Out of Water

Hollywood had been good to Erich Wolfgang Korngold. But was Hollywood good for him?

Forty years ago Erich's family & friends thought he might be a new Mozart. He had one of Mozart's names, the same precocity, and a gift for melody. His ballet (The Snowman), composed when he was eleven, was produced in Vienna two years later. Before he was 20 he had written two operas. The Dead City, written at 23, won him fame throughout Europe, and a new star, Maria Jeritza, introduced it at Manhattan's Metropolitan.

Max Reinhardt brought Korngold to the U.S. in 1934 to arrange Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music for the screen. Since then Korngold has written some of the movies' best music, won two Oscars (for the scores for The Adventures of Robin Hood, Anthony Adverse). Currently cinemagoers can hear his passionate cello concerto winding and whining through Bette Davis' Deception.

Like many high-paid Hollywoodians, Erich Korngold, now a plump and unpressed 49, wondered whether he could still write music that would stand alone. Most movie music sounds banal when played in concert halls.* Composer Korngold took a summer off to write a violin concerto.

Last week, Jascha Heifetz and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave the Korngold concerto its first Manhattan hearing in Carnegie Hall.

Snorted the New York Times's critic Olin Downes: "This is a Hollywood concerto. . . . The melodies are ordinary and sentimental in character; the facility of the writing is matched by the mediocrity of the ideas." Quipped the New York Sun's Irving Kolodin: "More corn than gold."

* Most notable exception: Prokofiev's score for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.

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