Julius Korngold, the most influential Viennese music critic of his day, couldn't have chosen a more prophetic middle name for his youngest son. For just like the wunderkind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Erich Wolfgang Korngold astonished Europe from an early age with his extraordinary abilities as a composer and performer. 

The prodigy of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Korngold received adulation from Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, and Gustav Mahler, who christened the child a “genius.” He completed his first major work, the ballet Der Schneemann (The Snowman), at the age of 11, performed for Emperor Franz Josef I at age 14, and by his 24th birthday in 1921, had enjoyed successful runs of three operas. 

From Vienna to Los Angeles

But Korngold’s career would take a surprising turn in 1934, when he was lured to the bright lights of Hollywood by Austrian director Max Reinhardt, who engaged his friend to arrange Felix Mendelssohn’s stage music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the big-screen adaptation he was directing at Warner Bros. Pictures. 

As Korngold and his wife, Luzi Sonnenthal, embarked on their transatlantic journey, little did he know Los Angeles would offer more than one of the supersized paychecks that had brought many Austro-German artists—including Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder—to America. The city would soon serve as the sanctuary that saved him and his family from death in a Nazi concentration camp. 

Once the Korngolds had settled into their Chateau Marmont apartment and Erich dove into his work with Reinhardt, Warner Bros. executives quickly took note of Korngold’s enormous talents. Members of the studio’s in-house orchestra praised his leadership on the podium, with one cellist calling the recording sessions “pure joy, unforgettable hours of music making....He didn’t conduct the orchestra, he hypnotized them.”

Inventing the Modern Movie Score

Eager to work with him again after A Midsummer Night’s Dream wrapped, the studio offered Korngold a contract to compose an original score for its upcoming film Captain Blood. The music Korngold contributed to that swashbuckling pirate tale would prove the first of 20 symphonic scores he composed for Warner Bros., whose pictures featured cinema’s biggest stars, from Errol Flynn to Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. 

Korngold thought of movies as “operas without singing,” and he approached scoring a film as he did an opera, tailoring each moment of music to match the action on screen. Unlike other composers in Hollywood, Korngold chose to work not in isolation at a desk, but in a projection room equipped with an upright piano, where he ran the film’s reels while exploring musical ideas. The quality of Korngold’s scores and his innovative ability to fuse music and moving image captured the attention of audiences and critics alike. In one particularly poetic review of the 1939 historical drama The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, featuring a critically acclaimed performance by Bette Davis as the English monarch Elizabeth I, the Hollywood Spectator noted: 

Korngold commuted between Los Angeles and Vienna as he composed music for six Warner Bros. pictures over three years, a period of rapid-fire work that culminated in a 1937 Academy Award for his music to the period romance Anthony Adverse. (However, per Academy rules for the Best Original Score category, the award went to the head of the studio’s music department, Leo Forbstein—not Korngold. This became an embarrassing affair for the Academy, given the outsized role Korngold’s music played in the film, and the rules were changed. Beginning the following year, it would be the composer, not the music department head, who receives the Oscar.)  

Finding a Safe Haven

In 1938, Korngold’s work in Hollywood would transform into a means of survival and protest. With fascism on the rise as the Nazis consolidated power, the lives of all Jewish people in Austria were under increasing threat. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,” the composer later wrote. “Hitler made us Jewish.”

So when he received an offer that January to return to the US and score The Adventures of Robin Hood—Warner Bros.' most expensive film to date, and its first presented in glorious Technicolor—Korngold considered it an omen to flee the continent. By the time the Nazis invaded Austria in March, his entire family was either in Los Angeles or safely en route. In defiance of the devastation German forces wrought at home, Korngold—whose royalties and assets had been seized by the Nazis—vowed to give up composing everything but film music until “that monster” Hitler was defeated.

Luckily Warner Bros. was only too happy to sign the composer to a long-term contract that met every one of his demands. He would score no more than two films within a 12-month period, maintained the right to refuse any project, and—most importantly—his music remained his property for future use.

Korngold's rising celebrity status in Hollywood stood in stark contrast to the professional difficulties fellow émigrés—including Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók—encountered in America. Not only did he now have the funds to purchase the Spanish-style home he had been renting in Los Angeles’s idyllic Toluca Lake neighborhood, just a 10-minute walk from Warner Bros.’ Burbank studio, but his symphonic film scores continued to achieve new heights of popularity and recognition—including his second Oscar, awarded during the Academy’s 1939 banquet at the Biltmore Hotel.  

Fan mail began pouring into the studio. One admirer confessed he had attended 30 screenings of 1942's Sam Wood–directed drama Kings Row—including once with his eyes completely closed—just to hear Korngold's music. Many letters also requested a recording of the score, long before the advent of official movie soundtracks. Erich’s son George, who helped his father respond to the mountain of letters received, took note of this tectonic shift in audience reception:  

A Return to the Concert Stage 

But after more than a decade in Hollywood, the novelty of writing for the big screen faded for Korngold, and he longed to compose concert music again. As the bells tolled on May 8, 1945, celebrating Germany's surrender to the Allied powers, he was ready to abandon the film industry altogether.

In planning his return to the European stage, Korngold didn’t turn his back on the music he had written in Los Angeles. Quite the opposite: Fueled by the fear his film work would be forgotten as each movie fell out of circulation, he decided to use material from his scores in future works—including concertos for violin and cello, a third string quartet, and his Symphony in F-sharp—which the terms of his Warner Bros. contract freely allowed. 

A heart attack in 1947 put Korngold’s plans to return to Austria on hold, and when he finally arrived in 1949, it wasn’t the homecoming he had imagined. The destruction in Vienna was difficult to confront (the sight of the bombed-out State Opera House brought tears to his eyes), friends and relatives had fled or been killed in concentration camps, and performances of his works were poorly attended and savagely reviewed by critics who mocked his music and his popularity in Hollywood.

A second visit in 1954 solidified what he had feared: Audiences no longer had an appetite for his music. For in the aftermath of a near-apocalyptic war, composers had begun to create new musical languages to express the charred world around them. Even in Vienna, the site of Korngold’s greatest triumphs, his tender, hyper-expressive music was deemed passé, too rooted in the grand Romantic tradition that had dominated the city’s stages before the war.

Back home in Los Angeles, Korngold was determined to continue composing works that would help him answer a long-held question about the state of contemporary music: 

A rapid decline in his health ended Korngold’s attempts to test that theory. In October 1956, he suffered a major stroke that left him unable to speak or use the right side of his body for weeks. During his months-long convalescence, Korngold’s only remaining joy stemmed from the fact that he was safe in his beloved home in Toluca Lake and surrounded by his wife and children, all of whom had become naturalized US citizens in 1943. 

Erich Wolfgang Korngold passed away on November 29, 1957, at the age of 60, his body interred in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, just steps away from the graves of Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolf Valentino, and many others who devoted their lives to the cinema and its “realm of phantasy” that had inspired so much of the composer’s music. 

Most obituary columns described Korngold simply as a “film composer,” a term he despised and one that minimized his tremendous body of work for the concert stage—music of longing and loss, nostalgia and beauty that served as Romanticism’s final statements. But it is fitting that he’ll be forever associated with Los Angeles, whose enduring siren song beckons artists hungry to reinvent themselves and capture the world’s attention. Korngold was able to do just that—first as a visitor, then as a refugee, and finally as an American citizen—thanks to a city that never failed to offer him the two things every artist desires: opportunity and adoration. 

Michael Cirigliano II is a freelance writer who has worked with The Cleveland Orchestra, the LA Phil, the Britt Music & Arts Festival, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.