Sinfonietta in B major, Op. 5

Program notes

About the Work

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was fourteen when he began the Sinfonietta, in the spring of 1912, and had just turned fifteen when the sketch was finished that August. Orchestrating it took another year, during which he also wrote a violin sonata and started his first opera. By then he was already a known quantity in Vienna: the son of a prominent music critic, and the composer of a ballet, Der Schneemann, written when he was eleven.

The first performance was given by the Vienna Philharmonic under Felix Weingartner on 30 November 1913. The score is dedicated to Weingartner, who had backed the boy from early on, and the orchestra that plays it in these concerts is the one that introduced it. Other conductors took it up quickly, and Richard Strauss, who had followed Korngold’s progress for some years, was among its admirers.

“Sinfonietta” undersells it. The piece has four movements, lasts around 43 minutes and calls for a large orchestra that includes two harps, celesta and piano. In everything but name it is a symphony. The diminutive is usually read as a pointer to the music’s sunny temper, and has nothing to do with its size.

The whole score grows from a motto of five rising notes built from stacked fourths. Korngold called it the “Motiv des fröhlichen Herzens”, the motif of the cheerful heart. It is there at the start of the first movement, it shapes themes in the other three, and it has the last word. The idea stayed with him: commentators trace the same rising figure through the music he wrote over the following decades, into the years in Hollywood.

The key is B major, a bright one, and the richly chromatic harmony keeps slipping away from it, so that the home key has to be won back again and again. The orchestral sound owes a good deal to Strauss. The long, buoyant melodies, and the ease with which they arrive, were his own.

The piece was played widely in the years that followed its premiere and then fell out of the repertoire. Korngold, who was Jewish, spent the Nazi years in exile in the United States, and performances of the Sinfonietta are still uncommon.

What to Listen For

Fließend, mit heiterem Schwunge (flowing, with cheerful swing). The motto rises at once and the first theme springs out of it, so the opening bars hold the material of the whole work. The second theme is slower and lilting, with a Viennese sway, and is built on the same fourths. A short development works up to a climax with brass fanfares; when the opening returns, the second theme is quieter than before, and the coda dwells on the five notes in a new harmonisation.

Scherzo: Molto agitato, rasch und feurig (fast and fiery). Brass and timpani launch it, with heavy accents and a restless main idea, and this is where the debt to Strauss is plainest. The middle section could hardly be more different: a slow, warm melody that drifts through one key after another. Listeners who know Korngold’s film scores will recognise the manner. An abbreviated return of the scherzo ends the movement with hammered chords.

Molto andante (dreamy). The shortest movement. A cor anglais sings a wistful melody over hushed chords coloured by celesta and harps. The strings then take up the motto, slowed down and richly harmonised, the music rises to a single climax, and it sinks back to where it began.

Finale: Patetico, Allegro giocoso. The start is the darkest music in the piece: a stern gesture, then a slow, uneasy climb from the lower strings. The mood does not last. The same idea turns up in the Allegro giocoso as a cheerful main theme, and a broad, songlike second melody follows it. The movement grows from one climax to the next with the motto threaded through it, and the five rising notes close the work in triumph.