Korngold’s Hollywood Homecomings

This article explores how Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s experience of moving from Vienna to Hollywood in the late 1930s aligns with his score for Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1941). Korngold’s use of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) as source music and underscoring is interpreted as giving voice to the composer’s predicament as an emigrant, and as being emblematic for the changing relationship between classical music and film music in his oeuvre and in the history of Western classical music.