Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born in Brünn (today Brno) in 1897, was the most spectacular child prodigy of his generation: a boy whose ballet Der Schneemann, written at eleven, became a sensation in Vienna, whom Mahler called a genius, and who by his early twenties had written the international operatic hit Die tote Stadt (1920). His was a late-Romantic idiom of opulent harmony and soaring melody, unfashionable in an age turning toward modernism. In 1934 Max Reinhardt invited him to Hollywood, and Korngold went on to become a founder of the symphonic film score, winning Oscars for Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood and bringing full Viennese Romanticism to the cinema. As a Jew, he found that the rise of the Nazis turned that move into exile, and it very likely saved his life. After the war he tried to return to concert composition with a violin concerto and a symphony, but felt out of step with musical fashion. He died in Los Angeles in 1957; the rehabilitation of his concert music came decades later.