A new book on opera and film composer Erich Korngold (1897-1957), written by Music lecturer Ben Winters, has been published by Oxford University Press in their Music/Media series.

Korngold in America: Music, Myth, and Hollywood offers new insights into the film scores and post-Hollywood concert works of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a Vienna-raised Austro-Hungarian composer who left Europe for Hollywood in the mid-1930s to write for Warner Bros. It reassesses Korngold’s place in twentieth-century music historiography and dismantles many of the myths that have obscured a proper understanding of his work. These myths include the extent of Korngold’s relationship with the technology of film production (much greater than had hitherto been acknowledged) and the nature of his contractual arrangements with Warner Bros., which were less generous than previously thought and far more typical of other musicians working in the Hollywood studio system.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival material gathered primarily from the Library of Congress and Warner Bros. Archives, Korngold in America reveals Korngold’s commercial and artistic relationships with studio processes and staff, highlights aspects of his compositional practice, and traces the ways in which he adapted his skills as  musical dramatist and experienced opera composer to the demands of film. The book presents a more complete picture of Korngold’s artistry than has hitherto been possible, showing both the important role played by his music in the Hollywood films of which it is a part and the importance in turn of Hollywood films for his compositional identity. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the relationship between Korngold’s film scores and his works for the concert hall and opera house in ways that draw attention to the significance of Hollywood for histories of twentieth-century music.

The book includes notated extracts from classic film scores of the 1930s and 40s including The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, The Sea Wolf, Juarez, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Kings Row, Between Two Worlds, Another Dawn, and Devotion, alongside Oscar-winners Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Dr Ben Winters is Senior Lecturer in Music. He is the author of several books on film music, including Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film (Routledge, 2014) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood:A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He was co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (Routledge, 2017) and Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear (Routledge, 2018) and is a former co-editor of the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. He currently co-edits the Ashgate Screen Music Series of books for Taylor & Francis.