When Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in Hollywood he was all but forgotten despite having been one of the most important composers of film music ever. Rather than providing ‘atmosphere’ in reaction to a film’s events, Korngold created large-scale scores linked by motifs representing particular characters, as Wagner did in his operas, and contributed immensely to the mise-en-scène with a masterful knowledge of instrumental colour.

He had learned it all in Vienna, where he was one of the most striking prodigies since Mozart. Mahler heard some of the ten year-old Korngold’s music and pronounced him a genius.

Korngold wrote his incidental music to Shakespeare’s late comedy for a German-language performance by the Vienna Burgtheater at Schönbrunn Palace in 1920. Around this time, at the age of 23 he wrote his greatest opera, Die tote Stadt.

In the play, Don Pedro of Aragon visits his friend Don Leonato in Messina, Sicily en route home from waging war, with a retinue of soldiers including his bastard half-brother Don John, Benedick, and Claudio. Claudio and Hero, Leonato’s daughter fall in love and are to be married, but Don John hatches a plot to discredit Hero as unfaithful. Meanwhile, confirmed bachelor Benedick spars constantly with confirmed spinster Beatrice (Leonato’s niece) about the evils of marriage, until they are tricked into admitting their love for each other. At the last minute Don John’s ploy is accidentally uncovered by ‘two foolish officers’, Dogberry and Verges.

For the suite, Korngold extracted five of the 14 numbers and arranged them to create a satisfying musical shape independent of the play’s chronology.

The ‘Garden Scene’ reminds us that, as Richard Taruskin notes, ‘never was a musical hypnotist more adept than Korngold’. It accompanies Benedick’s soliloquy on the nature of love in Act II scene iii and forms a bridge to the next act.

Program notes supplied by Gordon Kerry © 2020

The late-Romantic musical language that Wagner developed in Tristan und Isolde was highly chromatic, with extended passages of unresolved dissonance to mimic the erotic tension of the story, and it laid the foundations for the expressionist idiom of the early Richard Strauss in operas such as Salome or Elektra, and much of the music of Mahler. Slightly younger than these, Arnold Schoenberg would in due course push this highly chromatic language further, in works such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, and on into atonality, where the concept of consonance no longer applied, and then systematise this in the twelve-note serial method. In doing so he would become one of the most revered and reviled figures of the 20^th century.

In his early twenties, Schoenberg’s aspirations to be a musician were briefly derailed; on the death of his father he was obliged to get a real job and joined a Viennese bank in 1895. (The bank obligingly went bust soon after, leaving Schoenberg free to return to music, making a living from orchestrations and piano reductions of popular music.) During his time at the banks, he continued to play cello in the amateur string ensemble of the Polyhymnia Music Club, which was led by the composer (and later Schoenberg’s brother-in-law) Alexander Zemlinsky; a review from early 1896 mentions a Notturno for strings and harp. The score was presumed lost until only recently, when the musicologist Antony Beaumont found the manuscript of an ‘Adagio for harp and strings’ in the Library of Congress, and identified it as the missing piece. There is some disagreement between editors as to whether Schoenberg was involved in the premiere.

Composed two years before Verklärte Nacht, this other nocturnal piece is one of those early Schoenberg works described by Charles Rosen as ‘Brahmsian, even Dvořákian’, opening out from warm, tonal lyricism in the alto and tenor regions of the band, adding the bright line of a solo violin and the delicate tracery of the harp as the music climbs ever higher.

Program notes supplied by Gordon Kerry © 2020

Mahler is known primarily as the composer of epic symphonies, works that, like the world, ‘embrace everything’; his surviving chamber music consists solely of this opening movement from the Piano Quartet, and 24 bars that he sketched for the scherzo of the same work.

In the face, at first, of parental opposition he attended the Vienna Conservatorium from 1875 for three years. There, however, he distinguished himself, despite frequently ‘playing truant’, both as a pianist and as a composer. It was as a student that he began to be drawn to the ‘modernist’ school of music represented by Wagner and Bruckner (whose classes Mahler informally attended). When he graduated he won first prize for composition, for a now-lost scherzo for piano quintet.

The Piano Quartet seems to be one of several chamber works with piano that he wrote while a student (this work is thought to have been composed in 1876) – clearly he himself would have played the piano in performance. While its form is a well-crafted sonata-allegro, suggesting Mahler’s respect for the tradition embodied (especially in Vienna) by Brahms, its opulent harmony – derived from Wagner – and distinctive themes already show this great composer in embryo. The work’s key, A minor, looks ahead to the bleak tragedy of the Sixth Symphony, especially in the opening theme, tolling deep in the piano, answered by emotive, yearning counterpoint from the strings that gains in speed and turbulence. The first part of the central development section of the movement is perhaps Brahmsian in the density of the texture, the emphatic rhetoric built on repetition and sequence, and the occasional rhythmic dislocation of simple duple metre against triplets. All this surging soon leads to a kind of exhausted calm, with plangent string melodies against rippling piano figurations.

Rhythmic energy reasserts itself, though is subverted into a violin cadenza before a surprisingly quiet close.

Program notes supplied by Gordon Kerry © 2020