Read on to discover all about the Korngold Symphony in F sharp - a work that depicted the dark days of Nazi Germany...
Korngold Symphony in F sharp... a rare recording featuring the composer himself
A shout, heavily accented: ‘First movement!’ Erich Wolfgang Korngold begins to play his own Symphony in F sharp on what must once have been a piano. Soon the sounds are making my study walls shake – or maybe it’s just me that’s shaking, because the volcano of history itself seems present in this musical roar of pain.
Last year I received an email from the record producer Richard Guérin. He was about to release a double CD of Korngold’s Symphony: a live concert performance from 1997 by the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana conducted by John Mauceri, alongside a piano recording by the composer himself, which had been preserved in the archive kept in the garage of his grandson Leslie Korngold, and which Mauceri had consulted before tackling the work. Neither recording has been previously released. At last, here they are.
Korngold Symphony in F sharp... a discovery in the archives
Mauceri had first contacted the Korngold family in the early 1990s while preparing to record the Symphonic Serenade, hoping that something useful might be lurking in the archive that Leslie had inherited. Leslie subsequently spent months in the studio with the music historian and archivist Lance Bowling, transferring his collection of lacquer records onto DAT. ‘During those sessions, we found a recording of my grandfather playing the Symphonic Serenade, which I shared with John. It became one of the tools he used to prepare for that recording,’ Leslie says. ‘A year or two later, he called me again, wondering if I had anything that would help with the Symphony.’ Leslie checked his database – and found that he did.
Leslie and Mauceri both suggest that the composer’s recording was intended as a tempo guide for conductors, but that it seems far more besides. First, Korngold was an extraordinary pianist: ‘You can hear effects in this that can’t be realised with an orchestra,’ Mauceri says. But other clues to the Symphony’s nature are present: notably, the Scherzo is so fast that Korngold himself can’t play it.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold... a Jewish composer forced to flee the Nazis
As a child prodigy in Mahler’s Vienna, Korngold once had the musical world at his feet, but after the Nazis took power in Germany, his music was banned because he was Jewish. At the invitation of his friend and colleague, the theatre director Max Reinhardt – who had left Europe as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933 – the composer went to Hollywood in 1934 to arrange Mendelssohn’s music for Reinhardt’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers Studios, quickly spotted his instinct for drama and timing and persuaded him to write original movie scores. With his wife Luzi and their younger son George, he was in Hollywood working on The Adventures of Robin Hood when Hitler’s forces marched into Vienna.
Korngold’s parents and his elder son Ernst, who was at school in the Austrian capital, managed to escape to Switzerland; Ernst, cramming into the last train out, had to sit on the lap of a Nazi soldier. Korngold always credited Warner Brothers and the US for saving their lives.
After the war, he attempted to go back, expecting that his former home would welcome him. The reality bit hard: nobody wanted his music anymore. After two years, he retreated to Hollywood. ‘It really destroyed him, and it was in this atmosphere of horrified disillusionment that the Symphony came into being,' says Mauceri. 'It was designed as his comeback piece, but stands instead as a very different testament.
Korngold Symphony in F sharp... a work shaped by war
Korngold insisted that the Symphony was ‘pure’ music, not remotely programmatic. Mauceri saw through that notion and regarded its dedication to President Franklin D Roosevelt as a further clue – Roosevelt having been president of the country that took the composer and his family in.
‘I cannot buy the fact that this is a non-programmatic symphony,’ Mauceri says, ‘and I also don’t buy the fact that anything that’s called “programme music” is lesser art than so-called “pure music”. That’s a crazy invention by the 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick because of his admiration for Brahms and hatred for Wagner. And we still live in an environment where it’s taken for granted that movie music somehow isn’t real music because it’s descriptive. That is nonsense! Movie music is as much music as Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egmont by Beethoven or Schumann’s Manfred. This is dramatic music – it’s as simple as that.’
Clues to the Symphony's meaning
Having put this theory to Ernst Korngold, Mauceri later received a call from him, saying that he was right: ‘Ernst had just remembered that his father once referred to the flute melody in the first movement as the “Theme of Reconciliation”. That idea becomes the main theme of the last movement. I believe that there it signifies rebuilding Europe.’
Leslie, who is George’s son, accepts Mauceri’s view. ‘My grandfather returned to Europe, he saw his home country again, and he saw it in shambles. He saw what had happened to it. I don’t know how those things could not have affected him or inspired him. Going back to Austria after the war, he wanted to try and revive his career and his reputation.
And if, in fact, he consciously wrote this symphony as a portrait of the war and his feelings about what had happened, how could he have sold that? He couldn’t! He could not go back to Vienna and say, “The first movement is a reflection on the rise of National Socialism and the Adagio is the Holocaust.” It would have been over in a second. He wouldn’t have had one ear listening to him. It was very difficult to get the Symphony performed at all during his lifetime. Perhaps he was wise in saying this was simply “pure” music.
‘But personally, when I think about his music, he always seemed to work with a story, whether it was his early pieces, his operas, his work in musical theatre and operetta, or his film scores. To think that suddenly his music had no direct inspiration or connection to a narrative seems the bigger jump.’
Korngold Symphony in F sharp... pure and raw emotions
At first, Leslie found the Symphony heavy going. ‘This was so far removed from film music or some of the other musical expressions of my grandfather that it was hard to wrap my head around it,’ he says. ‘But slowly, with repeated listening, I’ve connected to its emotions. That’s where it gets really personal for me. The more I listen to it, the more I feel my grandfather’s emotions, very pure and raw. I perceive it as a way that he was communicating who he was and how he felt, and a way of sharing that with the family at the time, and maybe for those generations yet to come that would only get to know him in this way. I could hear who he is, how he felt and how deep his emotions could run. If you’re human, you can’t listen to this, especially the Adagio, without breaking down.’
For me as well (I wrote a book about Korngold some years ago), hearing him play the Symphony opens up a new dimension. What I sense behind it is not depression, ire or disillusion, but rather a type of mortal agony that feels stronger than any human frame could survive for long. Korngold died aged 60 of a stroke in 1957. No longer do I wonder why.
Korngold... a painful legacy
Mauceri, who also conducted the premiere recording of Korngold’s opera Das Wunder der Heliane for Decca’s Entartete Musik series in the 1990s, has written a book, The War on Music, on four composers who managed to escape the Nazis and went to America: Korngold, Hindemith, Weill and Schoenberg. This too is an explosion of fury at a musical world that appears to have accepted the unacceptable: the murder and exile of an entire generation of musicians and their creations.
The first time he conducted an all-Korngold programme in Germany, he asked the orchestra if they had ever heard of Korngold before. ‘Silence,’ he recounts. ‘You see, after the war – and still today – there’s a terrible, unspoken embargo on this music, because it’s too painful. The Austrian and German people’s brand, heart and soul is classical music. It is impossible for them to accept the fact that they would have murdered their greatest composers.’
This, in his view, is what led 20th-century avant-garde music to lose touch with its audience. ‘They wanted an audience on their terms. They never seemed to ask the question: What is the thing we’re selling? If you have tomato ketchup and no one wants to buy it, you might ask whether the actual thing is what people don’t want. They try to change the packaging, make it more friendly or accessible – but the actual thing is the question. Why is it that Boulez and Stockhausen became the official voice of Europe when, in fact, few people wanted to hear that music? And yet we still are honouring their memories. You have to wonder if there was some other reason for this.’
Korngold... a legacy restored
In Korngold’s case, high-profile, top-level championship by leading musicians – André Previn, Nicola Benedetti, Kirill Petrenko and John Wilson, to name but a few – has finally helped restore the music to wide acclaim. But there are more where he came from, still waiting for similar attention: composers whose music was smeared, dismissed and banned by the Third Reich have faced three quarters of a century of neglect, denigrated even today for reasons that are spurious at best or that, at worst, parrot Nazi slurs. Mauceri’s book asks the key question outright: why have we let Hitler win the cultural battle even though he lost the war?
These extraordinary recordings are therefore at the front of an essential process: a form of musical truth and reconciliation. The Korngold Symphony holds both the pain of truth and, explicitly, the hope of reconciliation. Perhaps, finally, it is time to face the music.
