About this Piece

Between 1934 and 1947, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a celebrated figure at Warner Bros. Pictures in Burbank, where the Austrian composer proved a pioneering force in orchestral film scoring. Across 20 pictures, his heart-melting harmonies and operatic melodies set the scene for pictures starring the biggest names in Tinseltown, from Errol Flynn and Bette Davis to Olivia de Havilland and Claude Rains.

Korngold’s film scores—two of which won him the coveted Academy Award—helped define the sound of cinema’s Golden Age. Despite this success, he never intended to devote so much time to the business of making movies. Rather, his work in Hollywood was primarily an act of survival and political protest.

When Korngold first set foot on California soil, he was one of the most popular composers in the Austro-German world—a prodigy of Mozartian proportions who was declared a “genius” by the Promethean composer-conductor Gustav Mahler. He premiered his first major work, the ballet Der Schneemann (The Snowman), at the age of 13, and by his 24th birthday he had enjoyed successful runs of three operas.

At the height of Korngold’s popularity, Austrian director Max Reinhardt lured his compatriot to the bright lights of Hollywood to orchestrate music for his 1934 big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Demand quickly grew for Korngold’s talents as a composer, conductor, and pianist, and over the next three years, he penned six film scores while commuting between Los Angeles and his home in Vienna.

But in 1938, Korngold’s life, and the lives of all Jewish people in Austria, came under tremendous threat as the Third Reich began to expand its authoritarian empire. Sensing imminent danger, Korngold accepted an offer to score the swashbuckling action film The Adventures of Robin Hood—only this time his entire family made the transatlantic journey to the United States, where they found safe haven shortly before the Nazis annexed Austria.

In defiance of the devastation being wrought in his homeland, Korngold vowed to compose nothing but film music until “that monster” Hitler was defeated. But as time passed, he was increasingly frustrated by the quality of projects he was offered by studio executives who prioritized profit over artistic expression. After World War II ended, Korngold completed his final film scores and officially retired from the industry in 1947. When a journalist asked about that decision, the composer replied: “When I first came to Hollywood, I couldn’t understand the dialogue. Now I can.”

Korngold was hungry to return to the world of concert music, but his first postwar works were panned—including his sensuous, nostalgic Violin Concerto, which one critic bullyingly described as “more corn than gold.” The composer’s return to Austria in 1949 further diminished his hopes of returning to the stage. Performances of his work were poorly attended, and colleagues and critics alike belittled his sweetly expressive music as passé, a relic of 19th-century Romanticism that stood worlds away from the clinical modernism now favored by European composers. Despondent, he left Austria believing his music would be forgotten forever.

Back in California, Korngold faced few prospects for new work. So when the American School Orchestras Association approached him to compose two short pieces for student orchestra, he relished the opportunity and completed the first of the commissions, Theme and Variations, in 1953. While its simplified harmonic language may have catered to an intended audience of young musicians, any orchestral player would be delighted to perform Korngold’s work, whether student, amateur, or professional. (In fact, the premiere performance that November was given by the Inglewood Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ernst Gebert.)

As the lilting opening theme, marked “like an Irish folk tune,” takes on different emotional characteristics with each new variation, Korngold unleashes the cinematic sweep of his singular musical style. Opening moments of relaxed, pastoral beauty give way to puckish dancing in the winds, inspiring chorales that evoke the rich, burnished sound of a Hollywood studio orchestra, and a final march of jubilation that recalls the “March of the Merry Men” from his Oscar-winning score to The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Theme and Variations, Opus 42 in his catalog of works, marked the final original composition Korngold completed before his death in 1957—the manifestation of a superstition that had plagued the composer all his life. “From the time I was a boy,” he shared with his wife, Luzi, “I knew I would not make it beyond Opus 42.” Although Luzi assured him that if he counted his film scores, Korngold had written far more than 42 works—and although he had begun work on a second symphony that would surely have become his Opus 43—the composer’s self-fulfilling prophecy came to pass. —Michael Cirigliano II