Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957)
String Sextet in D major (1916)
Surely few composers have succeeded in their chosen profession as brilliantly or as well as Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Born in Vienna in 1897, he was hailed as a “genius” by Mahler at the age of 10 and saw the first performance of his music at the Vienna Court Opera (today the Vienna State Opera) at 13. With the premiere of Die tote Stadt just a decade later, Korngold experienced one of the greatest operatic triumphs of the 20th century: The Dead City, as it translates into English, was the most widely-performed new German-language opera of the 1920s, eclipsing the success of even the great Richard Strauss. With the rise of National Socialism in the ‘30s, Korngold moved his family to the United States, where he became a staff composer for Warner Brothers, penning some of the finest film music ever written (including the soundtracks for Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood), and defining, for eight decades and counting, the sound of the great film score.
Still, during his lifetime and in the immediate aftermath of his death in 1957, Korngold’s concert output – his operas, songs, chamber music, and symphonic works – were widely dismissed (or at least held suspect) owing to his prominence and success writing music for movies. In recent decades, though, this bias has, thankfully, begun to thaw, and today Korngold is rightly seen as one of the vital links between the eras of Mahler and post-World War 2 Western art music.
And it’s an impressive legacy – by any standard – that Korngold left. He was gifted along the lines of Mozart or Mendelssohn, crafting masterpieces from his teens onward. The Sextet in D major dates from that precocious adolescence: it was finished in 1916, when Korngold was all of 19 years old. While it’s steeped in the style of Mahler, Strauss, Zemlinsky, early Schoenberg, and others, all of the telltale signs that mark his later style – bustling energy, vital counterpoint, sweeping melodies, dramatic shifts of mood and texture, and so on – are present here.
The first of the Sextet’s four movement is cast in a very elaborate sonata form with several changes of tempo and texture. Its two main themes, though, are clear enough: the first, a violin melody encompassing wide leaps of register before relaxing into a warm, scalar tune; the second, another violin figure, this more constricted in range than the first, and heard over a gossamer accompaniment of sul ponticello violas and slowly-moving second violin and cellos.
Two more expressive themes drive the haunting second movement. The mood here is more unsettled, as is clear from the very start, with a sudden major/minor discord shattering the aura of relative joy with which the previous movement closed. The initial theme, played by a cello, is lushly chromatic. The second, a viola countermelody, interposes itself on and grows out of the first: it derives from an unpublished Korngold song and demonstrates substantial lyrical qualities.
Light moods prevail in the charming third movement Intermezzo, itself a nod to the Austrian ländler popularized in the symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner. The music is carried on its away by a series of variations on Korngold’s personal musical motto, “the motive of a cheerful heart” (itself a figure derived from three ascending perfect fourths).
In the boisterous finale, themes and motives heard in earlier movements reappear, culminating in a grand statement of the first movement’s opening theme, before a scampering coda wraps everything up ebulliently.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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