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    Korngold and His World
    Korngold and His World
    Korngold and His World
    Ebook503 pages7 hours

    Korngold and His World

    By Daniel Goldmark and Kevin C. Karnes

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    A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold

    Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, Korngold and His World provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold’s life and accomplishments.

    Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. This collection examines Korngold’s operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. The volume also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold.

    The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans.

    Bard Music Festival 2019
    Korngold and His World
    Bard College
    August 9–11 and 16–18, 2019

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateAug 27, 2019
    ISBN9780691198736
    Korngold and His World

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      Korngold and His World - Daniel Goldmark

      Music!"

      Essays

      Korngold Father and Son in Vienna’s Prewar Public Eye

      DAVID BRODBECK

      In what year did I meet your late husband? Unfortunately, I can’t say with certainty. I only know that he had come with his parents and that he was a boy. He was probably around eleven, at most thirteen. We all had the impression that he was a great talent!

      —Paul Wittgenstein to Luzi Korngold, February 1958

      In a feuilleton published in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt on 24 April 1910, Max Kalbeck, the paper’s longtime music critic, wrote in celebration and appreciation of the Vienna Philharmonic, which was then completing its fiftieth season of subscription concerts. Although most of the essay was concerned with the orchestra’s glorious past, toward the end Kalbeck looked into its future: We can wish for nothing better for the members of the Philharmonic on their Golden Jubilee than that, in this latest, so grandly inaugurated era, there might ripen a young, truly creative genius worthy of being introduced by them to the musical world.¹ We cannot be certain, but Kalbeck may well have been thinking here of the twelve-year-old son of his friend and colleague Julius Korngold, music critic of the city’s Neue freie Presse. After all, Vienna was at this very moment in the grip of reports telling of the astounding talent of little Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a wunderkind who had recently caused quite a stir.²

      It is not difficult to see why. The boy was a prodigy the likes of which had scarcely been encountered before. He was not only an accomplished pianist but also a composer of preternaturally mature and astonishingly modern-sounding music.³ Eduard Hanslick, who heard Erich perform at the piano at least once before his death in 1904, declared him the little Mozart.⁴ In 1907, at the age of ten, the boy began contrapuntal studies with Robert Fuchs, a venerable teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. In June of that year Julius arranged for Erich to show Gustav Mahler one of his original compositions, a cantata entitled Gold. (To avoid confusion, hereafter I will generally refer to the father and son by their given names.) Such was Mahler’s astonishment that he reportedly exclaimed, Send the boy to Zemlinsky. No Conservatory, no drill!! Zemlinsky will give him everything he needs in a free way!⁵

      That Julius sought Mahler’s opinion is no surprise; he was among the composer’s staunchest supporters in Vienna and had very much regretted Mahler’s recent decision to resign his position as director of the Court Opera.⁶ As Mahler had hoped, the counterpoint lessons with Fuchs were supplemented in due course by instruction with Alexander Zemlinsky, beginning in 1908 and continuing until Zemlinsky’s departure for Prague in 1911 to become First Kapellmeister at that city’s German Provincial Theater. During these years, Erich composed, albeit for the most part without Zemlinsky’s knowledge, the compositions for piano by which he would first become known to the public—the Piano Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, a set of six characteristic pieces after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Der Schneemann (The Snowman), a ballet-pantomime based on figures from commedia dell’arte.⁷

      Not only Mahler, but also the composer Carl Goldmark and other leading musicians in Vienna came to know some of these early compositional efforts through domestic performances by Erich at the piano. One such occasion took place in mid-1909, when Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s successor at the Court Opera, heard the boy perform Der Schneemann and a recently composed passacaglia with twenty variations. Duly impressed, Weingartner went so far as offer to perform Der Schneemann at the Court Opera were it to be orchestrated. Citing the boy’s unreadiness to make such a grand debut, Julius refused this offer in no uncertain terms.⁸ In fact, he took pains at first to keep his son’s extraordinary musical gifts out of the public eye in Vienna. As Hanslick’s handpicked successor at the music desk of the city’s only newspaper of international repute, and as a critic of strong and often acerbic opinions, Julius Korngold was both a powerful and polarizing figure in Vienna’s musical scene. He thus had good reason to worry about how his many adversaries would respond to the presentation of Erich’s music in his own bailiwick. Would the boy, because of the father’s position, be thought to be the beneficiary of undeserved favored treatment? Would the spite opponents felt toward the father be taken out unfairly on the son?

      In December 1909 Julius hit upon the idea of seeking expert opinion on Erich’s abilities from persons living outside Vienna, neutral parties who would presumably have no reason to take a biased position one way or the other. He quietly arranged for the piano sonata, Don Quixote pieces, and Der Schneemann to be printed and distributed to a select number of musicians and musical experts in cities ranging from Berlin and Leipzig in the German Reich to Budapest and Graz in Austria-Hungary, with each being asked to reply with a written evaluation. The reviews soon began to pour in, perhaps as many as forty altogether, from the likes of the composers Richard Strauss and Engelbert Humperdinck, the conductors Artur Nikisch and Anton Seidl, the historical musicologists Hermann Kretzschmar and Hugo Leichtentritt, the systematic musicologists Erich von Hornbostel and Carl Stumpf, and the critics Ferdinand Pfohl and Paul Marsop. From within Vienna came at least one evaluation, by family friend Goldmark, who seems to have asked to see the scores himself.⁹

      Figure 1. Erich in 1910.

      Not surprisingly, Erich’s remarkable story did not remain off the record for long. On 16 February 1910, the Budapest music critic August Beer broke the news in an effusive article entitled Ein musikalisches Phänomen:

      You have to go back far in the history of music, to the young Mozart, to encounter a similar musical phenomenon. Equally inconceivable in the piano music of the little composer are the mature and imaginative design, the mastery of the form, the extraordinary rhythmic variety and, what is probably most notable of all, the complete familiarity with the latest possibilities in harmony. How rapidly must this twelve-year-old have made the monstrous journey in order to arrive already at the ultramoderns, mixing it up—well past Brahms and Wagner—in the dissonant domains of a Richard Strauss, a Max Reger, a Debussy!¹⁰

      Nine days later, on 25 February, came a report by Richard Specht published in Der Merker, a new Viennese journal for music and theater.¹¹ Finally, on 29 February, there appeared an article, written in the form of an extended anecdote, in Julius’s Neue freie Presse. This was not written by the composer’s father, of course, but by Ernst Decsey, a music writer from Graz and one of the experts to whom the scores had originally been sent. It was probably this colorful account, more than anything else, that was responsible for setting off the Korngold sensation that swept through the city’s educated classes.¹²

      Things now moved quickly—and largely out of Julius Korngold’s control. With Erich at his side, Zemlinsky undertook to teach his student the basics of orchestration by transcribing Der Schneemann for orchestra: the cover page of an incomplete manuscript full score carries the initials A.v.Z./E.W.K, and is dated Mitte März (middle of March).¹³ Around the same time, Ludwig Winter, the secretary to the General Intendant of the Court Theaters, arranged for the work to be performed in a benefit concert in the Palais Modena, the residence of the Austrian prime minister. In the event, two private performances took place there, both hosted by the prime minister’s wife, Baroness Anka von Bienerth. The first, on April 14, was given during a soirée to which members of both the first society of the old established aristocracy and the second society of movers and shakers, disproportionately Jewish and Protestant, from the world of officialdom, finance, and industry were invited; the second, on April 26, was the benefit concert itself. On both occasions, Erich was joined by Richard Pahlen, Mahler’s favorite pianist, in playing a hastily made two-piano arrangement. Fritz Brunner of the Vienna Philharmonic played the violin solos, and dancers and sets were brought in from the Court Ballet.¹⁴

      Meanwhile Emil Hertzka, head of Universal Edition, made a bid to publish the sonata and ballet-pantomime. Julius agreed on the condition that the latter would not be released to any theater without his express permission. Ignoring this stipulation, Herztka immediately offered Der Schneemann to Weingartner, who readily accepted, confident that Zemlinsky’s orchestration would be effective. All this put Julius in a difficult spot. He had long targeted Weingartner with barbed reviews, not, as the conductor saw things, primarily on account of artistic differences, but merely for having been the person appointed to replace the critic’s beloved Mahler at the head of the institution that lay at the center of Viennese musical culture.¹⁵ Julius reasonably assumed that people would think Weingartner had agreed to perform Erich’s work only as a way of making peace with his father and therefore of securing better notices from him in the future. Accordingly, he tried, to no avail, to put a stop to things then and there.

      As Weingartner later recalled the matter:

      I had already heard of the great talent of the eleven-year-old Erich. Perusal of the ballet confirmed the rumors and led me to conclude the performance contract with Universal Edition. I later reassured Dr. Julius Korngold that he had had no influence on this decision. He even appeared in my office and asked me not to perform the work because it would put him in an awkward position. I could only tell him what I already had told Director Hertzka, namely, that the father and son are completely separate persons for me. The publisher offered me Der Schneemann, along with other new works, and I accepted it only after objective examination. Dr. Korngold did not change his attitude toward me; he was and remained the opponent of the successor of Gustav Mahler. If attentive observers nevertheless wanted to see the halfhearted appearance of a benevolent glimmer in his critiques of me, it would only have been human to understand things this way, for I was well disposed toward his talented, precocious, and thoroughly pleasant boy, which, by the way, I considered a duty, not a credit to me.¹⁶

      That Julius had correctly anticipated the public reaction is seen in contemporary press reports such as this one from 23 May: "You see, that’s how people are. They get all worked up because the Court Opera Director has made peace with Herr Korngold at the price of a performance of his little child prodigy’s Schneemann. . . . How was the director of the Court Opera supposed to find the courage to be hostile to the critic of a newspaper of international renown?"¹⁷ This suspicion gained credence when, in the prospectus of the 1910–11 season made public a month later, the premiere of Der Schneemann was announced for October 4, the emperor’s name day, along with Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s intermezzo Susannens Geheimnis (Il secreto di Susanna), on a double bill of short new works under the direction of Kapellmeister Franz Schalk.¹⁸

      The premiere was by every measure a resounding success with the public, no doubt in part because of the composer’s tender age and all the buildup preceding it. The critical response, however, was mixed. Very much in Erich’s corner was Max Kalbeck, who began his review of the concert by attempting to inoculate his friend Julius Korngold from charges that he had used his influence to bring it about:

      We are reminded of the young Mozart by another child prodigy who goes by the name of Wolfgang. Erich Wolfgang, the brilliant son of our highly esteemed colleague Dr. Julius Korngold, is the author of the pantomime that appeared on the boards together with Susannens Geheiminis to unanimous cheers by old and young alike. Erich Wolfgang was eleven years old when he breezily composed Der Schneemann out of the Nicolomarkt and into the piano studio. And he only had to wait two years until the work, endowed by his teacher Alexander v. Zemlinsky with magical orchestral splendor, was acquired by the Vienna Court Opera on the basis of a conspiracy of influential friends and colleagues who were enthusiastic about the unusual talent of the boy. The surprised Herr Papa had nothing to do but say yes and Amen.¹⁹

      Figure 2. Alexander von Zemlinsky.

      Kalbeck then goes on to note how everything came together in the wonderfully disciplined imagination of the imaginative child’s head to form an indivisible whole, albeit with so many details. Indeed, he declares that anybody who wishes to pursue the motivic and thematic relationships of the work will be amazed by the spirit of strict objectivity and systematic order that governs it. No less worthy of admiration, in Kalbeck’s view, was Erich’s ability to find apt musical depictions of his characters and the dramatic situations in which they find themselves, as well as his rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities, unusually rich and powerful, though often raw and unbalanced. This last observation leads to the expression of some skepticism—widely shared among the critics—regarding the boy’s adoption of the most modern tonal styles found in the works of contemporary French and Italian composers, not to speak of the truly childish character of Secessionist-musical nonsense. Nevertheless, Kalbeck concludes, For these poster children [of ultramodernism], let us be just as grateful to the composer as he approaches his teenage years as for the highly gratifying revelations of his talent; they promise a great future for the young composer and make us glad of his presence.

      Very different was the reaction of Max Graf, music critic for the Neues Wiener Journal.²⁰ Graf gave Erich’s work its due as a successful proving ground (Talentprobe) of the boy’s remarkable musical gifts. But he scarcely judged it worthy of making its way from the private, intimate salon into the broad public space of the Court Opera Theater. On the contrary, because the pantomime did not, in his view, amount to a fully worked-out piece of theater, the Court Opera had no business staging it. As to why the performance was allowed to take place, Graf pulls no punches in pointing to what he calls the incessant blowing on the trumpet of familial promotion. Were it not for Julius’s assumed lobbying, he pointedly suggests, the work would never have been dragged from the boy’s study and playroom into a great opera house.

      This last, dismissive remark leads to some cutting advice in conclusion:

      The fact that the little work was performed under the external signs of lively success, and that the young composer was called forth several times at the end with thunderous applause by a section of the audience, cannot change this opinion. Who would not want to treat the gifted boy with joyous approval? Who would not be interested in applauding the boy’s appearance? But it would have been wise to usher the young musician into the Court Opera for the second and third performances. He would have then learned the difference between the artificial coaxed applause of relatives, friends, and the fashionable crowd and the chill of an unbiased audience, and perhaps would not be a little affected by it. This embarrassing surprise would be more conducive to his artistic education than pleasing praise. In his pantomime, out of one snowman come two, three, four, five snowmen . . . until the room is full of snowmen. It will certainly be the other way around in the opera house, and one hundred applauding people will dwindle away into twenty, ten, five, one.²¹

      When, on the day following the premiere, Julius wrote to thank Schalk for the successful performance, there can be little question that he was steaming over Graf ’s brutal review:

      Heartfelt thanks to you yourself and your artists for leading my little one’s little work to victory! The act of revenge that an unscrupulous enemy has committed against me in a local newspaper (!) will leave you cold. Der Schneemann has proved its theatricality [Hofopermäßigkeit], and its composer, as you know from his latest works, is stronger than any malice [Niedertracht].²²

      In Julius’s view, Graf ’s unfounded charge that he had effectively forced the performance on Weingartner had poisoned the well for a handful of other Viennese music critics, who likewise would soon come to think that he was willing to abuse his power to further Erich’s career. The bitterness engendered by this episode would linger for years to come.²³

      Maliciousness of a different kind could be found in the pages of Vienna’s anti-Semitic press. Karl Schreder began his review for the Deutsches Volksblatt, Vienna’s most widely read political daily of this type, by seemingly admiring Erich’s ability at so young an age to find his stride alongside Richard Strauss and other modernist composers. This is immediately shown to be a backhanded compliment, however, when Schreder dismisses modernism using coded anti-Semitic language that dates back to Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik, in particular, the suggestions of Jewish cunning and shallowness:

      In the composition of the young Korngold, who, with the early maturity of Semitic youth, has effortlessly learned the secrets and tricks of modern music, it can be seen how the creation of modern tonal works is absolutely child’s play [kinderleicht]. The rummaging about in harmonies, the unraveling of the motives, the overripe changes in meter and key, all this can be learned and utilized. Composing becomes mechanical work. . . . Heart and mind no longer need to be taken into consideration.²⁴

      This was mild stuff by comparison to the over-the-top rhetoric at work in the review of Der Schneemann published in the Ostdeutsche Rundschau, a political daily given to full-blown völkisch cultural critique.²⁵ Here Julius Korngold is the primary target, not merely on the basis of an alleged misuse of his powerful position, as was the case with Graf and certain other mainstream writers, but as a devious Jewish critic to boot. In Wagnerian fashion, the Germanized Jew—in this case, Julius Korngold—is understood to be an imposter, a cultural parasite in the genuine German body politic:

      Before little Erich Wolfgang Korngold was chosen to copy the whole of Mozart’s story . . . his name was simply Erich. And it is indicative of the disgusting affair that, when it finally started, Mozart’s name was quickly attributed to him. It would not at all be surprising if the former lawyer from Brünn were from now on called Julius Leopold and [like Mozart’s father] writes a treatise on playing the violin.²⁶

      What appears to have particularly outraged this writer is the notion that the young Mozart and the young Korngold might truly warrant discussion in the same breath. Worse still, in this critic’s mind, is the notion that Korngold might even have surpassed Mozart:

      Of course, a comparison comes soon with the young Mozart, and the father’s pride . . . is compounded by the assertion that Erich Wolfgang is actually more than Wolfgang Amadeus, since [Mozart] composed in the sense and in the style of his time, but [Korngold] follows completely new ways. . . . In no time, one of the members of the charming clique for whom a Jewish Beethoven is not enough, and who would hastily construe a Jewish Mozart in addition, rashly wrote that just now, when so many musicians find themselves lost in dead ends, one had finally come along who knows the right exit.

      Such attitudes, so publicly expressed, were undoubtedly painful and infuriating annoyances to Julius Korngold and every other member of Vienna’s community of assimilated Jews, with their thoroughgoing identification with German culture. But we do well to bear in mind that these voices remained on the margins of high culture and polite society and were powerless to prevent Jewish representation in greatly disproportionate numbers in Vienna’s rich musical life.²⁷ Still, there were times when mainstream writers on music—whether they were Jewish, like Korngold and Graf and a number of the city’s other leading critics, or, like Kalbeck, were not—did feel compelled to engage the anti-Semitism they found in their midst.²⁸

      One such case, part of a larger story that merits close examination, involves Erich’s Piano Trio in D Major, Op. 1, composed in 1910. A strikingly mature work for a boy of thirteen, the Trio was a clear advance over Der Schneemann. Compared with this child we are all impoverished, Richard Strauss is supposed to have said upon first hearing it.²⁹ The Trio’s first Viennese performance was given in the Bösendorfer Hall on December 11, 1910, in a concert of new works by Austrian composers that was sponsored by Der Merker. Julius, who continued to be wary of allowing Erich’s music to be performed in Vienna, permitted this performance under the impression that it was to be a private affair, designed to promote the new publication. The concert was anything but. Glowing notices from Munich, where the Trio premiered on November 4, made Erich’s work the most highly anticipated piece on a program that also included music by Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler, and Karl Weigl, among others. Indeed, the inclusion of the Trio induced a veritable who’s who of Vienna’s political, social, and cultural elite to attend, including the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, and Felix Salten, and the composers Carl Goldmark, Oscar Straus, and Oskar Nedbal. The newspapers even saw fit to treat the event like a society affair by publishing the names of the many notables who were present.³⁰

      As with Der Schneemann, here again there was a split in critical opinion between Kalbeck and Graf. For Kalbeck, the Trio provided new evidence that the "splendid boy [Prachtjunge] whose mighty talent remains a mystery related to nature, was fast approaching a significant future."³¹ The critic describes each of the four movements in some detail, noting, for example, how in the opening Allegro there is no patchwork, no stuffing, not a weak bar anywhere; everything is arranged in accordance with the composer’s self-will. The other three movements came in for similar high praise. Most notable, however, was Kalbeck’s decision to send his readers off with a striking biblical citation from Luke 2:47: ‘All who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers,’ it was said of the twelve-year-old boy Jesus. May Erich Wolfgang increase in wisdom, age, and grace with God and the people! He will not be lacking in laurels.

      Figure 3. Carl Goldmark in 1902.

      Standing in complete contrast to this image is the picture Graf paints of an unseemly venue of musical commerce: What shall we say when a boy, a strong and precocious musical talent, takes the plunge into the modern musical market, where circus people and fire-eaters sit in bright-colored, painted booths behind the shouting barkers?³² The critic reminds his readers that he had never denied the boy’s extraordinary musical gifts, even if, in his review of Der Schneemann, he had made no secret of his belief that Erich’s propensity for quirky harmonies and irregular, twitching rhythms had a corrosive effect on the musical style, like rust on metal. "If [in Der Schneemann], Graf continued, those distortions and discolorations . . . could be interpreted as expressions of boyish cockiness, now, with the more mature new piano trio, it had become clear that artificiality and intricacy were in fact part and parcel of the young composer’s style—and this, clearly, Graf does not see as a good thing. This composing boy, he writes, is a true child of his time in that the bizarre and nervous nature of modern music exerts a strong appeal on him, because he feels a kindred element in these problematic elements of music."

      Richard Robert, writing in the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, was similarly critical of the Trio’s precocious harmony, finding it to be unnatural, bizarre, and contrived. It would be good for the little maniac for dissonance to take to the mineral springs with Joh. Sebastian Bach (I know of no better teacher). Indeed, Robert suggests that further publications and performances—Julius’s doing, the reader is presumably meant to infer—should be put aside for the time being to allow the boy to continue his studies in search of simplicity and purity.³³

      The principal objection made in David Josef Bach’s review for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Vienna’s voice of social democracy, recalled in its own, more politicized way, Graf ’s criticism of the atmosphere surrounding the concert:

      It is to be hoped that the little Korngold will be a musical matter; then he must be saved from becoming a social sensation. Success, loud public recognition can also be beneficial to the youngest composer and therefore can probably also be granted to young Korngold. But if our public concert life has in and of itself less and less to do with art, and more and more to do with the sensationalism of unmusical snobs, of liquid capital and its parasitic following, then Erich Wolfgang Korngold should at least learn to distinguish judgment from a lack of judgment, and discerning listeners from audiences of the worst kind. In the end, all this was confused. Little Korngold’s power of discrimination will not be sharpened if raving mad idiots [tobsüchtige Schmücke] strive to confuse him with irreverent comparisons, when attendance lists are published, as if it had to do with a ball or a charity bazaar, not with art and a young artist.³⁴

      The generally lukewarm reception of Erich’s Trio by more than one Viennese critic provides the context for the note his father sent to Max Kalbeck in response to Kalbeck’s rather more heartening review:

      With tears still in my eye, I sit down to thank you wholeheartedly for your lovely, warm words about my Erich. When someone like me by virtue of his position has to struggle again and again against adversity, misinterpretation, and anger in a matter that really should silence the evil instincts of human nature, words like yours are doubly fortunate. . . . May your wishes concerning the child be fulfilled!³⁵

      Julius’s frustration is palpable. He seems to interpret any questioning of the circumstances under which Erich’s music was making its way onto Viennese programs as evidence of an unwarranted and unfair belief—a triumph of the evil instinct of human nature—that all this was happening so early and so rapidly not because of the boy’s merit as a composer, but only because of the power and influence his father wielded as the city’s leading musical tastemaker. Rather than allowing that some criticism may have been made honestly by fair-minded critics in the course of doing their jobs—not by Graf, perhaps, but certainly by others—Julius took it all personally. Now it was not only Graf, his bête noire, but also the likes of Robert and Bach and others who, in his mind, were against him. Given his obvious conflict of interest, Julius could not fight back in print against this perceived injustice, so he registered his protest privately by withdrawing his membership in the Vereinigung Wiener Musikreferenten (Association of Viennese Music Critics). This soon led a minority faction of the association to respond in a condemnatory letter intended to goad Julius into public argument. Advised by a journalist friend—Kalbeck is a likely candidate—of the inflammatory nature of what was contained in the letter, Julius reportedly left it unopened. And though the charges made in the letter were retracted a year later, it did little to lessen the breach.³⁶

      Meanwhile, the noted satirist Karl Kraus, whose hatred for what he saw as the perniciousness of Vienna’s daily press (and of the Neue Freie Presse most of all) permeated his writings, entered the fray on 31 December 1910 with a biting essay titled Der kleine Korngold.³⁷ Kraus began by fantasizing about intervening in the family life of the old Korngold and using a pair of pinchers to excise the demon who compels this father, like William Tell, to deliver critical shots to the head of his child—strong evidence, he believes, that musical politics is the meanest and most dangerous of all aspirations arising in any field of art. Kraus is convinced that all the recent attention paid to the little Korngold by every independent virtuoso, every trio, piano tuner, and organ grinder merely reflects a desire to curry favor with the old Korngold. One critic in particular comes under Kraus’s direct fire in this regard:

      Herr Max Kalbeck, that colleague who has remedied in their children what he has inflicted on the men of music, that man from the era of Wagner and Bruckner hatred who has not yet discovered the late Hugo Wolf but does not want to let it be said that he has misjudged a new-born Korngold, has the goodness to write down the passage: ‘All who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers,’ it is said of the twelve-year-old boy Jesus.’ May Erich Wolfgang increase in wisdom, age, and grace with God and the people! He will not be lacking in laurels.

      Kraus immediately scoffs at this audacious comparison, first because the audience that crucified Jesus is enthusiastic in the Bösendorfer Hall—Jews were always disproportionately represented among Vienna’s concert-going public—and second because the modest world fame to which the [Christian] salvation doctrine could be brought could not be compared with the sensation produced by the miracles of the little Korngold.³⁸ Clearly impugning Kalbeck’s and Julius’s integrity at the same time, Kraus adds for good effect: At least at the time [of Jesus] correspondents did not receive telegraphic orders from their editors to give a favorable report. It is also mortifying to imagine what part in the comparison [with Jesus] father Korngold plays, and one has to assume it does not suit him. He prefers the part of the old Mozart, and he did not hesitate to take it on in a feuilleton.

      The feuilleton in question had appeared in the Neue freie Presse two months earlier. In it is Julius’s discussion of a Mozart Evening recently given in the auditorium of Vienna’s newly inaugurated Urania, an educational institute with a public observatory. Among other items, the bill included Mozart’s youthful singspiel Bastien und Bastienne, composed at the age of twelve. Julius writes at some length to justify the many actions Leopold Mozart took on behalf of his prodigy son: Leopold Mozart . . . fought like a lion for his child and considered it his duty to defend the prodigy against lies and underestimation. You have to read the letters Leopold Mozart wrote at that time from Vienna in order to gauge the tribulations he faced, and how stubbornly he argued for his cause. ‘He was guilty of convincing the world of this miracle,’ he wrote in one of them.³⁹

      All this was too good for Kraus to pass up, so he shared his wicked take on the many parallels that could be drawn between Leopold Mozart and Julius Korngold:

      One must see how poorly the young Mozart, who was born with talent but without a press, comes off in the comparison, and one may wonder what would have become of this other Wolfgang if his father, like the elder Korngold, had had his hand in the divine game. . . . [Father Korngold] has already supplanted the young pseudo-Korngold of the eighteenth century and introduced the genuine Mozart of the twentieth.⁴⁰

      Later, alluding once more to Kalbeck’s review, Kraus offers Julius some advice:

      I do not know if the criticism that praises the chubby lad as a splendid boy whose mighty talent remains a mystery related to nature is valid. I do not know whether it is instead a secret related to the Neue freie Presse, that is, an editorial secret and a family secret at the same time. In any case, it should stay that way. If the little Korngold is approaching a significant future, then the genius-correspondence of the father will not stand in the way. But if he is just a freak of nature, his presence is not worth the hype.⁴¹

      A few weeks after the appearance of Kraus’s article, Der Merker weighed in on the controversy, one that had been set into motion, after all, by its concert of December 11. In his article Zum Wunderkindproblem (On the Child Prodigy Problem), Richard Batka begins by noting that events of recent weeks and months had led many in Vienna to compare the accomplishments of young Erich with those of Mozart, adding that, for some, such a comparison was not only impudent but blasphemous.⁴² He quickly dismisses this criticism by making the obvious point that no one was comparing the lad in short pants with his Op. 1 with "the immortal creator of Don Giovanni and Zauberflöte, and that it could only be left to the future to determine what significance might eventually be attached to the mature Korngold vis-à-vis the German musical genius of light and love. Rather than stopping there, Batka continues by suggesting that if the history of the young Mozart were not seen through the rose-tinted glasses of anecdotal wisdom, then it would be discovered that even Mozart was only human, that he had benefited from certain deceptions made on his behalf by his father, and that the hymns to the Wunderkind sung in 1765 were not altogether different from those sung in 1911. This leads Batka to conclude: Perhaps those principled persons who are discontented with the present and praise times past [laudatores temporis acti] will take these facts to heart. No one today can say whether a Mozart will one day come from the young Korngold. But one is arguably justified in drawing parallels between the early stages of their lives without running the risk of committing artistic sacrilege, not as a blind supporter of modernism, but as a perceptive appreciator of

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