Korngold: Die Tote Stadt (complete opera)

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the second son of the distinguished Viennese music critic Julius Korngold, himself the son of a well-to-do wine-merchant in Briinn (Brno) and a pupil of Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory. Julius Korngold had won the approval of Brahms and of Hanslick, assisting and then succeeding the latter as music critic for the Neue freie Presse. As a child Erich Korngold showed remarkable precocity and embarked on the study of composition at the age of six. His father was on good terms with Mahler and in 1906 the boy played by heart for him his new cantata Gold, while Mahler followed the score, exclaiming" A genius" , as the music continued. He advised Julius Korngold to avoid the Conservatory and allow his son to study with Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler's former teacher and brother-in-law of schoenberg, while Robert Fuchs was persuaded to give him lessons in counterpoint. The connection with Mahler continued and the Korngolds visited him in succeeding summers when he was at Toblach. In the summer of 1909 the boy played to Mahler a new Scherzo he had written and a Passacaglia on a theme of Zemlinsky. Mahler advised him to add a first movement to these pieces and make of them a sonata, the result of which was Korngold's Piano Sonata No.1 in D minor. By this time the boy's reputation had aroused wider interest from, among others, Engelbert Humperdinck and Richard Strauss, Nikisch and even Weingartner, whose appointment as successor to Mahler at the Hofoper had earned Julius Korngold's open hostility. In 1910 Julius Korngold allowed the private publication by Universal Edition of three of his son's compositions, Der Schneemann (The Snowman), Charakterstiicke zu Don Quixote (Character Pieces based on Don Quixote) and the Piano Sonata in D minor, for the exclusive use of musicians.