For example, when one examines his score for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing composed for a Vienna stage production in 1918, the inspired facility of musically highlighting words and action is clearly already present. Yet it was Korngold’s experience in theatre, and more importantly, of underscoring dialogue and dramatic action that would serve him so well later on, when he finally arrived in Hollywood. Collaborations with Hubert Marischka in Vienna and Max Reinhardt in Berlin, Paris and London resulted in outstanding adaptations of works by Johann Strauss, Jacques Offenbach and Leo Fall as well as original stage works utilising the music of the Strauss family, most notably Walzer aus Wien which later became the international stage hit, The Great Waltz.Īs a result of these successes, UFA approached Korngold with a number of projects, including Erich Pommer’s famous musical Der Kongress Tanzt but Korngold was either too busy or not interested in scoring a film at the time and declined. He had already been approached by UFA, Germany’s leading studio as early as 1930, to score musicals, chiefly as a result of his tremendous success in the field of operetta. Korngold’s interaction with cinema did not begin in America. He was the first to compose in long, flowing lines and to conceive and construct truly symphonic scores that are contrapuntally developed throughout with a complex multi-thematic structure. It was more in the method – in how he used this material to underscore the remarkable visuals on screen that makes this early work so important now.įilm music may well have remained in this somewhat basic, simplistic style were it not for the arrival of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a musical genius who immediately grasped the potential of the medium, completely transformed it and, at a stroke, created the style and rhetoric of film music that endures to the present day. With KING KONG, he demonstrated conclusively what a powerful impact music could have on a film, even though in structural terms at least, his score was fairly simplistic in design and scope, comprising only three or four major themes. Steiner had already begun scoring key scenes in earlier films like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME and A BILL OF DOVORCEMENT and relished the chance to do a full score. The film’s extraordinary fantasy scenes provoked laughter at its early previews and the producer David O Selznick asked Steiner to clarify the mood of certain scenes with music. Max Steiner (1888-1971) another Viennese émigré, is credited with writing the first genuine original film score – that for KING KONG (released March 1933) and even this came about almost by accident. The gradual development of original musical scoring for sound films only really began in late 1932 when it finally became possible to record music, dialogue and sound effects on separate optical tracks and combine them in a composite soundtrack. Only a brief musical introduction under the film’s main titles was heard, partly because of the technical limitations of early film recording. Musical scoring was initially deemed unnecessary – it was spoken dialogue that mattered. With the coming of sound to motion pictures in late 1926, all of this changed. By the 1920s, standard classical repertoire was ruthlessly mined in the creation of what amounted to suites, issued by the studios for important films and performed by symphony orchestras in the larger cinemas or a lone pianist in smaller, provincial houses. Although throughout the years of silent cinema, live musical accompaniment had always played an important role, few original scores were composed. When Erich Wolfgang Korngold first arrived in Hollywood in October 1934, film music was relatively undeveloped. The Maestro of Hollywood by Brendan CarrollĪn examination of Korngold’s first film assignment A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and how he subsequently transformed motion picture scoring into an art form.“The Role of Paul,” by Wilhelm Pfeiffer.Music analysis: “Beim Grossmutterchen” by Troy Dixon.Three Violinists: A Look at Korngold’s Violin Concerto. Stokowski and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Music.North American Centennial of Die tote Stadt.The American Premiere of Korngold’s Symphony in F-Sharp.The Premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Quartet #3 in D Major, Op.America’s Introduction to Erich Wolfgang Korngold.The adventures of Robin Hood analysis by Bill Wrobel.
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