How Korngold got left in the cold

Herbert Pauls says:

The blog post notes: “After 1938 ‘Die Tote Stadt’ was no longer played. Only at the end of 1970s it started a cautious comeback.”

But, it was not for lack of trying. To give a really eye-opening example, a series of eight sold-out performances of Die Tote Stadt in Munich was greeted with unreserved critical derision despite lengthy standing ovations. It was not unlike how the ovations that greeted Heifetz’s premiere of the Violin Concerto only a few years earlier, in 1947, somehow turned into “more corn than gold” in newspaper the next morning.

The reality was that audiences over the years evidently would have been quite happy to hear Korngold’s music. And, deep down, musicians (at least those who knew of Korngold’s quality) also probably wanted to perform Korngold. But who was strong enough to risk going against the tremendously strong critical and academic reserve which had long since embedded itself on the institutional level? It was a case of critics fighting against the zeitgeist. Inevitably, the zeitgeist won, but it took a while.

Bone says:

His Sinfonietta is just criminally underrecorded. What a fantastic composer!

Fred says:

Holland is not a country : the Netherlands are