• Home
• Basic Repertoire
• Composers
• Books and Scores
• Reviews and Articles
• Buying Guide
• Music Links 

Related Links

Recommended Links

Site News

What's New for
Winter 2018/2019?

Site Search

Follow us on
   

Affiliates

---

CD Review

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Symphony

• Symphony in F# Major, Op. 40
• Sechs einfache Lieder (excerpts)
• Die tote Stadt - "Mariettas Lied"

Barbara Hendricks, soprano
Philadelphia Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst
EMI 56169 63:00

Rerelease of EMI 86101
Amazon - UK - Germany - Canada - France - Japan - ArkivMusic - CD Universe

• Symphony in F# Major, Op. 40

Munich Philharmonic Orchestra/Rudolf Kempe
Varèse Sarabande VSD-5346 48:32

Summary for the Busy Executive: Ravishing and more.

Best known during his lifetime for his movie scores, Korngold nevertheless composed significant concert music before and after his Hollywood adventure. His film career began in the Thirties and ended, for all intents and purposes, in the Forties – in terms of years, not very long. Yet the film music turned out to overshadow his considerable accomplishments in other genres, notably opera. Korngold, of course, had fled the Nazis. He and his family landed in Hollywood by great good fortune. The Warner Bros. studio provided him with a way to support himself, and, in the process, he elevated the musical standards of film scoring. Korngold regarded films as operas without singing and his sharp sense of symphonic construction (much tighter, by the way, than Strauss's) pulled together scenes in long argumentative arcs. It's one way to score films, and Korngold remains the practitioner with few peers. Korngold had few illusions about the quality of the films he worked on, even though he worked solely on "A" pictures, mostly featuring Bette Davis chewing the scenery. Nevertheless, he always gave his best, and his best was good enough to rework into new symphonic pieces, notably the violin concerto.

By the time Korngold was ready to return to concert work, however, he found that the movie music had stigmatized him. Furthermore, many of the most influential music critics dismissed him as old hat or simply ignored him. It was as if Korngold the composer had dropped off the face of the earth as far as concert programming was concerned. I remember reading some critic or other sneering at Korngold as the "world's richest composer," as if money disqualified you from writing decent stuff. It was also not true. Strauss made far more than Korngold. Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky were no slouches pursuing the buck either. Much the same happened to Strauss (with the added complication of his very minimal ties to the Third Reich), and many of the late Strauss operas are still mainly names in books. Within his style, however, Strauss had changed, absorbing the influence of Mozart and approaching orchestration in a more chamber-like way. Korngold had changed the style itself in his late music. Those who know the Violin Concerto or Die tote Stadt might be quite surprised by the Cello Concerto or the Symphony. The demands of films and the incredible community of interwar Hollywood musicians and composers (ranging from mossbacks to Young Turks) broadened Korngold's music in terms of dramatic range and technical resource. It's quite obvious that he has heard and absorbed the work of more radical, Modernist composers. Unfortunately, after the war, he got commissions only with difficulty and then usually from organizations with little prestige. In fact, he returned to movie work shortly before he died at a relatively young age in 1957.

Korngold's music sings, in a Straussian way, and is usually gorgeously scored. His songs are simpler, sweeter, and, to me, more memorable. I prefer his orchestration to that of Strauss. His sense of form is surer. You find little to none of Strauss's sprawl. And yet, I think Strauss unquestionably a great composer and Korngold simply a fine one. Someone once defined genius as the ability to come up with something that seems to have no precedent. Strauss does this time and time again in dazzling works like Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, and Elektra. Korngold often produces works of greater finish and even greater surface beauty than Strauss. It's music eminently loveable and in exquisite taste. It enchants and stirs you, but it doesn't amaze you. Amazement isn't everything, of course (one can be amazed both by sunsets and by sheer stupidity). Nevertheless, that's the difference to me between the two composers. As Dr. Johnson said, comparing Pope to Dryden: he neither rises so high nor sinks so low.

Korngold intended his only symphony for Bruno Walter, who for one reason or another, never performed it, although Walter did praise it as the finest modern symphony he knew. Apparently, he regarded the Mahler symphonies as un-modern. Bad luck dogged this work. The 1954 première on Austrian radio was reportedly a disaster: it's a damned difficult piece to play and to interpret. Two years after the composer's death, Mitropoulos wrote in glowing terms: "All my life I have searched for the perfect modern work. In this symphony I have found it. I shall perform it next season." Mitropoulos died shortly thereafter, before any performance. Rudolf Kempe, as far as I can tell, revived the work over twenty years after the composer finished it and holds the title of First to Record, a shrewd move on the part of the producer, George Korngold, the composer's son. It first appeared around 1972 on RCA, as a kind of pendant to the pioneering Gerhardt-Korngold albums for the same label of film-score excerpts from Hollywood's golden age. Kempe was a Straussian of prodigious gifts. His three-volume set of Strauss orchestral music for EMI surely marks a high point in the reception of Strauss's music. Kempe, among other things, scrupulously attended to orchestral texture and cultivated a gorgeous orchestral tone, even from second-rank bands.

The symphony strikes me as Korngold's most "advanced" score. The opening notes, unusually scored (forte pizzicato strings, piano, timpani, maybe harp, and xylophone), fall like heavy icicles. In fact, most of the symphony glitters like ice. The clarinet gives out a highly dissonant subject, taken up by the rest of the orchestra. The development, in its continual varying of the seed ideas, owes more to Mahler than to Strauss. In fact, the first movement, if we consider pure sound, reminds me of Bernstein's symphonies. The second subject gives us a bit of a lyrical break. This approaches the Korngold we know, but the treatment of it is much leaner than in early Korngold: no more, really, than melody against held chords, with almost no counter-melodic commentary typical of the late 19^th century. A scherzo follows, with part of its subject made up from the second subject group of the first movement. One can rightly call this music "fantastic," in the sense of grotesquerie. The scherzo proper moves swiftly and at times whimsically, heroically, or even harshly. The colors change in an instant. The trio, on the other hand, arrives like a balloon with its air spent – music from the doldrums. While the fantasy of the scherzo remains in keeping with late Romanticism, the trio is something other – more disturbing, Angst-ridden. The following adagio is for me Korngold's most profound piece – but a little lower than corresponding movements by Mahler. Again, the rhetorical movement suggests late Mahler, rather than Strauss. Yet another Mahler link is Korngold's emphasis on the sixth note of the scale (think of "ewig" at the finale of Das Lied von der Erde) with the first theme. Beyond the musical argument, the orchestral sounds astonish. At times, one hears a bit of Mahler, but for the most part Korngold works from a cold sound-palette to a degree at odds with the nature of the themes. The combinations are intriguing: a duet for flute and glockenspiel, another for violin and celesta. One can hear some of this in the movie scores, but not really before then, and at any rate Korngold works the sounds into a long, involved development, a larger scale than the typical snippet of film cue. The movies, apparently provided Korngold with a laboratory. Although he didn't orchestrate many of his scores, a task Hugo Friedhofer usually undertook, he did provide direction. The finale, a driving rondo, depends on sharp articulation at great speed, especially from the strings. As in the Gershwin Concerto in F, themes from previous movements provide material for the episodes, but they take on new emotional meanings in their new contexts. The wild harmonic shifts here owe much to Strauss, especially the habit of modulating to somewhere in the twilight zone only for an instant and then wrenching the music back to the home key.

Kempe's recording remains a classic, as well as, I believe, historically important. The music moves right along, even during the adagio, and the orchestra sound is brilliant. The texture is preternaturally clear, but this comes, to a large extent, from over-miking, especially obvious in the finale. If the art of the mixing board bothers you, this may not be the recording for you. On the other hand, you will hear stuff that otherwise would get buried in the orchestral mass. Welser-Möst's sonics come more from the concert hall and less from Fantasyland, although I must add that for me Korngold's music doesn't suffer from that kind of gilding. In general, Welser-Möst lingers even less than Kempe. The reading just about defines "brisk." Welser-Möst emphasizes the modernity of the symphony, while Kempe keeps clear the connections to the late nineteenth century. Kempe gives you sumptuousness, Welser-Möst movement. For him, the Philadelphia guys play like angels. In fact, this is the best I've heard them – with crisp rhythm and a sound of chamber-like clarity. In general, the two conductors have different strengths and shine in different movements. Kempe to me tells the "story" of the first movement better than Welser-Möst. The return to the opening chords convinces me as the cap to a long symphonic argument more than in the younger man's account. Honors go to Kempe again in the scherzo. Here, Welser-Möst rushes through, losing the contrast between the spiky and the lyrical themes of the first section. On the other hand, Welser-Möst scores in the trio, keeping the slightly queasy lassitude, but moving things along better than Kempe, who almost (but not quite) becomes stuck in the long sighs. I should also mention the outstanding work of the Philadelphia french horns, who, when called upon, soar without electronic enhancement and even manage to diminuendo (hard to do on those temperamental instruments) and flawlessly. However, as you can probably tell, the adagio is for me the heart of the work. Both conductors bring it off. If I prefer Welser-Möst, it's because he gets the orchestra to sing more beautifully and to remind me more of Mahler. For me, this translates to "more profound." Kempe's account, on the other hand, reminds me more of Korngold's soundtrack to Another Dawn, not bad in itself but short of what this music can deliver. Welser-Möst gives us a finale of great delicacy and clarity. Kempe lights up the sky. A vulgar sensualist, I go with Kempe here.

With the EMI disc, you get lagniappe, a selection of Korngold's orchestral songs – the four of the Sechs einfache Lieder ("six simple songs") Korngold orchestrated and "Mariettas Lied" ("Marietta's song") from the opera Die tote Stadt ("the dead city"). The title of the "Simple Songs" says it all. The melodies are pretty and the instrumental incarnation gorgeous, but they lack the psychological insight of Mahler's songs, for example, not to mention Schubert's, even though the latter two could certainly come up with simple-sounding, beautiful tunes. "Mariettas Lied," on the other hand, has been popular with singers ever since the première of Die tote Stadt, and rightly so. Here, Korngold produces from Straussian materials a way with a melody, unique to him. As in Tristan, the lyrics about lost love are no better than they have to be, but the music does what music does best: lifts the text from its rather mundane level to a plane of glory. The tune is, naturally, gorgeous, but the music shows us a love strong as death. Henricks is good, although not spectacular, and Welser-Möst and the orchestra provide most of the interest here.

I can't choose between these two discs, as far as the accounts of the Symphony go. The Kempe recording is sumptuous and his reading is leavened with vulgarity. Welser-Möst shows a more elegant musical mind, and you get the bonus of the songs. If you have the money, get them both.

Copyright © 1999, Steve Schwartz