Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born in Brünn (today Brno) on 29 May 1897, was a child prodigy who had won the admiration of Strauss, Mahler and Puccini.  Being a pupil of Zemlinsky and progressing rapidly, his meteoric rise to fame with the ballet "The Snowman", composed at the age of 11 and premiered in 1910 at the Wiener Hofoper, caused a sensation.  By his early teens Korngold's astonishingly mature works were being widely performed by such legendary musicians as Bruno Walter, Artur Schnabel, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Felix Weingartner or Richard Strauss.

Korngold's opera compositions (The Ring of Polycrates and Violanta, both in 1916, Die tote Stadt 1920, Das Wunder der Heliane 1927) made him the most performed operatic composer in Austria and Germany, apart from Richard Strauss.

Being invited to Hollywood in 1934 by Max Reinhardt to arrange Mendelssohn's music of Shakespeares "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Reinhardt's film, Korngold began a second career as a composer of film music for Warner Brothers, pioneering the symphonic film score in a long series of romantic films (a.o. "Anthony Adverse" 1936 and "The Adventures of Robin Hood" 1938, which both won him the coveted Academy Award).

Having settled in Hollywood since 1938, his attempt to revive his concert and operatic career (with a.o. the Violin Concerto, the Cello Concerto and the Symphony in F#") after the war failed and he found himself largely ignored, both in his adopted homeland and in Europe.  He died in Hollywood on 29 November 1957.

 The Korngold Society website www.korngold-society.org