This is the story of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), who bridged the worlds of serious music, operetta and film scores. The son of Vienna's most powerful turn-of-the-century music critic, he achieved legendary status as a child-prodigy composer with the operas "Violanta" and "Die Tote Stadt". Pressures of adult life steered him into arranging the operettas of Johann Strauss, his contemporaries and then Hollywood. Korngold became a highly regarded composer of incidental music for films such as "Sea Hawk" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He ignored the changing tides of musical fashion, and continued to write in his own romantic idiom, creating scores which establish him - within the film-music genres - as one of this century's most influential composers. This study offers a reappraisal of his life and works. This text is part of the 20th-century composers series, examining composers in a biographical context, and offering a comprehensive study of key figures in the creation of 20th-century music. None of the books in the series presume a knowledge of specialized terms or musical notation. Each book in the series features a list of works, a bibliography, and a discography.

Author Biography

Jessica Duchen is a freelance music journalist whose work appears frequently in the Guardian and BBC Music Magazine. Founding Editor of Piano magazine, she is the author of Gabriel Faure, also in the 20th-Century Composers series.