold’s youthful Vienna. It was even an expression of love for his Hollywood residency: He liberally used melodies from his scores for Another Dawn and Juarez in the first movement; Anthony Adverse factors in the more melancholy second; and the jauntier final movement was based on his main theme from The Prince and the Pauper. Korngold lamented that the current age “has gone unmusical with too much modernism,” and he wondered whether the concert world could return to its “old-fashioned ways.” But he was nervous about those New York critics: “Today’s musical authorities and composers have delivered themselves, almost to a man, to the strange musical sects of men such as Schoenberg,” Korngold said, “who produce scores more related to mathematics than to music. It is these musical authorities I am afraid of.”

He had cause for concern. The violin concerto was received with electric warmth when it premiered February 15, 1947, in St. Louis; but when Heifetz took it to New York, the Times critic casually dismissed it as a “Hollywood concerto,” adding that “the melodies are ordinary and sentimental in character; the facility of the writing is matched by the mediocrity of ideas.” Another New York critic coined the phrase “more corn than gold,” which hung like a cloud over the composer for decades to come. When the concerto made its way to Los Angeles in January 1953, the Los Angeles Mirror critic denounced it as “music almost totally lacking in any real inventiveness or development.” (A recording made that month by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Heifetz, under then-Music Director Alfred Wallenstein, was released by RCA Victor.) Korngold followed the violin concerto with a cello concerto and his ambitious Symphony in F-sharp major, but he died in 1957 at age 60 without the longed-for victory in Vienna or wide embrace from the classical world.

But history has recapitulated back to Korngold’s theme; beginning in the 1960s, his music was much more warmly reappraised particularly with the release and programming of many of his film scores. In time his violin concerto became the most performed work in his catalog. Today’s audiences and orchestras are drawn to its beauty and melodicism, and critics such as The New Yorker’s Alex Ross hail Korngold as “a master of late-Romantic opulence,” noting that his tonality is more daring and unique than was often acknowledged. We can’t always know how the melody of our lives will resolve—but Korngold’s life proves that a long tune is, indeed, a gift from heaven.

—Tim Grieving