When Korngold was ten, his father took him to Mahler so that the boy could play over on the piano his recently composed cantata, Gold. As the music unfolded, Mahler stalked up and down the room muttering, “A genius—a genius.” By eleven, Korngold wrote a pantomime, Der Schneemann (The Snowman), which, after it was orchestrated by Zemlinsky, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera (on October 4, 1911)—the composer was thirteen years old! There were suspicions that this music had actually been composed by the boy’s father, one of the best-known music critics of his day, but Julius Korngold replied, sensibly and humorously, that if could write music of such quality, he would not spend his life writing articles about other people’s music!

First-rate musicians were fascinated with the talented boy. Arthur Nikisch commissioned a work for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra—the first orchestral work that Korngold himself orchestrated, the Schauspiel-Ouvertüre (Overture to a drama). Korngold began to write operas—two of them at eighteen! When he was twenty-three, Die tote Stadt made him famous all over the world, with productions in eighty-three opera houses. He wrote two more operas after that, and his last, Die Kathrin was scheduled for performance in 1938 when the Nazi Anschluss meant that the same racial attacks on the art of Jewish musicians would take place in Vienna as in Berlin—and the performance was canceled.

By the mid 1920s, though, Korngold, still regarded as a prodigious talent, was also considered a representative of the past; his devotion to the romantic style of the turn of the century gave him a retrospective position in the Vienna of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. He arranged operettas (including some of Strauss’s A Night in Vienna and Cagliostro in Vienna); the great German director Max Reinhardt invited him to Berlin for productions of Fledermaus and La belle Hélène. By this time Korngold had already found a new métier, one in which he was to become a pre eminent master—as a composer of scores for films in Hollywood. He visited first in 1933, accompanying Reinhardt, who was to film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and who wanted Korngold to adapt Mendelssohn’s score of incidental music for the film. He began to compose original scores, too, and immediately discovered that he had a special flair for this kind of work. Two of his scores (Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) received Oscars. When the Nazis overran Austria, Korngold found a welcoming home in California, where, by 1947, he had composed eighteen film scores of great distinction.

He vowed not to write any more concert music until “the monster in Europe is removed from the world.”  But after the war he gave up writing film music and returned to the concert hall, with his Violin Concerto in D major. For some thirty years, the great violinist Bronislaw Huberman used to ask, whenever he visited the Korngolds, “Erich, where’s my concerto?” When writing the film score for Another Dawn in 1937, it struck Korngold that one of the themes would provide excellent material for a concerto, and it was with this that he began soon after the war ended.

If you are a devoté of movies from the 1930s, you may be surprised to find that you recognize some of the music in this concerto. Korngold, who realized that most classical musicians did not consider film music to be serious, decided to recycle some of the musical ideas that had already appeared in films (much as J. S. Bach would turn a piece for unaccompanied violin into the overture to a festive cantata, or Handel would turn a cheery little Italian duet into one of his most famous choruses in Messiah). And it was not unknown for a composer of film music to do the same thing. Prokofiev reworked the isolated, sometimes fragmentary musical cues from the film score for Alexander Nevsky into a cantata that is one of his most satisfying large-scale concert works, and just about the time Korngold was writing his violin concerto, Ralph Vaughan Williams was turning his musical score for Scott of the Antarctic into his Sinfonia Antartica.

Korngold was, naturally, familiar with the great tradition of romantic violin concertos, and he composed a piece that would fit snugly into that world, offering the soloist the opportunity for lyricism, by turns gentle and soaring, and for spectacular virtuosity. After completing two movements, he asked a violinist friend to play through it; The result was disastrous; the friend made many false starts and made the piece sound horribly cacophonous. Korngold was on the verge of dumping the piece, but a friend of his was the manager of Jascha Heifetz, whose breathtaking virtuosity and assurance was world famous. When he looked at the work, Heifetz urged Korngold to make the finale even more demanding technically.

Huberman never got around to playing “his” concerto; in the end the piece was premiered by Jascha Heifetz. The concerto was a great success in St. Louis, but Korngold was worried about the response of the New York critics, who sniffed at film music and were unlikely to be generous. Indeed they were not. Though audiences loved the work, the critic of the New York Sun famously, and rather nastily, called it “more corn than gold.” For some years it was only the Heifetz recording that made it possible to hear the concerto. But times have changed, Korngold’s star has risen, and many violinists have found the concerto very much worth putting in their repertory.

The soloist opens the work with a long passage, rising yearningly, drawn from Korngold’s score for the 1937 film Another Dawn. The second theme of the movement comes from the 1939 film Juárez. His first Academy Award score, Anthony Adverse (1936), provided the material for the delicate emotions of the Romance, and the light-hearted comedy of The Prince and the Pauper (1937) provided the lively material for the racing finale. The Korngold concerto is not a work to puzzle over; it is one, rather, to sit back and simply enjoy. —© Steven Ledbetter