Mus i c
Knowingly oversold
Robin Holloway
Film music, once a dirty word, is now high praise. When Miklos Rozsa was Radio Three Composer of the Week recently the presenter's hype was so upbeat as to cause wonder at what he could possibly say for Beethoven or Wagner. And in this, his cen- tenary year, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hollywood's most celebrated working musician, seems poised for a niche in the pantheon of modem masters.
Abjured or admired, the quality film music requires, beyond the tunefulness, accessibility, atmosphere-creating which go without saying, is exactness in connoting. Film-music, in those heady days with their surging symphonic scores, had to issue explicit instructions on how the viewer should react — this is anxiety, danger, relief, rejoicing, love, a happy end. Such tropes aren't exactly unknown to previous music, obviously; especially in opera and in the projection of drama, character and self that fuels late romantic symphonism. What's needed for King Kong Robin Hood, King of Kings, and thousands of others, is for the musical message to be large, lurid and unmistakable. Rozsa's backing for Mowgli's narration in The Jungle Book sets out some basic moves with delightful slick- ness — the svelte panther, the chuckling bear, the gliding serpent, prominent among a large supporting case of clichés. And Komgold, who after his early exposure as a prodigy had seen his operatic double-bill at the age of 19 and enjoyed vast success with Die Tote Stadt at 23, shows the same gift for demonstrative verisimilitude, on a grander scale. The climax of his European career, the super-degenerate Miracle of Heliane, came in 1927 at the ripe old age of 30. Hollywood was waiting.
Something is wrong with his serious music. Those useful German words kitsch, schmaltz, ersatz — all apply. It's dif- ficult to define just how Korngold's operas, possibly the most accomplished ever writ- ten in terms of technical prowess and sheer-silk finish, are unmistakably all three — trash, lard, imitation — in plain Ameri- can, tacky; in plain English, tat. But what's wrong with it is right for Hollywood where he flourished like the green bay-tree.
Komgold and Rozsa were supreme wiz- ards of this newest profession, with its roots in the old European high culture that they consistently strove to retain. And in view of the claims now made, for Korngold's seri- ous concert-works in particular, I've been exploring them with keen curiosity. There are two main aspirants. The Violin Concer- to (1945) uses material from his film- scores, the Symphony (1947-52) doesn't, though its idiom is similar. An idiom sur- prisingly unbeholden to his Austrian ori- gins. In the Concerto, though I discern a glaring quotation from the slow movement of Mahler's Fourth, the accent when the music is sensuous, is French with a Slavic tinge; when vigorous it is cheerfully Ameri- can, in cowboy-breakfast-cereal mode. The three movements grow steadily in quality. The first (sources, Another Dawn and Jau- rez) alternates lushness with pyrotechnics, both equally stereotyped: the juxtaposition produces no tension and the final impres- sion is desultory. The lyric second (Anthony Adverse) presents decorative melodisation rather than melody, against a high-choles- terol background shimmer with plenty of vibraphone. The finale provides much- needed contrast, as a lively rondo-cum- variations, in a style not so far from a more recent Viennese master Franz Schmidt. A brief moment of tinsel apotheosis brings Errol Flynn to mind before the final bril- liant dash for home.
Korngold's Symphony, however, carries conviction. It's a pity that it has to be 'I advise you to talk, Mr, er, Smith. This is, after all, a job interview.' guarded about with his defensive words: 'I believe that my newly completed Sympho- ny will show the world that the use of a tonality and ugly dissonance — at the expense of inspiration, form, expression, melody and beauty — will result in ulti- mate disaster for the art of music.' The first movement is brusque, terse, purposeful, its rhapsody disciplined into dissonant linear writing that has surely heard and retained Stravinsky's then-recent Symphony in Three Movements. Yearning sets in; hero- ic, then pastoral strains; renewed tension builds to martial music, they alternate, then struggle. These discrepant ingredients cohabit and bounce off each other to strong effect.
The scherzo is ordinary: cartoonish chro- matic busyness, relieved by an epic-con- toured horn theme, touchingly open and up-front. But its trio, all creeping lilting silkiness (again very close to Schmidt), is perhaps the work's best section. For the adagio that follows sounds like film music in the derogatory sense: a heart-on-sleeve elegy for Roosevelt with instructions to grieve here, here grow anxious, then calm, then despairing, then be consoled, till Fate strikes a sudden Blow, before the move- ment closes in neon-lit Acquiescence with a velvet fur of strings, a twinkle of glocken- spiel, and a soft pattern on drums like a three-quarter echo of Parsifal.
And again the finale is good — more `modern' but not to hurt, Hindemith miti- gated by homeliness even when it grows fugal. Bits of the prior movements return slow across the basic lively tempo, and Richard Strauss, mentioned by every com- mentator but to my ears not a primary source, is evoked in several ways: in an excellent passage where another of Korn- gold's healthy comflake turns is placed against a slither of Rosenkavalier col- oration; elsewhere the buffa overture to Strauss's little-known Ben Jonson adapta- tion The Silent Woman is pillaged to good effect.
Yet, all in all, it is kitsch however classy, however dazzling its technical perfection and the sumptuousness of surface equally with the expert control of its hearer's every response. Which need not in itself be a complaint: plenty of real music after all is located here, and for some composers Puccini and Tchaikovsky being obvious examples — the danger in their proximity to glittering vulgarity and flagrant manipu- lation is inseparable from its rewards when their results so often and so successfully hit the target. But, despite an element of nec- essary cunning, their calculation is the legitimate means by which they reach what they're trying to express; it doesn't come straight out of an expression-kit. In Korn- gold, calculation is formalised into knowing- ness; emotive responses are technologised into pat routine. For all its seductive wiles his concert works, as well as his film scores, emit the odourless yet palpable whiff of plastic — or should one say celluloid?
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