Steven Schwartz wrote:

>Everything you've said could be applied equally to bel canto opera.
>Of course, we don't discuss that here, either.  Perhaps it's not Really
>Classical Music after all.  The "standing up on its own" criterion is
>a red herring.  They're not meant to stand up on their own, any more
>than Mendelssohn's complete Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music is.
>Mendelssohn made a suite, just as Herrmann, Rozsa, Honegger, Milhaud,
>Shostakovich, Walton, Thomson, Copland, and Prokofiev did.  Now tell me
>why these guys didn't write classical music.

Korngold could have done this.  I mention it because I remember his
biographer, Brendan Carroll (I think that ws his name), writing that when
you consider Korngold's movies scores as a whole, they were in many ways,
long tone poems.  That's the way I have always thought of them, but there
was really something operatic about Kings Row.

Roger Hecht