Classical music hideout? It’s in Hollywood

The death of classical music in the 20th century has become an almost tiresome cliche, but maybe now is the time to ask if these reports of serious music’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps we have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Perhaps it merely went into hiding in a place where you would least expect it: the Hollywood soundstage.

Let’s go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear and consider composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Warner Bros.’ 1938 swashbuckling costume epic “The Adventures of Robin Hood” as a case in point. Mr. Korngold’s score for the film, which starred a youthful Errol Flynn as Robin and a winsome Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian, has long been hailed as the gold standard for movie music.

As an exciting new recording makes clear, however, even this high praise somehow diminishes the achievement, for Mr. Korngold’s “Robin Hood” score was much more than great incidental music. It was nothing less than a massive, heroic tone poem easily the equal of anything by Mahler or Richard Strauss and approaching the tight cohesiveness even of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Maybe classical music never died, after all.

Not that it hasn’t been ailing. Long gone are the days when college students demonstrated loudly in the balconies in support of Hector Berlioz’s tradition-shattering “Fantastic Symphony” or when wealthy young women routinely handed their room keys to barnstorming pianist-composer Franz Liszt. Today, serious music is a nonevent for most young people downloading three-minute cuts of the latest MTV-hyped, high-decibel tripe into their iPods.

To some extent, the classical repertoire hasn’t been significantly freshened for nearly a century. Yes, works by 20th-century composers including Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Ives and Messiaen are increasingly represented in the concert hall and on the dwindling number of new classical CDs. And modern composers are commissioned to write new stuff all the time. Nevertheless, the average concert program today still treats musical diversity as a choice of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms.

Worse yet, when new music is introduced, concertgoers are turned off by the snarling cacophony that’s a legacy of the Second Viennese School. These musical ideologues valued new works in direct proportion to the auditory pain they inflicted. Largely the product of a nihilistic European intelligentsia reeling from the destruction bookended by two world wars, this institutional ugliness has mindlessly possessed at least two generations of American academic composers.

Yet while such composers labored mightily to exterminate listenable music, classically trained professional composers who still longed for money and an audience — including European Jewish composers anxious to escape Hitler’s wrath — headed for that capital of decadence, Los Angeles, to try their hand at writing music for motion pictures.

With a hat tip to the French brothers Lumiere for inventing the motion picture, it was in America where this fledgling art form made its greatest strides. Early films were stage plays without words, assisted by captions and transformed into thrilling melodramas with the addition of live music in a small orchestra pit or by means of a theater organ. Specially composed recorded music became an important part of the film experience when “talkies” began to appear in the late 1920s.

It was around this time that Hollywood got lucky. Fearing the rise of Nazi totalitarianism, a significant minority of classical composers, many of them Jewish, fled to the United States in the 1930s. Some, like Kurt Weill, composer of the “Threepenny Opera,” were avant-garde musicians still capable of writing in popular genres. Others, like Karl Hajos and Friederich Hollander, were mainstream composers who ended up in film. (Even the dreaded Arnold Schoenberg eventually settled in the United States.)

None of this generation achieved greater stature than Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

A child prodigy, the Czech-born Mr. Korngold wrote his first symphony at age 11. His uncommon genius was recognized by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, the leading Germanic lights of the early 20th century. At age 23, he scored his first real triumph with his opera “Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead City” or “The City of Death”).

The score for “Robin Hood” was not Mr. Korngold’s first cinematic effort. First noticed by the Warner brothers, he had been invited by them to the United States in the early 1930s. The Warners were quickly rewarded for their prescience when Mr. Korngold penned popular scores for their hit films “Captain Blood” and “Anthony Adverse,” the latter of which won the composer an Academy Award.

Mr. Korngold was strongly influenced by his father, an influential music critic who hated the Second Viennese School’s atonal experiments. The composer thrived in a then strongly traditionalist Hollywood by remaining an unabashed Romantic tonalist, although his music is comfortable with dissonance and modern idioms.

Mr. Korngold envisioned his film scores, including “Robin Hood,” as “operas without singing.” And what story had greater resonance in the Depression 1930s than the tale of a former lord who robs the rich to help the poor, thwarting the schemes of greedy royals who would rather pocket the money themselves? Add a poignant love story with a brave young woman, and you have the stuff of timeless movie legends.

As in Wagnerian opera, Mr. Korngold organized his score around a series of leitmotifs, including the famous “March of the Merry Men,” love music for Robin and Marian, and heroic music for Robin Hood himself — borrowed from the composer’s ambitious but failed “Sursum Corda.” All were woven into a lush symphonic tapestry that immeasurably enhanced this already well-constructed film.

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