Faith in Music!

This chapter contains Erich Korngold's last published statement on music. In it he made no mention of his own. Written in October 1955, less than half a year after what would turn out to be his final, dispirited return from Europe, “Faith in Music!” recapitulates a position he outlined in “Notes for an Interview.” However, he updates it for the postwar world, with its collective witness to what had recently been the unimaginable, technologized violence of the interceding years. Against the backdrop of his critical failures in Austria and West Germany, and recasting his apology for the untimeliness of all great works of music, he wrote: “The true creative artist does not wish to recreate for his fellow man the headlines screaming of atom bombs, murder, and sensationalism found in the daily paper.”