Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35
Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote the Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35, in 1945. It was premiered by Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Golschmann on February 15, 1947, followed by a Carnegie Hall performance with the New York Philharmonic and conductor Efrem Kurtz in March. First BSO performance: August 2, 2025, at Tanglewood with Elim Chan conducting and Leonidas Kavakos as soloist.
Ambition no doubt was mixed with hope when the powerful Viennese music critic Julius Korngold in 1897 named his second son Erich Wolfgang—might he turn out to be another Mozart? Within a few years many were predicting just that of the phenomenal prodigy. His ballet The Snowman was staged at the Vienna Court Opera when Erich was 11. Gustav Mahler became an early supporter, as did Richard Strauss, Artur Schnabel, and Giacomo Puccini. In 1916 Bruno Walter conducted the premiere of his second opera, Violanta, and the stage continued to hold a particular allure. Die tote Stadt (The Dead City, 1920), which Korngold wrote at 23, remains his best-known opera and his next, Das Wunder der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane, 1927), has deservedly received increasing attention in recent years.
The keen dramatic sensibility apparent from Korngold’s success with ballet and opera moved in the second half of his career to music he wrote for films, which coincided with the move of his physical world from Europe to the U.S. In 1934 the great theater director Max Reinhardt, with whom Korngold had already collaborated on various projects, enlisted him to come to Hollywood to help adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus began a long, successful, and influential career in the movies. Korngold initially shuttled between Vienna and Los Angeles, but the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 made this no longer possible for a Jewish composer. He remained in California and fortunately managed to bring over his parents and family.
By this time, Korngold had won Academy Awards for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The film experiences left their mark on his music. His Cello Concerto was actually central to the plot of Deception (1946), and he later expanded the work for concert use. The Violin Concerto overlaps with music Korngold used in four of his film scores, although in this instance it is not always clear which came first, parts of the concerto or the movie soundtrack.
According to Korngold’s wife, Luzi, his friend Bronislaw Huberman, a superb violinist, kept up a running refrain: “Erich, where is my violin concerto?” Korngold started writing one in 1937, but after an unsuccessful private reading with the composer at the piano he put it aside until 1945. As the war ended and his father died in September, he returned at his wife’s urging to writing concert music with a string quartet and decided to finish the Violin Concerto. Huberman still wanted the piece but there were no plans for the premiere. Korngold read through the work privately with another violinist, Bronislaw Gimpel, former concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who after military service was angling for a solo career.
At this point the great Jascha Heifetz heard of the project through his manager and approached Korngold. The legendary violinist studied the concerto and played it through flawlessly with the composer. Korngold wrote somewhat sheepishly to Huberman: “I haven’t been unfaithful yet, I’m not engaged…but I have flirted.” In the end Heifetz gave the acclaimed first performance in February 1947 with Vladimir Golschmann conducting the Saint Louis Symphony. Korngold expected it would be well-received in Saint Louis but dreaded what critics in New York would say the next month when Efrem Kurtz conducted Heifetz and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Sure enough, the reviews were condescending, glib, and nasty, and yet a recording of that live broadcast concert, available on YouTube, shows the audience clapping enthusiastically after each of the movements. That summer Gimpel gave the European premiere in Vienna with Otto Klemperer conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.
Heifetz performed the concerto for the last time with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Alfred Wallenstein in January 1953 and soon after they made the first recording of the piece. There are no documented performances for the next 20 years. Then the work slowly began to enter the repertory, further recordings were released, and it ultimately emerged as one of the most beloved concertos of the 20th century.
Heifetz’s gifts for both astonishing technique and moving lyricism inspired Korngold, who remarked, “In spite of its demand for virtuosity in the finale, the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini. It is needless to say how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.” Korngold dedicated the work to Alma Mahler-Werfel, whose third husband, the novelist Franz Werfel, had recently died.
In 1937 Julius Korngold supposedly suggested to his son that the main theme of the recently released film Another Dawn would work well in a violin concerto. The soloist starts the first movement, Moderato nobile, with the film score’s lush, soaring melody, which is followed by a second one he used as a love motive in Juarez (1939). The middle movement, Romance: Andante, drawing upon the main love theme from Anthony Adverse, has an atmospheric “misterioso” middle section using muted violin and celesta with the evocative presence throughout of the vibraphone. The brilliant finale, Allegro assai vivace, unfolds as a dancelike rondo employing material from The Prince and the Pauper (1937) and ending with a dazzling coda.
© CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBS
Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and has been the program annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2000. He is the author of several books on Schubert and Liszt, and the co-author, with Richard Taruskin, of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition.