Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Few composers arrived in Hollywood trailing so much European prestige. Born in Brunn and raised in Vienna, Korngold was hailed as a genius in early childhood - Mahler pronounced him one after hearing him play, and Richard Strauss marveled at scores written by a boy barely into his teens. By his mid-twenties he had composed Die tote Stadt, one of the most successful operas of the 1920s, performed on the great stages of Europe.

It was the theater impresario Max Reinhardt who lured him to Warner Bros. in 1934 to adapt Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Korngold stayed, and in doing so brought the full apparatus of the late-Romantic symphony to the movies. His scores for Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, and The Prince and the Pauper gave the swashbuckler its musical soul - soaring, chromatic, opulent, alive with heroism and longing. He won Academy Awards for Anthony Adverse and Robin Hood, the latter establishing that a film score could be a symphonic achievement in its own right.

The Anschluss of 1938 turned his Hollywood sojourn into exile; as a Jewish artist he could not return, and he later said his music had saved his life. He treated his films with unusual care, calling them operas without singing. After the war he tried to return to the concert hall, writing a Violin Concerto that quoted his film themes, but the musical world had moved toward modernism and dismissed him as a movie composer. Wounded by the neglect, he wrote little in his final years and died of a stroke in Hollywood in 1957, aged sixty. Rediscovery came slowly; today his lush, unashamedly emotional idiom is recognized as a direct ancestor of the modern blockbuster score, and later masters have named him a touchstone.