KORNGOLD – The Sound of Hollywood Came from Vienna

Los Angeles, 23 February 1939: Erich Wolfgang Korngold receives the Academy Award for his music for “The Adventures of Robin Hood”. The composer, born in Brno and raised in Vienna, is honoured in Hollywood for a sound that will shape the cinema. Yet the world this music comes from has already shattered: after Austria’s “Anschluss”, the Jewish Korngold family is persecuted and dispossessed, and his music disappears from public cultural life.

The film follows Korngold’s path from Brno via Vienna to Los Angeles. Recognised early on by Gustav Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss, he achieves his international breakthrough in 1920 with the opera “Die tote Stadt”. In 1934 Max Reinhardt first brings him to Hollywood; within a few years an artistic commission becomes a rescue. At Warner Brothers, with his scores for films such as “Captain Blood”, “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk”, Korngold gives classic Hollywood cinema its grand orchestral sound. Letters, scores, family material and historical documents tell of flight and loss, of his first return to Vienna in 1949 and of the late rediscovery of his work.

The film tells its story without a presenter – through places, letters, scores, archival material, music and interviews. Its dramaturgical principle is Korngold’s own, the leitmotif: the song “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Die tote Stadt” runs through the film and takes on new meaning at each stage of Korngold’s life. Present-day performances as well as film and game music make audible what lives on of his method. It is not that Korngold sounds like film music – film music still sounds like Korngold.