Surround Sound

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, long dismissed as a Hollywood relic, has a resurgence.

- Alex Ross

That sounds like film music” is a put-down that deserves to be retired. The usual intention is to dismiss a work as splashy kitsch. Over the past century, though, enough first-rate music has been written for the movies that the charge rings false. Hollywood composers have employed so many different styles that the term “film music” has little descriptive value. Worst is when the pejorative is used to discount figures who brought distinctive personalities to the scoring business, thereby elevating it. Such was the fate of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who began his career, in Vienna, as one of the most astonishing child prodigies in musical history and who reached maximum fame writing film scores, in Los Angeles, in the nineteen-thirties and forties. A master of late-Romantic opulence, Korngold shaped the sonic texture of Golden Age Hollywood. To say that his work sounds like movie music is an elementary fallacy, a confusion of cause and effect.

The Bard Music Festival, which has been exploring neglected corners of the repertory for the past three decades, is honoring Korngold in this year’s edition, which began on August 9th, at Bard College, in upstate New York. In addition, Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and musical ringleader, recently conducted the American première of “Das Wunder der