Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was one of the most gifted and prodigious composers of the 20th century, whose career took a dramatic turn due to the rise of National Socialism and his subsequent emigration. Originally, he was widely celebrated in Vienna as a child prodigy and operatic wunderkind, but Korngold's forced exile to the United States during the Nazi era transformed him from a serious European composer into a pioneering figure of Hollywood film music.^[1] His life in exile was marked by both displacement and renewal—a paradox that defined his legacy and reputation for decades.

Korngold was born in Brno, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a cultured Jewish family. His father, Julius Korngold, was a prominent music critic in Vienna and a powerful figure in the city's cultural life. From an early age, Erich showed extraordinary musical talent. Gustav Mahler declared him a genius after hearing him play, and by the time Korngold was a teenager, his works were performed across Europe. His opera Die tote Stadt (1920), written when he was only twenty-three, solidified his status as a major composer of the post-Romantic tradition. His music, like Mahler’s or von Zemlinsky’s is resplendent with soaring, lyrical themes and particularly beautiful string writing from Korngold’s own skill with the violin.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Korngold enjoyed significant success in Austria and Germany. In 1934, the American director Max Reinhardt, a fellow Austrian émigré, invited Korngold to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a Warner Bros. film. Korngold accepted, unaware that this opportunity would become his lifeline out of Europe. His adaptation was a success, and he quickly found himself in demand as a film composer. He returned to Austria briefly but was summoned back to Hollywood in 1938 to score The Adventures of Robin Hood which won the Academy Award for best original score in 1939. The Anschluss occurred just weeks after Korngold’s return to Los Angeles, Korngold’s Austrian home was seized, and many friends and family members were forced into hiding or eventually deported. Korngold’s refuge in Hollywood mirrored other exiled composers and artists including Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and Hanns Eisler.^[2]

Korngold’s exile, though born of necessity, also marked a dramatic artistic transformation. In Europe, he had been a serious composer of operas and concert works; in America, he would become one of the founding fathers of the symphonic film score. His work for Warner Bros. on films such as Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940) introduced a bold, orchestral style to Hollywood that blended Wagnerian leitmotifs with a cinematic sense of pacing and drama. He won two Academy Awards and created a new benchmark for film music.^[3] The significant work of European emigres to Hollywood also raises an important aesthetic and musical discussion about viewing film music or commercial production as “lesser” than concert works, and the ghostwriting and other survival of serious “academic” composers. We certainly do not consider the diegetic music of Opera to be less academic or “serious” than symphonic writing, nor the extreme romanticism of composers like Wagner or Strauss to be inappropriately descriptive or emotional, and this standard should also be applied to recognizing the musical creativity and genius of many films from the 1930s and 40s composed by exiled European composers.^[4]

Despite his success, Korngold never fully accepted his exile. He continued to identify primarily as a concert composer and often viewed his film work as a compromise. After World War II, he tried to reestablish himself in the European classical scene, composing a violin concerto (premiered by Jascha Heifetz in 1947) and a symphony, among other works. Yet the world had changed. His style, once considered progressive, was now viewed by many critics as old-fashioned in the face of emerging modernist trends. However, the violin concerto which is still widely performed today is considered one of the most excellent concertos for the instrument of the 20th Century and reflects Korngold’s excellence for both the film studio and the concert stage. Similarly, his scores like that for Adventures of Robinhood are canonical examples from the golden age of American cinema, and were recognized within his lifetime.

Composed in 1945, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D Major marked his return to concert music after more than a decade in Hollywood and he considered the concerto, rather than his Oscar-winning film scores, his true artistic homecoming. Korngold dedicated the work to Alma Mahler, the widow of his mentor Gustav Mahler. Drawing on themes from several of his film scores such as Another Dawn, Anthony Adverse, and The Prince and the Pauper the concerto weaves cinematic lyricism with an unusual form and extensive virtuosic cadenzas, offering lush melodies and technical brilliance. The concerto was premiered on February 15, 1947, by Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. In the premiere of the concerto, we also see the importance of artist advocacy as Heifetz (and Issac Stern) were both influential in the reception of Korngold, Schoenberg, and Waxman’s concert works.

In many ways, Korngold's exile epitomized the broader dislocation experienced by countless artists during the Nazi era. He had been uprooted not only geographically, but also aesthetically—forced to reconcile his European identity with the demands of a new, commercialized art form in America.^[5] Though his contributions to film music were profound, he struggled with the artistic compromises he had made.

Korngold died in Los Angeles in 1957, still yearning for recognition as a “serious” composer. For decades, his reputation remained in limbo—celebrated by film aficionados but dismissed by many in the classical establishment. In recent years, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in his concert works, with new recordings, performances, and scholarship highlighting the depth and originality of his music.

Die tote Stadt and Marietta’s Lied

Die tote Stadt is a psychologically complex opera in three acts by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, based on the symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach. Set in the mist-shrouded city of Bruges, the city itself is imagined as a symbol of mourning and spiritual decay, and the opera explores themes of grief, obsession, and the struggle between memory and renewal.

The protagonist, Paul, is a young widower paralyzed by the death of his beloved wife, Marie. He lives in seclusion, preserving a shrine to her in their home filled with her possessions, including a lock of her hair. The gloomy, lifeless city of Bruges mirrors Paul's inner desolation. One day, Paul encounters a woman named Marietta, a dancer who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife. Struck by her physical likeness, he invites her into his home, attempting to revive his idealized love for Marie through her. Marietta, however, is vivacious, sensual, and independent—everything Marie was not. Their relationship becomes a tense battleground between past and present, memory and desire.

As Paul becomes increasingly obsessed with Marietta, his psychological state unravels. The boundary between dream and reality dissolves. In a fevered hallucination, Paul murders Marietta by strangling her with Marie’s hair—an act symbolic of his refusal to let go of the past. But this moment is revealed to be a dream, or perhaps a psychological projection. He awakens, shaken and changed. The most famous aria, Marietta’s Lied ("Glück, das mir verblieb"), encapsulates the opera’s central tension between transient beauty and the inevitability of loss. In the opera’s conclusion, Paul resolves to leave Bruges, the “dead city,” behind. He finally recognizes that clinging to the memory of his wife has imprisoned him in grief. Rather than remain haunted by the past, he chooses life and renewal, acknowledging that the living cannot exist in the shadow of the dead. Die tote Stadt is a masterful meditation on mourning, memory, and psychological transformation. Written when Korngold was only 23, it remains his most acclaimed operatic work, a powerful exploration of emotional paralysis and the human capacity to choose life in the aftermath of devastation.

Alexandra Birch, November 2025

Sources

[1] Brendan G. Carroll, The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 189–213.

[2] Michael Haas,  Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), Chapter 8.

[3] Kevin Bartig, "Korngold in Hollywood: Reimagining the Composer," The Musical Quarterly 91, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 274–309.

[4] Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 98–103.

[5] Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), 54–63.

Images are courtesy of the Korngold Society. https://korngold-society.org/site/