From High Art To Hollywood

By Michael Walsh

TITLE: DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE

COMPOSER: ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD

LABEL: LONDON

THE BOTTOM LINE: This muddled work ended Korngold's operatic career, but Vienna's loss was the movies' gain.

MAHLER CALLED HIM A GENIUS; Richard Strauss held him in awe; Puccini said he could give away half his talent and still have plenty left over. Schoenberg? Stravinsky? No, the recipient of these accolades was a wunderkind from Vienna named Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The son of the city's leading music critic, young Korngold had written a large body of music before he turned 15, including a piano sonata for Artur Schnabel, and achieved international success in 1920 at the age of 23 with his romantic opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City). It seemed possible that he would go on to become one of the century's greatest musical figures.

Today, however, he is best remembered as a composer of colorful, sweeping Hollywood film scores such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. What happened? A new recording of the 1927 opera that Korngold always considered his masterpiece, Das Wunder der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane), offers some clues.

First, the ultra-lush, quasi-mystical Heliane was a popular failure; in just seven years, the Zeitgeist had moved away from romanticism toward modernism. Discouraged, the composer turned to smaller pieces and adaptations of famous operettas for German director Max Reinhardt. Then, after 1933, the Jewish Korngold saw his works put on the list of entartete Musik (decadent music) and banned by the Nazis. In 1934 he followed Reinhardt to Hollywood and remained there until his death in 1957.

But perhaps the most important reason for Korngold's loss of nerve may be this: despite some sumptuous melodies and opulent orchestration, Heliane is simply not very good. It suffers from an incomprehensible libretto, based on a murky "miracle play" by a minor Expressionist poet, Hans Kaltneker. Korngold's literary instincts were never very sharp, and it was not until he turned to films that his natural dramatic gifts found their true outlet.

The recording, with soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow in the title role and John Mauceri conducting, is probably as good a performance as this very demanding work is likely to get. But for a better take on Korngold's particular genius, rent a videocassette of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.