On October 26, 27 and 28, acclaimed guest conductor Fabien Gabel leads Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, a program of musical storytelling featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Korngold and Bernard Herrmann. Learn more about innovative film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his swashbuckling Suite from The Sea Hawk, which concludes the program.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold began his career as perhaps the greatest child prodigy Vienna had seen since Mozart. By the time he was twelve years old, both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss had declared him a genius. He quickly produced a series of acclaimed works that climaxed with his wildly successful opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) of 1920. In addition to his original compositions, the onset of the Great Depression led him to arrange and conduct music for revivals of classic operettas, which proved reliably lucrative in that difficult time.
It was this talent that first brought him to Hollywood in 1934 to create arrangements of Mendelssohn’s music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a Warner Brothers adaptation of the play (you can watch a rare video of him playing the piano from a “making of” promo for A Midsummer Night’s Dream here). The film was a success, and the studio soon enticed him to compose original scores; however, he was reluctant to permanently resettle in the United States, despite his Jewish background and the rise of the Nazism in neighboring Germany. It was thanks to an offer to score The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 that he and his family left Austria less than two months before the Anschluss. His parents barely escaped on the last unrestricted train to Switzerland.
Korngold’s Mozart-like gifts proved invaluable in Hollywood; unlike other composers, he never used cue sheets or click tracks when composing or recording film scores. His memory was such that he could simply look at a sequence and compose music that fit it exactly. He could also compose even complex, intricate music extremely quickly, an invaluable asset in the fast-paced movie business. Most importantly, his gifts as an opera composer revolutionized film music; the opulent orchestral sound and symbolic leitmotifs that we associate with the Golden Age of Hollywood were largely his creation.
It would only take Korngold seven weeks to complete the 96-minute score of The Sea Hawk, and many critics regard it as his best film music. The 1940 adventure film starred Errol Flynn as a swashbuckling privateer in the service of Queen Elizabeth I:
Though the film is set in the 15th century, the Spanish, with their plans for world domination, are oppressive stand-ins for the Axis powers, while the English clearly represent the Allies.
The original suite Korngold prepared from the film score was reconstructed in 2003 by Patrick Russ (orchestrator for Dead Poets Society, Chocolat, George of the Jungle, Ghostbusters and many other films). It begins with the dashing fanfare theme that accompanies many of our hero’s daring feats:
It then immediately segues into the love theme, which is used not only for the hero’s interactions with the love interest (a proud Spanish lady), but also for feelings of freedom and patriotism.
A reprise of the heroic theme leads to a longer development of the love theme, followed by lively music representing the hero’s ship and the pomp and splendor of Elizabeth’s court. Slower, more exotic music takes us to the jungles of Panama; a violent outburst then accompanies the hero’s duel with a treacherous English lord in league with the Spanish. The return of the heroic theme signals the hero’s escape from the life of a galley slave on a Spanish vessel, and the suite ends with a reprise of the love music and one last gallant flourish. —Calvin Dotsey
Don’t miss Korngold’s Suite from The Sea Hawk on October 26, 27 and 28, 2018! Get tickets and more information at houstonsymphony.org.
