Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Symphony

* Symphony in F#, op. 40
* Sechs einfache Lieder (excerpts)
* Die tote Stadt - "Mariettas Lied"

Barbara Hendricks (soprano)
Philadelphia Orchestra/Franz Welser-Moest
Total Time: 63:00
EMI 56169-2

* Symphony in F#, op. 40

Munich Philharmonic Orchestra/Rudolf Kempe
Total Time: 48:32
Varese Sarabande VSD-5346

Summary for the Busy Executive: Ravishing and more.

Best known during his lifetime for his movie scores, Korngold
nevertheless composed significant concert music before and after his
Hollywood adventure.  His film career began in the Thirties and ended,
for all intents and purposes, in the Forties - in terms of years, not
very long.  Yet the film music turned out to overshadow his considerable
accomplishments in other genres, notably opera.  Korngold, of course, had
fled the Nazis.  He and his family landed in Hollywood by great good
fortune.  The Warner Bros.  studio provided him with a way to support
himself, and, in the process, he elevated the musical standards of film
scoring.  Korngold regarded films as operas without singing and his sharp
sense of symphonic construction (much tighter, by the way, than Strauss's)
pulled together scenes in long argumentative arcs.  It's one way to score
films, and Korngold remains the practitioner with few peers.  Korngold had
few illusions about the quality of the films he worked on, even though he
worked solely on "A" pictures, mostly featuring Bette Davis chewing the
scenery.  Nevertheless, he always gave his best, and his best was good
enough to rework into new symphonic pieces, notably the violin concerto.

By the time Korngold was ready to return to concert work, however, he
found that the movie music had stigmatized him.  Furthermore, many of the
most influential music critics dismissed him as old hat or simply ignored
him.  It was as if Korngold the composer had dropped off the face of the
earth as far as concert programming was concerned.  I remember reading some
critic or other sneering at Korngold as the "world's richest composer," as
if money disqualified you from writing decent stuff.  It was also not true.
Strauss made far more than Korngold.  Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky were no
slouches pursuing the buck either.  Much the same happened to Strauss (with
the added complication of his very minimal ties to the Third Reich), and
many of the late Strauss operas are still mainly names in books.  Within
his style, however, Strauss had changed, absorbing the influence of Mozart
and approaching orchestration in a more chamber-like way.  Korngold had
changed the style itself in his late music.  Those who know the Violin
Concerto or Die tote Stadt might be quite surprised by the Cello Concerto
or the Symphony.  The demands of films and the incredible community of
interwar Hollywood musicians and composers (ranging from mossbacks to Young
Turks) broadened Korngold's music in terms of dramatic range and technical
resource.  It's quite obvious that he has heard and absorbed the work of
more radical, Modernist composers.  Unfortunately, after the war, he got
commissions only with difficulty and then usually from organizations with
little prestige.  In fact, he returned to movie work shortly before he died
at a relatively young age in 1957.

Korngold's music sings, in a Straussian way, and is usually gorgeously
scored.  His songs are simpler, sweeter, and, to me, more memorable.  I
prefer his orchestration to that of Strauss.  His sense of form is surer.
You find little to none of Strauss's sprawl.  And yet, I think Strauss
unquestionably a great composer and Korngold simply a fine one.  Someone
once defined genius as the ability to come up with something that seems to
have no precedent.  Strauss does this time and time again in dazzling works
like Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, and Elektra.  Korngold often produces
works of greater finish and even greater surface beauty than Strauss.  It's
music eminently loveable and in exquisite taste.  It enchants and stirs
you, but it doesn't amaze you.  Amazement isn't everything, of course (one
can be amazed both by sunsets and by sheer stupidity).  Nevertheless,
that's the difference to me between the two composers.  As Dr.  Johnson
said, comparing Pope to Dryden: he neither rises so high nor sinks so low.

Korngold intended his only symphony for Bruno Walter, who for one reason
or another, never performed it, although Walter did praise it as the finest
modern symphony he knew.  Apparently, he regarded the Mahler symphonies as
un-modern.  Bad luck dogged this work.  The 1954 premiere on Austrian radio
was apparently a disaster: it's a damned difficult piece to play and to
interpret.  Two years after the composer's death, Mitropoulos wrote in
glowing terms: "All my life I have searched for the perfect modern work.
In this symphony I have found it.  I shall perform it next season."
Mitropoulos died shortly thereafter, before any performance.  Rudolf Kempe,
as far as I can tell, revived the work over twenty years after the composer
finished it and holds the title of First to Record, a shrewd move on the
part of the producer, George Korngold, the composer's son.  It first
appeared around 1972 on RCA, as a kind of pendant to the pioneering
Gerhardt-Korngold albums for the same label of film-score excerpts from
Hollywood's golden age.  Kempe was a Straussian of prodigious gifts.  His
three-volume set of Strauss orchestral music for EMI surely marks a high
point in the reception of Strauss's music.  Kempe, among other things,
scrupulously attended to orchestral texture and cultivated a gorgeous
orchestral tone, even from second-rank bands.

The symphony strikes me as Korngold's most "advanced" score.  The opening
notes, unusually scored (forte pizzicato strings, piano, timpani, maybe
harp, and xylophone), fall like heavy icicles.  In fact, most of the
symphony glitters like ice.  The clarinet gives out a highly dissonant
subject, taken up by the rest of the orchestra.  The development, in its
continual varying of the seed ideas, owes more to Mahler than to Strauss.
In fact, the first movement, if we consider pure sound, reminds me of
Bernstein's symphonies.  The second subject gives us a bit of a lyrical
break.  This approaches the Korngold we know, but the treatment of it is
much leaner than in early Korngold: no more, really, than melody against
held chords, with almost no counter-melodic commentary typical of the late
19th century.  A scherzo follows, with part of its subject made up from
the second subject group of the first movement.  One can rightly call this
music "fantastic," in the sense of grotesquerie.  The scherzo proper moves
swiftly and at times whimsically, heroically, or even harshly.  The colors
change in an instant.  The trio, on the other hand, arrives like a balloon
with its air spent - music from the doldrums.  While the fantasy of the
scherzo remains in keeping with late Romanticism, the trio is something
other - more disturbing, Angst-ridden.  The following adagio is for me
Korngold's most profound piece - but a little lower than corresponding
movements by Mahler.  Again, the rhetorical movement suggests late Mahler,
rather than Strauss.  Yet another Mahler link is Korngold's emphasis on the
sixth note of the scale (think of "ewig" at the finale of Das Lied von der
Erde) with the first theme.  Beyond the musical argument, the orchestral
sounds astonish.  At times, one hears a bit of Mahler, but for the most
part Korngold works from a cold sound-palette to a degree at odds with the
nature of the themes.  The combinations are intriguing: a duet for flute
and glockenspiel, another for violin and celesta.  One can hear some of
this in the movie scores, but not really before then, and at any rate
Korngold works the sounds into a long, involved development, a larger scale
than the typical snippet of film cue.  The movies, apparently provided
Korngold with a laboratory.  Although he didn't orchestrate many of his
scores, a task Hugo Friedhofer usually undertook, he did provide direction.
The finale, a driving rondo, depends on sharp articulation at great speed,
especially from the strings.  As in the Gershwin Concerto in F, themes from
previous movements provide material for the episodes, but they take on new
emotional meanings in their new contexts.  The wild harmonic shifts here
owe much to Strauss, especially the habit of modulating to somewhere in the
twilight zone only for an instant and then wrenching the music back to the
home key.

Kempe's recording remains a classic, as well as, I believe, historically
important.  The music moves right along, even during the adagio, and the
orchestra sound is brilliant.  The texture is preternaturally clear, but
this comes, to a large extent, from over-miking, especially obvious in the
finale.  If the art of the mixing board bothers you, this may not be the
recording for you.  On the other hand, you will hear stuff that otherwise
would get buried in the orchestral mass.  Welser-Moest's sonics come more
from the concert hall and less from Fantasyland, although I must add that
for me Korngold's music doesn't suffer from that kind of gilding.  In
general, Welser-Moestlingers even less than Kempe.  The reading just about
defines "brisk." Welser-Moest emphasizes the modernity of the symphony,
while Kempe keeps clear the connections to the late nineteenth century.
Kempe gives you sumptuousness, Welser-Moest movement.  For him, the
Philadelphia guys play like angels.  In fact, this is the best I've heard
them - with crisp rhythm and a sound of chamber-like clarity.  In general,
the two conductors have different strengths and shine in different
movements.  Kempe to me tells the "story" of the first movement better than
Welser-Moest.  The return to the opening chords convinces me as the cap to
a long symphonic argument more than in the younger man's account.  Honors
go to Kempe again in the scherzo.  Here, Welser-Moest rushes through,
losing the contrast between the spiky and the lyrical themes of the first
section.  On the other hand, Welser-Moest scores in the trio, keeping the
slightly queasy lassitude, but moving things along better than Kempe, who
almost (but not quite) becomes stuck in the long sighs.  I should also
mention the outstanding work of the Philadelphia french horns, who, when
called upon, soar without electronic enhancement and even manage to
diminuendo (hard to do on those temperamental instruments) and flawlessly.
However, as you can probably tell, the adagio is for me the heart of the
work.  Both conductors bring it off.  If I prefer Welser-Moest, it's
because he gets the orchestra to sing more beautifully and to remind me
more of Mahler.  For me, this translates to "more profound." Kempe's
account, on the other hand, reminds me more of Korngold's soundtrack to
Another Dawn, not bad in itself but short of what this music can deliver.
Welser-Moest gives us a finale of great delicacy and clarity.  Kempe lights
up the sky.  A vulgar sensualist, I go with Kempe here.

With the EMI disc, you get lagniappe, a selection of Korngold's orchestral
songs - the four of the Sechs einfache Lieder ("six simple songs") Korngold
orchestrated and "Mariettas Lied" ("Marietta's song") from the opera Die
tote Stadt ("the dead city").  The title of the "Simple Songs" says it all.
The melodies are pretty and the instrumental incarnation gorgeous, but they
lack the psychological insight of Mahler's songs, for example, not to
mention Schubert's, even though the latter two could certainly come up with
simple-sounding, beautiful tunes.  "Mariettas Lied," on the other hand, has
been popular with singers ever since the premiere of Die tote Stadt, and
rightly so.  Here, Korngold produces from Straussian materials a way with
a melody, unique to him.  As in Tristan, the lyrics about lost love are
no better than they have to be, but the music does what music does best:
lifts the text from its rather mundane level to a plane of glory.  The tune
is, naturally, gorgeous, but the music shows us a love strong as death.
Henricks is good, although not spectacular, and Welser-Moest and the
orchestra provide most of the interest here.

I can't choose between these two discs, as far as the accounts of the
Symphony go.  The Kempe recording is sumptuous and his reading is leavened
with vulgarity.  Welser-Moest shows a more elegant musical mind, and you
get the bonus of the songs.  If you have the money, get them both.

Steve Schwartz