Korngold – Up Close and Personal

The last months have seen me busy trying to tie up loose ends on two publications that I began over a decade ago and which will hopefully shed a good deal of personal light on Korngold and his time. I’ve already written extensively about Korngold, but much of that material was based on these two books. It was more than a decade ago, when members of the current Korngold family, based in Portland Oregon, approached me with a huge number of personal letters, none of which could be read since they were all in German. The handwriting was in the Austrian Kurrentschrift, an archaic script that to the casual observer, was as foreign to the Latin alphabet as Cyrillic. Someone had managed to transcribe most of them and it was on the basis of these transcriptions that I began to provide translations.

Several years later, an Austrian singer, Lis Malina, decided she would undertake a PhD on the women in Korngold’s operas. In the end, and during her research, she found herself sidetracked by the family correspondence. After Korngold’s death in 1957, Korngold’s wife, Luise (née von Sonnenthal (1900 – 1962)), known as Luzi; wrote what appeared to be a biography of her husband, as well as an account of their lives together. Despite it being presented as a ‘biography’, it extended only to some 90 pages. Luzi Korngold sent the manuscript to a friend at a Viennese publishing house that had just published her biography of Chopin. Tragically, he died before he could read the treatment, and the manuscript was returned. Luzi died soon afterwards and the two Korngold sons, Ernst and Georg, set about typing up the handwritten pages. It was then handed to an Austrian publishing house that specialised in the biographies of Austrian composers.

With the addition of a positive foreword by Bruno Walter and somewhat incongruously, a negative one by Paul Bekker, it was published as it was. There appeared to be no editorial input or fact checking at all. Lis Malina still saw the book as an extraordinary account of their lives together and used it as a template for the selection of letters she subsequently published under the title of Dear Papa! How is you? The title was taken from a letter written by one of the Korngold boys still learning English.

I realised that I had translated nearly all of the personal correspondence, and while I was music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum, I had also translated a good number of additional letters that were with publishers and various musicians. It was decided that the letters should be published in English, and the biography by Luzi should also be translated. The original idea was to publish both books together in a single volume in English. This seemed to make sense as Luzi’s biography, as intimate as it was, did not appear to be a finished work.

It soon became apparent that what had been presented as a ‘biography’ was in fact merely a concept of a biography. While it covered all of the years and creativity of her husband as well as her own extraordinary life, it had been written in a single sitting without returning to double-check names and dates. Protagonists would be referred to by their initials on one page, their first names on another, and then again by their surnames later on. She mixed up casts and dates of performances and mis-remembered some events so profoundly, that any publication of the book in English would be instantly discredited by anyone who had read the more thoroughly researched biographies by Jessica Duchen or Brendan Carroll.

Brendan had been our historic advisor on the Korngold exhibition at Vienna’s Jewish Museum, but more crucially, he had attended the recording sessions of Decca’s Das Wunder der Heliane. I was the recording producer and Brendan’s granular knowledge of every Korngold score paid off handsomely. The orchestral material of the opera was full of possible mistakes (it hadn’t been performed since its banning by the Nazis except a in a small theatre in the German city of Bielefeld) and the orchestral score was so dense it was difficult to know if things were genuinely intended of not. The conductor, John Mauceri, would raise a question about certain harmonic passages, which Brendan instantly identified as being similar if not identical to another work by Korngold, thereby according a degree of legitimacy. Though a new biography of Korngold had come out in German by Guy Wagner, Brendan Carroll remained the ultimate authority on the actual notes on Korngold’s manuscript pages. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of nearly every performance that had taken place during Korngold’s lifetime.

My translation of Luzi’s remarkable memoirs (as indeed, it was as much memoir as biography) instantly expanded as Brendan filled in the gaps, identified people referred to by initials, and unscrambled her mis-remembered performance dates and cast members. He added footnotes that extended her original text. In the end, we had a genuine book – a full book, in fact, at nearly 350 pages, it was now too large to be published together with the letters.

Luzi’s memoirs go well beyond any monograph. First of all, she doesn’t write as an outsider. She came from a family of Viennese, Jewish aristocracy. Her grandfather was the ‘Sir Laurence Olivier’ of his day, and was one of the first Jews whom the Emperor Franz Joseph elevated into the aristocracy. He would subsequently become head of the emperor’s own Court Theatre, which even today remains a centre for German theatre and a reference for the spoken and written language in the way that Tuscan Italian and Oxford English remain references of ‘received pronunciation’ in their respective countries. During his years on the stage, he arguably became Vienna’s first celebrity. His progeny continued in the thespian tradition, albeit by skipping a generation. Luzi starred in several silent films and her sister Helene was an actress in Max Reinhardt’s ensemble. It would be interesting if future research ever discovered that she appeared in the same production as Eduard Kornau, Erich Korngold’s uncle who was a member of the ensemble at Vienna’s Theatre in Josefstadt, (a district of Vienna), another institution operating under Max Reinhardt.

But Luzi was not just a pretty face and potential starlette; she was a splendid pianist as well and a more than adequate singer. Crucially, she was a musician who was up to the task of copy editing her husband’s works and stepping in as rehearsal pianist for any of his operas and operetta adaptations. The aforementioned biography of Chopin was the result of her polished and technically flawless performances of Chopin’s oeuvre, all rattled off by memory. She had passed the audition to Vienna’s Music Academy in both piano and voice and even studied with the composer Joseph Marx.  

Her infatuation with the chubby, far from handsome Korngold is perhaps difficult to understand for today’s more televisual public. There’s a playfulness in the letters that suggests they kept each other entertained in bed suggesting she was the sort of individual who found erotic appeal in Korngold’s genius rather than his looks. Her physical and emotional love of the man would remain throughout, again something made very clear in the correspondence.  

God should grant that we’re rolling in the hay again (with the result of child following child following child following child!)

With that thought, 1000 kisses and deepest love, (Erich to Luzi 22 January, 1929)

Coming from thespian aristocracy she remained unimpressed by Hollywood. She already knew how film stars had achieved their fame. There are letters to her future husband as to why she was quitting the movie industry and, in any case, she was more interested in music than acting. She appears to have fallen into acting as a result of her family name and her attractive looks.

…I met a former colleague, Mr [Friedrich] Feher. You would have seen him in [The Cabinet of Doctor]Caligari, he played the crazy young man. I know him as a dedicated and highly expressive actor. He’s also a bit wild, but ultimately a good person (son of stockbroker who took lessons with Grandpapa). Just so you know who this clever little Jewish kid is who made a film career in Berlin and is now the owner of a production company called ‘Vita’ based in Berlin–Vienna–Budapest!! I only found out all of this by accident yesterday while I was talking to him about my own film plans. He talked me out of all of them and said he wanted to test my ‘talent’ in order to offer me a contract, which would have had the disadvantage of keeping me perpetually committed, since in order to provide sufficient publicity for me, he’d be shelling out over a million and I would have no choice BUT to become a film star, as he would need to recoup his investment! So he schmoozed with me from 10 in the morning to 01:00pm – [He] didn’t test my talent…(extract from a letter 14 July, 1921 Luzi to Erich)

Erich Wolfgang was the son of Julius Korngold, one of the most powerful music journalists in the German speaking world. This generation lived in a different age and inhabited a different world. Without gramophones, radios and any means of hearing music other than attending a performance or indeed, being a performer, music had an unimaginable position in the Habsburg realm. Music reviews took up a third of the front page of the paper and could spill onto the following three or four pages. Works that had just been premiered were dissected in scrupulous detail with the assumption a musically literate readership would be able to follow the complexities of the composition’s structure and harmony. The huge number of émigré musicians from Vienna alone, who following Hitler’s annexation of Austria, would go on to occupy college and university positions across the New World, would soon become the object of satire. A music teacher, conductor, violinist or pianist without a foreign accent couldn’t be taken seriously. Even doctors, academics and lawyers were able to sit at the piano and rattle off symphonic, chamber and operatic repertoire by memory or by ear. The number of composers and professional performers to come out of Vienna, born in the first decades of the 20^th century, (or the last years in the 19^th century) seems astounding today. This was a city where the young Walter Aptowitzer (later Walter Arlen) would be taken to the Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch for assessment, and whose best friend at school, Paul Hamburger, would in London be remembered as a noted pianist, chamber musician and lied accompanist. Why Vienna produced top musicians at such an industrial scale is the subject for another article. In any case, as I’ve written in a previous blog entry, the seriousness with which the Viennese took music, is hilariously parodied in Musil’s epic novel, Man Without Qualities.

But returning to the demographic of Korngold and Sonnenthal, both came from secular Jewish families; well-connected and moving in a parallel Jewish universe that appeared to be culturally avaricious. In Vienna, these circles were mostly well off, though it would never be allowed to integrate into Vienna’s non-Jewish bourgeois circles, (read Alma Mahler’s diaries for confirmation), but instead, created their own parallel society with its own social calendar. To offer concrete examples, Arnold Schoenberg’s future wife, Gertrud Kolisch was a childhood friend of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the sister of Rudolf Kolisch, the leader of the Kolisch Quartet, while Max Reinhardt’s future wife, Helene Thimig was a childhood friend of Luzi von Sonnenthal and though Helene Thimig wasn’t Jewish, like Luzi, she was a child of thespian aristocracy. As the wife of Max Reinhardt, she was treated as if she was a ‘non-Aryan’ and joined him in American exile.

Korngold and Luzi were grandchildren of the vast liberalisation that took place following the 1867 constitution that accorded all citizens of the Habsburg realms full equality. This included Jews, Protestants and Muslims. Recently liberated Jews, already fantastically wealthy in finance or industry, built enormous palaces along Vienna’s recently constructed Ring Boulevard. Some like the Wittgensteins and the Gallias would convert and keep offspring from marrying other Jews, though converted Jews continued to marry other converted Jews, meaning the Nuremberg laws treated them as if conversion had never taken place. Again, a reference to Alma’s diaries shows how forbidden it was for non-Jews to marry into Jewish circles, even into those circles of wealthy, establishment figures, who had converted.  

The generation of Luzi von Sonnenthal and Erich Wolfgang Korngold no longer lived in the palaces along the Ring Boulevard. They tended to inhabit solidly constructed villas in the city’s leafier quarters. When in 1933, Erich and Luzi Korngold found themselves wealthy enough to purchase an additional country estate, they bought a large farm house that an aristocrat from an earlier century had turned into a hunting lodge and elevated its architectural status by adding a tower. From that point on, it had become known as a “Schlößerl”, (a little palace).

The Rothschild and the Effrusi families were bankers thereby lifting themselves into the “aristocracy of money”. They aped the existing aristocracy with stables of race horses, shooting estates in the Hungarian puszta and large collections of old masters or French Impressionists. The Korngolds and von Sonnenthals were in a different category altogether. Their social position was borne out of bourgeois entitlement. Their status symbols were concert and opera subscriptions. They moved in circles that purchased paintings by the Successionists and filled their homes with items from Vienna’s Arts and Crafts Movement. Their milieu was militantly secular and could dismiss the pretentions of the super-wealthy as easily as they snubbed the non-Jewish debutant class.

Luzi Korngold’s memoirs take us to the salons and dinner parties in Vienna’s suburban villas or elegant apartments rather than palaces (or ‘palais” as these large  urban mansions were called). Her friends were the children of successful actors or writers, pupils from Eugenie Schwarzwald’s progressive school for girls, (where Schoenberg and Egon Wellesz taught music, Kokoschka taught art and Alfred Loos taught architecture), or the children of successful industrialists who supported the arts. This intersection of bourgeois and extreme-wealth is best illustrated in the correspondence resulting from Paul Wittgenstein’s commissions from Korngold for works for the left hand. Wittgenstein maintains an de haut en bas attitude towards Korngold, that clearly saw in the composer more paid courtier than friend. In a later letter to Luzi, he seems almost to play down their relationship.

24 February 1958, New York, Paul Wittgenstein to Luzi

Dear Mrs Korngold,

Many thanks for your friendly lines from the 18th of February.

Which year I got to know your departed husband? I can’t really say with certainty. I only know that he came to us, together with his parents, when he was only a boy. He was perhaps about 11, at the most 13. We all had the impression that he was an important talent!

I met him quite often later when he composed the piano concerto and piano quartet for me; you should be able to find the dates on the manuscripts, which must still be in your possession. The piano concerto must be from the early 1920s; the quartet comes from the late ’20s. The concerto was premiered with the composer conducting during an event at a music festival in Vienna. I premiered the quartet with Rosé. This is all that I can tell you at the moment.

I only wish to emphasise one thing: given the endless circle of flatterers who surrounded him in his youth, I truly admired his modesty!

With best wishes,

Your devoted,

Paul Wittgenstein

The extreme wealth of the Rothschilds, Wittgensteins along with other banking or industrial dynasties would often result in confusing manifestations of cultural identification. On the one hand, the Rothschilds generously supported Jewish charities such as hospitals and orphanages while on the other, they were proud (as famously quipped by Metternich) of moving in exclusively non-Jewish social circles. Metternich joked he would only start inviting Jews to his home when the Rothschilds did.  The Wittgensteins went further and converted, with Karl Wittgenstein, the father of the philosopher Ludwig and the pianist Paul, forbidding any of his offspring from marrying anyone who was Jewish. It would be difficult to find a family more dysfunctional than the Wittgensteins.  Several of his children would commit suicide, some would pay off the Nazis in order to remain safe, while Ludwig famously gave everything away and lived in Cambridge. The one-armed pianist Paul simply commissioned works from as many famous composers as possible and kept them as personal property. If he liked them, they might end up published (Ravel and Korngold) and if he didn’t, they remained locked away (Hindemith).

This minor excursion is an explanation that differentiates the worlds of Vienna’s social circles and explains the attraction and devotion that grew between Korngold and his wife Luzi. There was no apparent outward solidarity in being Jewish, just a tacit cascading into social circles that ran in parallel. Indeed, being Jewish at all is barely mentioned, at least until the arrival of the Nazi Party when it’s referred to as being “non-Aryan”. To be “Jewish” was to suggest adherence to a religious confession; to use the Nazi definition of “non-Aryan” was racist and included anyone with Jewish grandparents. It’s the term one reads in letters from publishers, or between musicians as they try and navigate the new politics of the day.

Given the way things are in today’s Germany, it would have made your name too conspicuous and
without question you would have ended up on the blacklist. You need to be extra cautious to avoid becoming the target of damaging accusations. Even if the text on its own merits is reasonable, objective, neutral and harmless, the mere fact that it was written by a non-Aryan means it will be placed under the sharpest scrutiny. But apart from all of these factors, there is no conceivable way that a new work by you can be premiered on any German stage at present, and I would advise you against attempting one since you would be subjected to attacks you shouldn’t have to endure. (extract from a letter addressed to Korngold by his publisher, 11. October 1933, in the appendix of Luzi Korngold’s biography of her husband)

If something truly stands out in these two books, it’s the relative lack of discussion on Korngold’s most important film scores in Hollywood. The huge successes are merely mentioned but not discussed to the extent of earlier works. Life in America for the Viennese was interesting – orange groves and lots of sunshine – but for Austrians, Italy was close by and offered similar attractions. As I mentioned, Luzi came from thespian aristocracy and even Korngold had enjoyed a lengthy collaboration with Max Reinhardt, while his uncle Egon Kornau was a well-known actor. Reinhardt was generally considered Europe’s most prominent stage director. What they encountered in Hollywood had little to do with theatre and stage craft. The only actress Luzi was interested in meeting was Grete Garbo, though Bette Davis is at least accorded an honourable mention.

His greatest joy was the orchestral recording sessions, which he conducted himself. He was able to forget his pessimism entirely and totally disappear into his work. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ he often said, ‘that I can compose music and then hear it performed immediately afterwards by a superb orchestra, albeit for the last time.’ [Luzi Korngold Memoirs]

These omissions tell us a good deal. It’s not that Korngold wasn’t proud of what he achieved in Hollywood; it was the uncomfortable reality following the war, that his work in the film studios had somehow diminished everything else. Luzi’s intentions in writing the biography of her husband, was to re-instate the pre- and post-Hollywood works by her husband. Until Korngold’s genius was recognised specifically for his Hollywood scores, they hung over his reputation discrediting everything else he had achieved. It would be decades before people stopped carping at how everything Korngold wrote sounded like ‘movie music’ and realised that it was the other way around with film scores, post Korngold’s arrival at Warner Bros having started to follow and emulate Korngold’s sound aesthetic. It would be decades before film scores would be recognised as a legitimate musical voice of the twentieth century, and due all the scholarship accorded to other musical genres.

One often overlooked irony is that Korngold’s creative peak (1919-1939) came at a time when a new sobriety had overwhelmed artistic movements across Europe. Music suddenly became ‘functional’. From 1927 to 1929, the Baden-Baden New Music Festival focused on the potential functionality of music in films and radio. Korngold managed to combine both the functionality of music, as represented by the age of ‘New Objectivity’ with his own Late Romantic voice, providing not just a synthesis between two ages with competing agendas, but determining the abiding nature of film music for subsequent decades, at least until it was overtaken by ‘sound design’.    

And then, there’s the hypocrisy they were unaware of. Joseph Marx, a close friend, correspondent and colleague blocked Korngold from being awarded Austria’s State Prize for composition, arguing he had already earned enough while working in Hollywood. There was the neighbour who bumped into them on the street and appeared both flustered and surprised at finding them outside their own home in Vienna. Embarrassed, she could only spurt out the question of when the Korngolds were planning to go back to America. Was in the hope the nice non-Jewish people who had taken over the Korngold residence would be allowed to stay, or genuine interest in the Korngolds retuning as neighbours? They hardly knew how to relate to those who told them how ‘smart’ they were at getting out of the country when they did, as if it was merely a matter of clever foresight rather than a question of life and death. Who can know? It’s this real-time confrontation with a new, unexpected reality that it so jarringly documented.

Our meeting with the two Strecker brothers, [owners of Schott Music Publishers] Ludwig and Willy from Schott in Mainz, reignited their original sympathy and friendship. That they could now do nothing to support the work of Erich, once their favoured son, was something we painfully had to accept as a sign of the times. Nonetheless, Erich’s heart remained deeply devoted to the Streckers and nothing would change his opinion. [Luzi Korngold’s Memoirs]

Anyone who has spent time reading correspondence from the decade following the end of the war will know the strange ambivalence encountered when reading about murdered family members and friends. The singularity of Hitler’s attempted genocide had not quite filtered to the surface. When I asked the composer Berthold Goldschmidt what lay behind this strange attitude, he simply replied that the sheer number of people murdered during the war hadn’t as yet, elevated what much later became known as “The Holocaust” to its present status. It would not be until the late 1970s, the 1980s and early 1990s with the television series Holocaust and the film Shoah, not to mention Spielberg’s Schindler’s List that the criminal singularity of the attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews would register to an international public. Even Otto Preminger’s film Exodus from 1960 featured a young survivor from the camps who refused to talk about her experience. The ability to survive in the camps was accompanied by guilt. It was not perceived as heroism. One only needs to read Primo Levi for verification. Eichmann’s capture and trial was the first attempt to expose the specific audacity of Hitler’s crimes – audacity so raw and evil, it would continue to be spoken of only in whispers for another two decades.  

Other things are only noticed in retrospect. Brendan Carroll pointed out that everyone, with a single exception, who performed in, directed, produced or designed the original Max Reinhardt/Erich Korngold re-working of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène would either be exiled or murdered. And this was a work that ran with success in Germany, London and eventually New York.  

After the war, the attempted re-education of the German population along with the Cold War would continue to suppress the music of composers like Korngold. The argument was made by German educationalists that had Korngold not been Jewish, Hitler would have supported and enjoyed his music. They believed there was nothing intrinsically ‘anti-fascist’ about Korngold’s sound world. The music being composed by the next generation of Europeans was written by young people who were children in the war, watching helplessly as their parents sold their cultural birthright to assorted variations of dictatorship. They wrote music that with expressions of anger and alienation, would inevitably be thought of as ‘anti-fascist’. Given the insanity of Hitler banning Korngold because he was Jewish, it’s unbelievable post-war arguments were made, while using different wordings, that continued to ban Korngold for exactly the same reasons. Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Zimmermann, Henze, Nono, Boulez were the musical voices of ‘anti-fascism’. There was no room for Korngold’s aesthetic, and indeed, critics, such as Michael Tanner in the British Spectator, were still referring to his opulent musical language as “degenerate” as recently as 2007.

I have to admit that it came as a shock to realise that a Korngold premiere is no longer a Viennese occasion, the reason being there is no longer a Korngold public in Vienna, since the younger generation know nothing of Korngold, following the extinguishing of my existence over the past decade and a half. The result is that the now gassed, impoverished and exiled composer is no longer capable of filling a theatre! (Letter from Erich Korngold to Egon Hilbert, Director of Vienna’s Federal Theatres: 2. November, 1950)

The Memoirs of Luzi Korngold offer a solid biography of her husband, and when I write “solid”, I mean her account of the sixteen years of her life when she didn’t know Korngold.  Her memoirs will be published by Toccata Press and come with a time line and many previously unknown photographs from the Brendan Carroll collection. Let’s hope both the Memoirs and the collection of correspondence arrive soon, or at least in the Korngold year of 2027 – his 130^th birthday. Maybe Toccata will also publish the correspondence. It would make sense as Lis Malina used Luzi’s memoirs as the template for her selection of letters. It was the reason we originally thought of putting the books together in a single publication. Nevertheless, Dear Papa! How is you, is a significant “stand alone” book and wherever it ends up, Korngold enthusiasts will long to read it, as it brings the reader as close to the man and his family as possible.

Both Luzi’s memoirs and the collection of letters dissolve the intervening decades and offer a story that is as moving and as significant as the more familiar von Trapp Sound of Music story. Korngold’s sound imported to Hollywood, whether he acknowledged it himself, was dynamic. But in truth, both the von Trapps and the Korngolds tell a common Austrian story, one being the flight of Universalist, Catholic aristocracy, and the other being the flight from Hitler’s murderous antisemitism. Both Luzi Korngold’s Memoirs, written as a biography of her husband and the family correspondence compiled in Dear Papa! bring us closer to the composer, his world and his influences. As I’ve written in the past, it was not just the tragic loss of position, wealth and success, it was Europe’s loss of a significant composer, who during his lifetime enriched the repertoire in more ways than even he could have imagined.  The return of Korngold’s music to the repertoire is as important as the restitution of any painting.