Arnold Schoenberg’s letter of condolence to Erich Wolfgang Korngold after the death of his father, the equally revered and feared critic Julius Korngold.

The autograph score of Eisler’s ‘Über die Dauer des Exils’… his 1939 setting of Brecht (a poem also set by the Austrian exile pianist and composer Eduard Steuermann).

“If Mahler, like Heine before him, saw conversion as his billet d’entrée to opportunity, Schoenberg would, with his reconversion to the religion of his birth, declare the opposite. Though Hitler provided Schoenberg with… Continue reading →

“They evolved an amalgam of values in which both the purity of art and the purity of German musical traditions merged. Few would wish to stray from these particular absolutes, which most, including… Continue reading →

“If Mahler had provided the portal through which younger Jewish composers could walk, embracing their uniqueness as artists, it comes as no surprise to discover that much of this uniqueness stemmed from their… Continue reading →

“Max Brod and Theodor Adorno, among others, have written about the ‘Jewishness’ of Mahler’s music. How ‘Jewish’ it might be is less important than how liberating it was for the following generation. Nevertheless,… Continue reading →

“Korngold, who certainly drew on Steiner’s methods (and vice versa), arrived in Hollywood as the first composer of film music already established as a successful composer of serious, ‘classical’ music. […He] first went… Continue reading →

“The many Jewish composers arriving in Hollywood from Vienna could hardly have been more varied. On one hand, there were Steiner and Korngold, who, along with Franz Waxman from Berlin, dominated cinematic, widescreen… Continue reading →