"Glück, das mir verblieb": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch ed. by Heide Stockinger (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Glück, das mir verblieb": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch ed. by Heide Stockinger Vincent Kling Heide Stockinger, ed., "Glück, das mir verblieb": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. 232 pp. Heide Stockinger's edited collection "Glück, das mir verblieb": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch, titled after "Marietta's Song" in Die tote Stadt, joins two biographies published in the 1990s, a recent concert review, and occasional other publications to reassess the life and work of a composer by turns extolled and scorned. The distance between the highs and lows of Korngold's reception calls for some background to contextualize the book under review. [End Page 116] Korngold's precocious compositional talent evoked serious comparisons to none other than Mozart. Major works in several demanding genres flowed with seeming ease from the adolescent composer's pen. His father Julius, Vienna's most influential music critic, injected himself harmfully, championing his son's talent with damaging aggressiveness. The senior Korngold was already mistrusted as a "Parteigänger statt Journalist," to quote the Wiener Zeitung (13 October 2020); "Die Schützenhilfe des Vaters war so massiv, dass die Familie ins Satirevisier von Karl Kraus geriet." Kraus's opinions were revered enough to cast a long shadow, admiration for the composer now tainted by his father's distasteful, even unethical pushiness. Kraus's condemnation was so crucial in shaping the Korngolds' reputation, at least in Vienna, that its omission in this book leaves a gap in understanding reception history. Nor did the younger Korngold's esteem increas when he became a Hollywood composer after his forced emigration at a time when writing "movie music" disqualified any composer from being taken seriously. Reviewing a performance of his violin concerto in those years, critic Irving Kolodin coined the glib tagline "more corn than gold." In his memoirs (Im Atem der Zeit), fellow composer Ernst Krenek pillories the father for turning his son into "ein gebrochener, desillusionierter Mann, der nichts aufweisen konnte als eine Anzahl unbedeutender, längst vergessener Filmmusiken." Accordingly, Korngold's large-scale Symphony in F-Sharp, completed in 1952, could not find performance in his lifetime and was long dismissed—although Dmitri Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter admired it (144)—as an overblown hodgepodge of recycled themes from his film scores. Until just recently, that is: the symphony was several times hailed as a masterpiece on a recent American tour by the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, culminating in an ecstatic review by Alex Ross in The New Yorker (30 November 2022). Korngold's story is not one of an abrupt upgrading or sudden rescue from complete obscurity, however. As Kurt Arrer points out in "Eine gefeierte (Wieder)-Entdeckung," "Von einem völligen Vergessensein […] konnte eigentlich ohnehin nie die Rede sein" (161), as he traces the continuity in performing Korngold's works through the decades, even though "die Muskigeschichte […] verlief anders […] als der enttäuschte, ja über die Nachkriegsentwicklung erbitterte Komponist im kalifornischen Exil gemeint hatte" (160). Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt has held the stage almost [End Page 117] constantly since its premiere in 1920, after all, but a marked rediscovery can likely be dated from 2004, when the Salzburg Festival, in its "Österreichischer Exilkomponisten" series, mounted a new production and presented more than a few of his other seldom-heard works (Arrer 160–69). In addition to Arrer's essay, the contributions in this book, according to the back cover text, "legen nicht nur die Gründe für die Neubewertung von Korngolds Kompositionen dar, sondern beziehen auch sein reiches kulturelles Umfeld im ausgehenden Kaiserreich, die Aufbruchsstimmung nach der Katastrophe des Ersten Weltkrieges und die Ächtung jüdischer Künstler in den 1930ern mit ein." The collection opens with an appreciation by conductor Simone Young, who has conducted both the violin concerto and Die tote Stadt, who indicates that she is glad that Korngold's music "wieder einen festen Platz im Repertoire der internationalen Opern- und Konzerthäuser erobert [hat]" (9). Editor Stockinger sketches in her foreword the content of the following essays, beginning with a reminiscence (translated into German by Edith Wutka) by Korngold's granddaughter, Kathryn Hubbard Korngold, a professional violinist and...