Patrick Bade
Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Patrick Bade - Erich Wolfgang Korngold

- So this is one of the last photographs taken of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He was only 60 years old, in fact, when he died in 1957. He looks older, I suppose, in this picture. But rather like Zemlinsky, I think he must have died a very sad and disillusioned man, thinking that his music was heading for oblivion and that the world had passed him by. And it all started so hopefully. Brilliantly, in fact. I think he’s one of the most extraordinary musical child prodigies in the history of Western music. Maybe the most. I find him even more extraordinary, really, than Mozart or Mendelssohn could be or even Reynaldo Hahn. They’d be the three rivals. You see this caricature of him surrounded by famous musicians. Siegfried Wagner, Nikish, Strauss, Reger, D'Albert. Everybody was simply astonished by his talent. Puccini said, “He could give me half his talent and still have plenty left over.” Strauss, who was, I suppose, considered the greatest living composer, this is what he said about Korngold’s music written when he was an 11 year old. He said, “The first reaction on learning that this has been written by a boy of 11 is something of a shock, mingled with apprehension that such a precocious genius may not experience the normal development one sincerely hopes for him. The stylistic assurance, mastery of form, individuality of expression, those harmonies, they’re really astonishing.” So there you see him around the age of 11 or 12 on the right hand side.

He was the son of the music critic of the Neue Preie Presse. I think this is a journal that you will have heard about probably many times from Judi, because Hetzel was the foreign correspondent for the Neue Preie Presse in Paris during the Dreyfus Affair and it was the leading liberal journal of Vienna in the late 19th, early 20th century. Julius Korngold, he was the successor to Hanslick, who’d crossed swords with Wagner, of course. And like Hanslick before him he had a pen dipped in vitriol, I think one can say. He was pretty nasty to anybody who he disapproved of. To Schoenberg, to Strauss himself. And he made many enemies. And that was going to, unfortunately, rebound on his son on many occasions through his career. He could never really throw off the rather disastrous shadow of his father. So his first publicly performed piece was a ballet score called “Der Schneemann,” “The Snowman.” He wrote that between 1908 and 1909. So he was 10, 11 years old when he wrote it. He did have some help with it. Zemlinsky helped him with the orchestration. But within a year of that, he was fully capable of doing his own orchestration, and of course he was a wonderful orchestrator. So this was something of a cause celebre when people saw this score. And it was presented to the Staatsoper and they agreed to stage it. In fact, what they demanded, that he had some kind of psychological assessment before they agreed to stage it. ‘Cause, like everybody, they could hardly believe that an 11 year old could write music like this. And the first performance was given with great success on the 4th of October, 1910 in the presence of the Emperor Franz Josef. And here is an excerpt from “Der Schneemann.”

So as you can hear, it’s melodious and agreeable music. But more astonishing to me is his trio for piano, violin, and cello written about the same time that was published, as you can see, as his “Opus 1.” And this was first performed not in Vienna, but in Munich with a very distinguished tri of musicians, Bruno Walter at the piano, Felix Booksbaum, who was the first cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Who was it who was the violinist? Arnold Rose. Yes, of course, the famous Arnold Rose, who was the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. And it was a great success. After the performance, Bruno Walter tells this story in his autobiography. Mr. and Mrs. Korngold were walking down the street having a furious argument about the performance. One of them was saying it was played too fast. Another one was saying, “No, no, no, no. It was too slow.” And little Erich was sort of trailing behind them. Eventually he dared to intervene. And he said, “I think it was just right, actually.” And both parents turned around and shouted at him, “You shut up.” So I would say that Herr and Frau Korngold were definitely the parents from hell. Julius was domineering, possessive. He was a real bully who often made his poor son’s life absolutely miserable. And I’m going to play you the opening of the first movement. And there are many things that are astonishing about this piece.

And you could argue, rather sadly, that he hit his peak at the age of 11. I don’t think he ever wrote anything better than this, or maybe even quite as good as this. It’s such an astonishing piece. It’s technically incredibly sophisticated. I talked to some musicians who have performed it in London about five years, and they were saying it was extremely difficult for them to play. It’s not an easy piece. And also the emotional maturity. But the thing that really astonishes me most about it, I mean, if you listen to Mozart that he wrote at that age, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was Mozart. You’d say, “Yes, it’s very amazing that a, you know, 12 year old wrote it.” But this is completely Korngold. All the fingerprints are there, all the typical features. The lush harmony, of course, but also melodically. Right from the start, these very characteristic melodies with leaping intervals. I imagine most of you will be most familiar with Korngold’s music for Hollywood movies in the late 1930s and the '40s. You will have recognised, as I said, his characteristics of his style, already, in that piece written when he was 11 years old. Now his great, of course, the First World War somewhat gets in the way. He had two one act operas premiered as early as 1916 in Munich by Bruno Walter, who was in charge of the Munich Opera at the time. But it wasn’t till just after the war that Korngold makes his great breakthrough to international fame. And it’s with his opera “Die tote Stadt,” which was based on a bestselling novel, “La Vie Morte,” of Georges Rodenbach. A rather morbid, erotic piece. And you sort of think, where did he, you know, he had such a sort of incredibly protected childhood.

His parents were the ultimate Jewish overprotective parents constantly pushing him, so where did he come across, how did he experience the kind of emotions in, well, already in that trio, but certainly in an opera like “Die tote Stadt?” And it had simultaneous world premieres in Hamburg with the great Maria Jeritza, who you see here, and in Cologne under the baton of Otto Klemperer. Now Maria Jeritza was an incredible superstar. Well, as you can see, she was a very, very beautiful woman with altogether a very glamorous personality with an extraordinary voice, as well. In a way, she was the kind of Maria Callas of her day. And she had a sensational success in Hamburg. And later she chose it for her debut at the Metropolitan in New York. And it was in that role of Marietta in “Die tote Stadt” that she conquered New York. And when I talk about Vienna between the wars, I’m going to talk more about her and I will play a little excerpt of her singing the role of Marietta. But here we’re going to hear the the very famous duet, really the hit number of the piece, that I imagine will be familiar to a lot of you. And the reason I’m choosing this recording, which dates from 1949, it’s actually a radio broadcast, it’s not a commercial recording. It’s because it’s Korngold himself conducting.

• So incredible, really for a composer, age 24, to have a huge success with an opera at the Metropolitan in New York and an opera that was done pretty well everywhere in the world. So in the period after the first World War, he’s still in his early to mid 20s. He’s taken very seriously as one of the world’s greatest composers. And he also works several times with Paul Wittgenstein. Paul Wittgenstein was a member of the very distinguished Viennese Jewish, I think they were banking, family. His brother is Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher. And Paul Wittgenstein, he begun his career as a pianist during the First World War. But he enlisted and he lost his right arm. And money wasn’t a problem for him, so he commissioned works from many of the leading composers of his time. Most famously, of course, the great Ravel left hand piano concerto, one of the, really, supreme masterpieces of the 20th century concert repertoire. But he also, Strauss wrote several pieces for him, von Schmidt, Benjamin Britten wrote something for him. But probably the composer he was closest to was Korngold. Korngold wrote a piano concerto and several other pieces for him. And this is from his suite for two violins, cello, and left hand piano. Ah, so gorgeous. And I’m presuming that all those swooning portamenti, you know, when the strings slide from one note to another, are actually specified in the score.

Because modern string players tend not to do that unless specifically asked to by composers such as Mahler and Korngold. So Korngold’s fame and his prestige as composer peaked in 1927, but it was a turning point for him and not in an altogether good way. His most ambitious work, his biggest opera, “Das Wunder der Heliane,” that was premiered with massive publicity. It was premiered in every major city in the German speaking world that had an opera house. But at the same time, and I suppose this, in a way, was good for generating publicity, Krenek’s, Ernst Krenek’s opera, “Jonny spielt auf,” I’ll play you a bit of it in my next talk. It was a jazz opera. It was much more acerbic, it was much more modern musical language, much more dissonant and it was kind of in your face. And by comparison it made Korngold seem old-fashioned. Korngold, here he is, he’s not yet, well he’s 30 in 1927. And he suddenly now seems like a man of the past rather than a man of the future because of the lush gorgeousness of the score. So I’m going to play you an excerpt today and another excerpt on Sunday with Lotte Lehmann, who sang the Vienna premiere of the work. And Korngold, like Puccini and Strauss, of course, was absolutely bowled over by Lehmann. And actually all three of them were besotted with both Lehmann and her great rival Jeritza, I’ll be talking about their rather bitter rivalry in Vienna next time. And this is what Korngold had to say. “One half of Vienna is for the fascinating Jeritza, the other for the sweet Lotte Lehmann. Who wins? I’m more for the heart and head, for the elemental and womanly, and therefore Lehmann is my motto.”

• So the smart money at the time was on Krenek and “Jonny spielt auf.” But as we know, as things turned out, neither opera really conquered the opera world long term, neither established itself in the operatic repertoire. But I think that Korngold, who was very sensitive, very intelligent man, must have realised that somehow the tide had turned and it was already against him. So in the late '20s and early '30s, he spends a lot of his time re-orchestrating and modernising operettas. He had a great love of operetta. And he worked with Max Reinhardt and they stage very glamorous productions of Offenbach’s “La belle Helene”. You can see “Die schone Helena” with the great Jarmila Novotna, who I played recently and got a wonderful response to her, the beauty of her singing. She was also a very beautiful woman. And as you can see in “Die schone Helena” as well as they had also had the glamorous dancer La Jana, on the right hand side, who actually, rather sadly, it’s a bit macabre, she died of pneumonia after doing an exotic dance with little clothing on the eastern front to entertain troops during the Second World War. 1924, Korngold managed to escape from the clutches of his ghastly father by marrying a beautiful young woman called Luzi. You see them here together. Of course, Julius Korngold was bitterly against this. He didn’t want to lose control of his son. So he was absolutely opposed to this marriage and was actually very nasty to poor Luzi for some years. But despite the setback with “Das Wunder der Heliane,” life was pretty good for Korngolds. He made a fortune from “Die tote Stadt.” And no doubt he was doing very well out of his collaboration with Max Reinhardt. He was able to buy this nice little schloss in the Austrian countryside and life must have seemed quite rosy. The marriage was very happy.

The marriage was a very successful, happy marriage right to the end of his life and there were two children. But of course there were ominous rumblings on the political horizon. His last opera, he had another go, after the setback with “Das Wunder der Heliane.” He tried a rather more, a less ambitious opera, a less pretentious opera, more Puccini like opera called “Die Kathrin.” And this was all set to go. It was going to be premiered at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1938. But you know what happened. So of course it wasn’t. It was going to be premiered, again, with Jarmila Novotna. So that got cancelled. And it’s a work which has, there have been very occasional performances. The photograph underneath here is of Korngold for a post-war performance in Vienna. But that was not a success and it was cancelled after a couple of performances. And I dunno what the whole opera is like, but this is an aria from it with very fine tenor Anton Dermota, a Yugoslavian tenor. And once again, it’s conducted by Korngold himself.

• In 1934, it turned out to be, of course, an extraordinary blessing for him. He got the call to go to Hollywood. Max Reinhardt had, as you know, been driven out of Germany in 1933. And he went to Hollywood and he staged his very famous production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the Hollywood Bowl and it was a huge, huge popular success. And Warner Brothers decided to take the risk of filming a whole Shakespeare play. And it was decided to use the famous Mendelssohn incidental music, but it still needed to be tailored for the movie. And Max Reinhardt, of course, remembering his collaboration with Korngold on all those operettas in Berlin, asked for Korngold. Here you see Korngold with his wife Luzi, and I think that must be, the one on the right hand side shows their first voyage to America with the two boys. And on the right that must be, I think it’s a post-war picture, they’re somewhat older. And on the left, you can see them with the cast of “The Midsummer Night’s Dream, the movie.” James Cagney, who was Bottom. Mickey Rooney. Olivia De Havilland. So Mickey Rooney was Puck. And there you see Korngold on the right hand side. Now because Korngold, he was so famous. Hollywood already had its composers like Max Steiner and so on. But this was the first time that Hollywood had imported a major famous classical composer. A composer who had actually had a huge success at the Metropolitan in New York. So he was able to dictate his terms. He had a far more advantageous contract than any other Hollywood composer After “The Midsummer Night’s Dream,” of course, he went on to write original music for no less than 16 movies for Warner Brothers. Unlike other composers, he didn’t have to go into an office to compose, he could compose wherever he wanted to, and he could pick and choose.

I don’t think any other composer in Hollywood had that right. He could choose which films he wanted to write the music for. And most important of all, he retained copyright on all the thematic material that he produced for movies. And we’ll see that became very important later when he wanted to reuse some of this material in concert hall works like his violin concerto and his symphony. So here is Warner Brothers, you can see it was the most enormous factory. It had been one of the lesser Hollywood studios until, of course, it pioneered the use of sound in 1927 with “The Jazz Singer” with Al Jolson and that propelled Warner Brothers, really, to the front rank and they continue to be one of the top studios right through the 1930s and '40s. On the top right you can see Korngold’s card for entry to the studios. Here is the title image of the Max Reinhardt. You see “Warner Brothers have the honour to present a Max Reinhardt production.” The fame and prestige of these Europeans. And if you haven’t seen it, watch it. It’s the most, it’s such a feast for the eyes. It’s such a gorgeous movie, really full of magic, in every possible way. And here you can see Korngold, actually. Of course the movie is shot. And you’ve got to synchronise the music with the moving image and that’s what you can see happening here. And here again, this is Paul Muni in “Juarez,” which was another one of the Warner Brothers movies for which Korngold wrote the music. After “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he had his first great success writing, this time, an original score for “Captain Blood,” which was the movie that launched Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. And it also launched the fashion for swashbuckling movies. Certainly Korngold, boy, does he give good swashbuckle, if that’s the right way of putting it. So I’m going to play you the opening, the title music, for “Captain Blood,” which really is full of ebullient energy.

There is a quote in it, I think it must have been an unconscious quote, from Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Don Juan.” You’ll hear it a minute or so into this. He goes, “dum da da dum, dum da da dum,” and that’s a direct quote from Strauss’s “Don Juan.” I imagine it was probably in the back of Korngold’s mind. I don’t think it was a theft, I think it was a memory, an unconscious memory. There’s the quote from Strauss. He won two Oscars for best movie score, for “Anthony Adverse” in 1936 and for another Errol Flynn swashbuckler, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” in 1938. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on his Hollywood music 'cause I already have given a talk on Hollywood composers and talked quite a lot about Korngold’s Hollywood scores for lockdown, must have been about a year ago now. But I’d like to play one more excerpt 'cause I just think, if you took, if you didn’t know where this came from, I mean, it could almost be from Rudolfowitsch. It’s really quite advanced harmonically and it’s very interesting, very inventive. So he was, Hollywood was really introducing an audience of millions to very sophisticated, modern music. This is from a movie which was regarded as being a complete turkey. It’s a film called “Devotion.” And it’s about the Bronte Sisters with Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte and Ida as Emily Bronte. And, as I said, it’s usually regarded as a pretty dire movie, which is a pity, 'cause the score is really wonderful. This is a short excerpt from a scene, I couldn’t find that the image to go with it, actually, where their ne'er do well brother, Patrick Branwell Bronte, he’s in a pub and he’s drunk and he’s making little caricatures and sketches of all the people in the pub.

This is another movie, which is maybe not exactly a masterpiece, but it’s great fun to watch. This is “Deception,” although the people working on the movie privately renamed it “Conception” because Bette Davis was getting increasingly, visibly pregnant throughout the filming and they had to do all sorts of things to disguise that. Claude Rains is the evil composer and her lover is Paul Henreid, who’s, here he is, Bette Davis, of course, with Korngold. And he got on well with her and wrote music for several of her other movies. Here’s Paul Henreid as the star cellist. Korngold had to write a proper little cello concerto for him to play at the climax of the movie. And here it is. I think, once again, he must have been really stretching the musical tastes of the American public with a piece like that. Now, this is where they lived in Los Angeles. I’m sure, like everybody, they missed Vienna, they missed Europe, but they had their circle of friends, practically Vienna, all of old Vienna, came to them. They hardly ever had to speak any English because there were so many German speaking neighbours. There was Thomas Munn, of course, there was the Schoenberg family. And strangely Julius, he’d been such a scourge, he’d been so appalling in his vicious criticism of Schoenberg. But all that was forgotten in exile and they mingled together. And of course they met at the famous salon of Zalker Thietl. As I said, they hardly ever needed to speak English.

Alma was there for a while until he died, of course, Franz Werfel. So it was a whole German speaking circle in Hollywood at this time. And I want to play you something which I find actually incredibly moving and touching. This is a private recording of the Korngold family celebrating two things. They’re celebrating Christmas as you’ll hear. And you may think, “What? I thought they were Jewish.” Well, they were Jewish, but they weren’t religious Jews. And they’d obviously really adapted to the American way of life. They’re also celebrating the 80th birthday of the irascible, horrible old Julius Korngold, who you see here on the right hand side. And so this is, as I said, a private recording. It’s never been published. Don’t ask me how I got it, 'cause I’m not going to tell you. But it starts off with Ernst, the oldest son, introducing, and then he hands over to his grandmother. And I find it very touching. She says, you know, she obviously hasn’t learned much English and she just says, “God bless America and ,” is what she says. She blesses America and her beloved son. And then we hear Korngold himself talking. And this delights me because he has such a strong Viennese accent. He says, “ .” He says, “ .” These very Viennese vowel sounds.

• [Ernst] Good evening. We are in a family circle. It is Christmas and I am announcing for the rest of the people gathered here. My name is Ernest Korngold. And now you will hear the voice of my grandmother.

• [Grandmother] God bless America and .

• And I’ve got another fascinating little insight into their life. There are all these stories about Hollywood parties. To which, you know, a composer would be invited. Gershwin was, of course, there in the late 20s, late 30s, rather. He was invited to all these glamorous Hollywood parties. They were all expected to sing for their supper. I think Gershwin did it quite gladly. He sit at the piano and play his popular songs and everybody would stand around drinking and smoking and chatting. There’s a wonderful story about Schoenberg being invited to one of these parties and absolutely hating it. He sat in a corner looking very lugubrious. And Fanny Brice, the original funny girl, came over to him and she said, “Cheer up professor, give us a tune,” she said, as though Schoenberg was going to do that. But here is Korngold at a private party. You can hear a sort of murmur of chatter in the background, actually, this is quite a long recording, the whole thing, I’m only going to play you a couple of minutes. But I’m afraid the noise of the chatter builds up while he continues at the piano. But he gives them just some of his top hits, big tunes. Starting off with an aria from “Die tote Stadt.” You can hear he is a fantastic pianist. Working for the movies in Hollywood saved Korngold’s life and the lives of his family and his parents, but in some ways it destroyed his reputation. He lost his credibility as a serious composer.

A lot of silly, silly snobbery about film music. Film music can be great, great music. I never would want to underrate it. It’s a very special skill to be able to do it. But I think eventually Korngold became very disillusioned and he wanted to go back to writing serious music for the opera house and the concert hall. And as I said, luckily he retained the rights over thematic material that he developed for his movie scores. The result of this was his glorious violin concerto, one of the great violin concertos, dedicated, incidentally, to Alma Mahler. And it was originally, I think, conceived for Bronisław Huberman, but the violinist who premiered it, you see him here, and who recorded it was, of course, Jascha Heifetz. And here is the sumptuous slow movement from Korngold’s violin concerto played by Jascha Heifetz. Korngold, like so many, longed for Europe. He went back to Europe. He went back to Vienna. But it was a bitter experience for him. He met with hostility and, at best, total indifference. He was dismissed for having sold himself out to Hollywood and nobody was interested. He had one more great masterpiece in him, which is his “Symphony in F.” This is the last excerpt I’m going to play you. It’s a very powerful, very sombre piece. But at the time, nobody was interested. It has picked up, it is done. And of course that violin concerto has, despite the notorious witticism, I can’t remember which American critic said, “This concerto is more corn than gold,” but it has become a favourite piece with both soloists and with the public. It’s now one of the most performed violin concertos. And the symphony, it’s not as widely performed as that, but it’s, I think, it’s still established in the repertoire. Well, we’re running out of time, so I think I’m going to come out of that.

Q&A and Comments:

This is Pamela. “I love Korngold.” So do I.

“I have some of his 'Lead’ in sheet music sung of you. They’re beautiful and on a par with Strauss and Joseph Marx,” well, ‘cause Josephs Marx, another underrated composer these days. But I totally agree with what you say there.

Mavis saying she loves “The Snowman.”

Translation of “The Die tote Stadt” is the dead city. “La Vie Morte,” it was, in the original. It’s, of course, by the Belgian writer Rodenbach and it was written in French originally.

Sherry, “About his pushy and overbearing parents. The thought came to me, is it possible that those early works might have been,” well, do you know, everybody asked that at the time. And it was an obvious thing to ask. But, I mean, Julius’s response to that was, “If I could write like that, do you think I’d be a music critic?” And I think it all the evidence is that actually Julius had nothing to do with it.

“Heard by Felix Bloch, no relation.” Felix Bloch? There are at least two well-known composers called Bloch, but neither them is Felix, I will look into that. Yes, you are right. The bit that I played you, which is called “Lead” that movement is called “Lead,” it uses the tune that he used for a lead, which is called .

Q: “Why is it that wonderful composers like Korngold, Zemlinsky,” …

A: now you got me here. Who is Friedrich Gernsheim? I don’t know him. There you are, but I probably need to know him. I don’t think that’s true anymore. It was true. I don’t think that they are, I mean, Korngold is really performed, and some Zemlinsky, are very, very widely performed. I think I’ve seen more productions of “Die tote Stadt” than almost any other opera. I’ve seen it in, you know, Barcelona, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, I’ve seen, London, all over the place.

Q: “Was his wife Jewish?”

A: I think she was, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

This is Dell. She thinks it’s schmaltzy. Well, it’s a matter of taste, isn’t it? You have to have a sweet tooth for this kind of music.

Alma Deutsche. Well, I think there’s a lot to discover. What can I say? There are so many interesting composers waiting to be discovered.

Q: “How’d they survive World War II?”

A: They were in Hollywood, so they were far away from trouble. Thank goodness.

This is Clive and Bonnie. They say, 'cause they know his film scores, we all know his film scores, 'cause we’ve, you know, grown up, our generation, seeing those films on TV. So that kind of his music is very familiar.

There’s Herbert saying, “Leon Fleisher was also a left-handed pianist as he injured his right hand. Works composed for Paul Wittgenstein, of course, have been very, very helpful to other pianists who’ve had trouble with their right hands.” Yes, classical music was actually, sometimes the musical scores for, well, sometimes they used actual classical music, and also in cheaper movies like, you know, those sci-fi movies that were in episodes, they used Liszt and Wagner and so on. It was quite common to use real classical music. You’re been watching a movie “Casino” and starts and ends with St. Matthew’s passion. That is a bit strange, isn’t it?

This is Arlene, she loves Marietta’s lead and that record Renee Fleming, of course it’s ideal for her voice. She’s the perfect voice for it, isn’t it? That creamy voice. That’s what you want in that music.

Korngold’s Richard Strauss quote, “Given the theme of the original poem and the film itself, and not to mention the actual character of Errol Flynn.” Yes, it might, maybe it was a conscious quote. That’s a thought. I hadn’t really thought about it deeply enough, I think.

Q: “How did Korngold write the scores in those days?”

A: Well, I’m sure he must have been given very precise cues. And yes, they did watch them. The movie was usually filmed first, rather than the other way around. Although both Schoenberg and Stravinsky both thought it should be the other way around. That’s why Schoenberg never got a movie contract, 'cause he wanted the actors and singers to do it to his music rather than the other way around.

Yes, Korngold’s mother blessed her son, but not the rest of the family. Well, I suppose the son, I mean, he was the centre, wasn’t he? I mean, they wouldn’t have been alive without him. He’d got them out, he’d got them to Hollywood. They totally depended on him financially and so on.

I’m glad you think that, Mavis thinks the music is beautiful. I do as well. Thanks for kind comments.

“Huberman, one of my greatest heroes and a fantastic violinist.” So exciting, the Huberman recordings. He’s, I think, somebody also today who’s very underrated. You know, everybody knows Heifetz, but they don’t necessarily know Huberman and his recordings. Thank you for, again, for your very nice comments.

Q: “Who’s the middle person in the Korngold Heifetz photo?”

A: I don’t know. Can’t tell you that, sorry.

Certainly Zemlinsky, I mean, so “The Lyric Symphony” gets done quite a bit and I think the chamber music is increasingly done. Oh, Eileen, thank you very much.

Q: Will I be looking at Kurt Weill?

A: I have done in the context of Berlin. And I’m sure sooner or later Judi will want to go back to Berlin and so actually, of course, if we do America, that’s another thing. I could do Kurt Weill, the New York Kurt Weill, who’s almost like a different composer from the Berlin Kurt Weill. Walter Goehr. Yes. When I was at school, is Walter the father or the son? I’m more familiar with the son’s music.

“Korngold’s symphony presages Bernstein’s 'West Side Story’ score for,” yes, it does, doesn’t it? It does. That’s interesting.

Q: “What is the name of the opera Marietta is in?”

A: That’s “Die tote Stadt.”

I jumped ahead again, what is it? Yeah, send me a link to, I’m always interested to discover more. There are so many composers of this period. Of course there was that wonderful series that Michael Hors put together for DECA called where many works that have been completely forgotten were resurrected.

Q: “Any follow up on the children?”

A: I’m sorry, I’m never good on that. It’s not my thing.

Q: “What happened to his sons?”

“Huberman was also a child prodigy.” That’s true. He played to Brahms.

Your great grandfather was a friend of Patrick Bronte and his sisters and he wrote a book called “Pictures of the Past.” That’s very interesting. Bruno Walter was also very much part of that Hollywood group of Jewish emigres. You know, there’s that famous story, isn’t there? About the film director, a very irascible film director, at a party where people were speaking Hungarian and thumping the table and shouting in German, “Why can’t you speak German like everybody else here in Hollywood?” “Walter was the father.” Yes, thank you. Alexander Goehr is the son. Yeah. And that seems to be it. Thank you very much. We’ll move on to Vienna and Salzburg between the wars. So some of the characters I’ve talked about tonight will come back again on Sunday. And thank you all very much for listening in.

• [Judi] Thank you, Patrick, and we’ll see everybody soon. Bye-bye.

• Bye-bye.