Njioma Grevious Violin Recital

America 250: Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Three of the composers on this program, Fritz Kreisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ernest Bloch are all European Jewish émigrés who became U.S. citizens and helped reshape American musical life by bringing Old World virtuosity, Viennese craft, and a distinctly Jewish artistic voice into new American contexts.

Celebrated in Vienna as a child prodigy and operatic wunderkind, Korngold was invited to Hollywood in 1934 by Warner Bros. to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What began as a short-term project became a lifeline: as a Jewish composer endangered by the rise of Nazism, he remained in the United States after the Anschluss in 1938, later saying that Hollywood had saved his life. Approaching film scoring as opera “without singing,” Korngold used leitmotifs, symphonic structure, and expressive orchestration to shape narrative and character. With scores such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, he established the symphonic Hollywood sound—lush, continuous, and dramatically driven—that became a model for generations of film composers including John Williams.