Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is a representative of the last gasp of late romanticism in Vienna. He never veered from this established idiom and never ventured into modernistic experiments. He was a true child prodigy whose works were performed in public in Vienna by the time he was 11 (although the fact that his father was the music critic of Vienna's most prestigious newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, may have helped).

In the early part of the century Korngold was known mainly through his operas (Violanta, Die tote Stadt, Das Wunder der Heliane) but today he is primarily remembered by his pioneering film music. At the urging of the director Max Reinhardt, with whom he had staged Die Fledermaus in Berlin in the 1920s, he came to Hollywood in 1934 where he wholeheartedly embraced the new medium, and incidentally, saved his life.

By the time Korngold came to Hollywood, his “classical” compositions were regarded as superficial and irrelevant to the proponents of mainstream twentieth-century modernism. But Hollywood adored him. Korngold saw film as the true successor to the operatic stage. His success as film music composer was phenomenal, two of them, Anthony Adverse (1936) and Robin Hood (1938), won Oscars.

The film music scene in Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s was dominated by German and Austrian émigrés who had escaped Nazism. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Korngold once again took up his classical pen in 1945 to write his Violin Concerto he dedicated it to an old family friend, the doyenne of the émigrés, Franz Werfel's wife and Gustav Mahler's widow, the legendary Alma Mahler. No less a master than Jascha Heifetz premiered the concerto in St. Louis.

It is an amusing exercise, when listening to the Concerto, to note how many themes and passages immediately call to mind the musical conventions we have come to associate with certain kinds of film action. We make these associations on the basis of countless hours of movie going, during which the musical “language” has implanted itself in the subconscious – perhaps even into the collective unconscious – and controlled our emotional response. In the Concerto Korngold reworked music from his successful film scores, including Juarez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936), Another Dawn (1937) and The Prince and the Pauper (1937).

But the Concerto is not all “movie music.” Korngold transforms the themes to conform to the concert conventions of the concertos of composers from Mendelssohn to Max Bruch. The technical and expressive demands, as well as the harmonies, surpass melodic clichés. Although it reflects the composer’s nostalgic attachment to fin-de-siécle Viennese Romanticism, even the most discerning twenty-first-century ears are eclectic and accepting, no longer trapped in the clutches of atonal dogma. Most important of all, Korngold’s writing for the violin is everything a soloist could dream of.

The first movement main theme, from Another Dawn, is a multifaceted melody and an ancestor of the Star Trek theme. The more sentimental, second theme is from Juaréz. The development inhabits the violin’s stratosphere.

The second movement is a rhapsodic romantic reverie on a theme from Anthony Adverse. As opposed to the sprawling melodies from the first movement, this one is surprisingly simple. Heating up the passion, Korngold uses a more expansive melody for the middle section.

In the energetic, humorous finale, Korngold teases the listener by delaying an outright statement of the movement’s single theme, from The Prince and the Pauper. Instead, the soloist starts with a fanciful melody containing hints of the theme for a couple of minutes, until the soloist finally “pins it down.”