Erich Korngold (1897-1957) was born in Brünn, the capital of Moravia, then under the Austrian Empire, today in the Czech Republic and called Brno.  His family was Jewish, but they did not practise their religion and saw themselves first and foremost as Austrian.  His father, Julius, was music critic of the local paper.  He had two sons, Hans Robert (after Schumann) and Erich Wolfgang (after Mozart).  In 1901 he was appointed music critic of the most important Viennese newspaper, and he soon established himself as the most influential critic in Vienna, which at the time was the musical capital of Europe, home to a great number of famous musicians, including Mahler, Bruckner, Strauss and Schoenberg.

Erich showed musical qualities from the age of three, and at the age of five he started to have lessons in piano and music theory.  When he was six he started to write his own music, already showing an individual and daringly "modernistic" personality which greatly worried his father who, uncertain of how to deal with his son's musical education, asked the advice of Mahler.  Erich was just ten years old when he played to the famous composer and conductor, performing at the piano, from memory, a long and complicated cantata which he had written the year before.  Without hesitation Mahler declared him ‘a genius’, and recommended that he should study with Alexander von Zemlinsky.

Zemlinsky was highly regarded not only for his great craftsmanship but also as a very imaginative composer and a fascinating teacher, and he and the young student developed an instant mutual liking and respect.  Although Erich was happy to accept Zemlinsky's authority, he nevertheless continued to develop his own independent musical personality, often surprising and even scandalizing his teacher with his daring use of harmony and his highly original concept of form.

Erich's first works (the Piano Trio Op. 1, the ballet-pantomime Der Schneermann, the first Piano Sonata) created a sensation with Vienna's public and critics.  By the time he was sixteen years old his music was being performed all over Europe, and his opera Die tote Stadt (‘The Dead City’), composed when he was twenty, became world famous.  Two chamber music works which immediately followed were also very successful: the Piano Quintet, which we are performing at this year's Festival, and the String Sextet which we are planning for next year.

He wrote several other operas, as well as many orchestral, chamber and piano works.  His music is tuneful, warm, luscious, imaginative and full of energy and optimism, and he firmly believed that atonality and serialism, championed by Arnold Schoenberg, would "result in ultimate disaster for the art of music".

Another aspect of his creativity was the making of arrangements of operettas, especially those by Johann Strauss, the Waltz King whose music Korngold liked enormously.  It was this involvement with operetta that brought Korngold together with the famous theatre director Max Reinhardt.  In 1929 their production of Die Fledermaus by Johan Strauss was a great hit with the Viennese public and brought to the composer much popular success.

By 1934 anti Jewish cultural policy by the Nazi regime had deprived many artists of their work.  One of the first to suffer was Reinhardt, who emigrated to America attracted by lucrative work in Hollywood.  Contracted by Warner Brothers, his first film was A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which he thought of using Mendelssohn's incidental music: but this needed to be arranged, and he convinced his employers that Korngold would the best person for the job.

The film, whose cast included James Cagney, Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland and a youthful Mickey Rooney, in his first film, playing Puck, was an enormous success.  Korngold was immediately offered other contracts, which however he turned down.  But once back in Vienna, he found that the Nazi threat to Austria and the danger for Jews had dramatically increased.  He decided to return to Hollywood, where one of the first films he wrote music for was Captain Blood, which launched the career of Errol Flynn.  This was followed by Anthony Adverse, with Frederic March, Olivia de Havilland and Claude Rains, based on the book by Harvey Allen.  The story was of epic proportions, and Korngold provided it with a grand and most striking score, for which he and the music department of Warner Brothers received an Oscar.  Altogether he wrote over 20 film scores, of which the one for The Adventures of Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and, in an unforgettable rendition of a "baddy", Basil Rathbone) earned him a second Oscar.

By 1946 however he had lost interest in writing for films and, with the war over and in a strong personal financial situation, he decided not to renew his contract with Warner Brothers.  He was fifty, and he explained that ‘I feel I have to make a decision now, if I don't want to be a Hollywood composer for the rest of my life.’
His first subsequent concert work was a Violin Concerto, for which he used material from several of his film scores.  The first performance, given by the great violinist Jasha Heifetz, was a huge success, and was followed by a recording (which, now available on CD, is unsurpassed) and many other performances.

But the combination of the ascendance of the new atonal trends and his association with Hollywood brought a strong reaction against his music.  His music was still successful with audiences, but critics and performers, with few exceptions, either ignored him or considered him passé.  The composer who as a young boy was called a genius by Mahler and had often taken the breath away with his daring modernism, was now even dismissed as ‘twentieth-century trivia’.  His attempts at resuming his place in Viennese cultural society were cruelly repelled, and he returned to Los Angeles (he and his family had become American citizens in 1939).  He died in the Hollywood Hospital on 29th November 1957, a few months after his sixtieth birthday, his music totally neglected.