This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication! I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead. Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂
Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Here’s something you may find a little stilted…
Prince John: “Have your men close in.”
Sir Guy has his men close in.
Little John: “They’re closing in! I hope Robin sees them…”
Cut to a very alert-looking Robin Hood, who obviously sees them.
Bishop of the Black Canons: “I must commend your highness for the subtlety of your scheme!”
Well, I like to think that since that production script writers, and filmmakers in general, have honed their subtlety just a touch. But it’s fun to watch, isn’t it? This is from a very colorful 1938 film by Warner Brothers based on a story that everyone knows, Robin of Loxley. What’s your favorite Robin Hood film? Is it Disney’s? Or Kevin Costner’s gritty “Prince of Thieves”? How about Mel Brooks’ bawdy and hilarious “Men in Tights”? Fortunately for us we can choose whichever style fits our mood, and I have met some people who prefer the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckling classic to all the rest. Its official title is “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.
The film is gorgeous – a feast for the eyes. It was created just as the Technicolor process was finding its legs and Warner Brothers’ costume and set designers were clearly only too happy to take advantage of the bold new medium, just as the designers of Oz were also keen to do for similar reasons (for more about the Wizard of Oz, see this post). Another point of interest in this version of Robin Hood, one that fascinates me and many of my music-loving friends, is the score. Listen to it again and see if you can follow the underscoring. Do you notice how rich and, yet, nuanced it is? Whatever the dialogue and acting may lack in understatement the music more than compensates for.
If you had played me the score and told me it was taken from a Wagner opera, I may very well have believed it (for more about Wagner see this post and this one). The composer of this score, Eric Wolfgang Korngold, is one of a number of Austrian musicians who eventually settled in the United States and contributed their considerable talents to entertaining Americans. Other musicians who follow that pattern include Max Steiner, who arranged music for Broadway shows and then contributed music for hundreds of Hollywood films (most notably Gone With the Wind), and Frederick Loewe who, in collaboration with librettist Alan Jay Lerner, created Broadway shows like My Fair Lady that endure in popularity to this day. Incidentally, all three of these musicians with Viennese roots were child prodigies of some degree or another and all three came from Jewish backgrounds.
Steiner and Korngold have both gone down in history as incredibly formative to the art of film music scoring, inspiring countless film composers and setting a very strong precedent for lush, late-Romantic orchestral music in American films. But in spite of these similarities, their professional aims were rather different. Steiner seemed content to be a “work-a-day” composer for major studios, churning out hundreds of well-wrought scores. Korngold on the other hand was able to be quite selective about the projects he accepted, scoring only 13 over the course of his career. But, they are fantastic and distinctive scores, written at such a level of quality that their influence transcends their relatively scant quantity. Korngold was not content to settle into a long, steady career as a film composer as Steiner was. It seems that Korngold accepted film scoring as a unique and formidable challenge, but was still mostly focused on creating music for the concert hall in a way that Steiner was not.
Film scoring may have been a detour for Korngold too, encouraged simply by serendipity, or lack thereof. Shortly after Korngold travelled to the United States at the invitation Warner Brothers to score The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he won an Oscar (the first film composer ever to do so), the Anschluss imperiled the Jews of his native Austria and he remained in Los Angeles, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1943. He would never return to his native Austria. He sought to resume his writing for the concert hall and stage in America with several notable concert works written after he left film scoring.
Before his travels to America to become involved with Hollywood, Korngold was having a ball (so to speak – see this post) working the scenes of musical Vienna, crafting operas, ballets and concert works. He scored major early critical successes with a ballet composed at age 11, and two operas composed shortly after that. Early admirers of Korngold included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini. In addition to these stage works he was also at the same time creating chamber music and short orchestral works. And he seems to have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Paul Wittgenstein, having written three pieces for his masterful left hand: a concerto, a piano quintet, and a concert suite for piano and strings. The young and flourishing Korngold was in fact one of the first composers Wittgenstein approached about creating works tailored especially for him.
The suite for piano, two violins and cello, opus 23 (for more about the opus system, see this post) was the latest of the three works Korngold composed for Wittgenstein. It is for the fewest forces and arguably the most elegant and direct in its communicative power. Its collection of five movements could only have been assembled by an ambitious German or Austrian composer writing between the World Wars, so peculiar is its selection of movements to the sensibility of the musicians inhabiting that time and place. In opus 23 Korngold creates a pastiche of musical procedures which seem to pay homage to the finest and most prominent figures of the German and Viennese persuasion. But if I had to compare it the work of one composer, I would probably describe it as a Mahler symphony cast for a crisp and transparent chamber group. There is a significant scale and sweep to many of the movements, five in number as was often the case with Mahler’s symphonies, exploring incredibly varied areas of the human experience, sometimes sincere (as in the beautiful Song fourth movement), sometimes biting and cynical (as in the sarcastic Groteske third movement), and always with an inspired and engaging melodic invention. The opening Prelude and Fugue is a nod to pure German rigor. The Waltz appeals to the Viennese, however Second Viennese (see this post) the disjointed and angular melody may be, and the Rondo Finale once again evokes the influence of Mahler who crafted similar finales himself (see this post). That Mahler pervades Korngold’s Suite is unsurprising – Mahler served as an important champion for Korngold, having pronounced him a genius early in the prodigy’s career. The Song is the shortest movement, the most direct, and the easiest to digest. It is also sublimely moving and beautiful:
While Korngold is known to many music lovers as one of the greatest film composers in history, a reputation that is richly deserved, his heart never left the concert hall. After his string of remarkable film scores Korngold returned to writing concert works even as he remained in the United States, sharing the invention and craftsmanship that shaped this early work, designed to showcase Wittgenstein’s ambitions, with American concertgoers.
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