KGNU’s Sanford Baran sat down with conductor John Mauceri to discuss the release of The Korngold Symphony, a two-CD album featuring Korngold’s Symphony in F-Sharp Major. Mauceri reflects on his passion for reviving overlooked composers like Korngold, shares the discovery of a rare recording of Korngold playing the symphony and explores its deep connection to the emotional impact of war, violence, and rebuilding. (Interview date: 3/17/2025)
Sanford Baran: I’m positively thrilled to bring you a conversation that offers a rare glimpse into musical history. I’m speaking about the album, the Korngold Symphony, a remarkable new two CD release that brings together two extraordinary performances of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F Sharp Major. On Disc one, we hear the composer himself at the piano playing his own symphony in a private recording discovered in the Korngold Family Archives. And on the second disc, we have a full symphonic performance by the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana under the direction of the brilliant conductor John Maucheri who joins us today. John, not only as a world renowned conductor and music scholar, but also one of the most passionate advocates for composers whose music has been overlooked or suppressed. John, welcome a real pleasure.
John Maucheri: Sanford I’m sitting here blushing. Thank you.
Sanford Baran: Over the course of your career, you’ve been a passionate advocate for 20th century composers whose works were suppressed or dismissed. What has drawn you to these composers and their work?
John Maucheri: Sanford, if I go back a bit to answer that question. I was a composition student, so I was a composer, and I studied composition and music theory at Yale University as an undergraduate. At the same time, I studied conducting, and as I went through school, I carried with me the normal prejudices and you know what you like, what you don’t like, and maybe you start asking yourself questions of why did you think that movie music wasn’t any good? Whereas when you were a teenager and you heard the score Cleopatra by Alex North, you went out and bought the album. And I started becoming curious just out of self knowledge. What was the music that was being written the day I was born? So I had the tremendous good fortune of being born on September 12th, 1945. World War II was over, the first atom bomb had dropped. I was born into the atomic age, but when I was conceived in those nine months, it was the most Titanic time, perhaps in the history of the 20th century, from the point of view of culture and history and hope and death and all those things going on at once. So in that time, I started to realize that being a conductor was far more interesting and probably far more valuable than just another composer writing music who was being required in those years in the sixties. To write more atonal, non tonal music that, quite frankly, very few people liked. That music wasn’t me. And I thought, you know what, let’s just look at this. And I found this treasure of music, not only the composers who were alive in my time, but composers I’d never heard of who had been world famous and had disappeared. So I suddenly had to learn who these composers were for Hollywood. And I also had to learn about the composers who were on the list of band composers that Hitler put together. And that’s where the moment happened, where I saw names on one list that were on the other list. And I had never in my entire life, studying music history, teaching at Yale. I taught at Yale for 15 years. I never knew this part of the story. It was never mentioned. So those Hollywood composers were, without exception, one exception, but without exception they were refugees of World War II and they were all the genius composers who were number one in their classes in all of the greatest and most strict music conservators in the world. It was a firestorm for me because there was a sense of outrage that we were inadvertently participating in what the Nazis had done. The Nazis had not actually physically killed them, but the Nazis had managed after the war to obliterate them. Because so much of our sense of self as Americans is dictated by a sense that we are second rate to Europeans and we trust their opinions. After all, most of the music we love and that you broadcast when you broadcast classical music comes from Europe. We understand that. But when it comes to World War II and when it comes to the Cold War, that’s when we Americans have to say, hold on, we’ve got something to say here because all of these composers I mentioned to you became American citizens. They lived here, they had their families here. Their lives were saved by the United States of America, and they wrote great music. So I say, okay, let’s get on the bandwagon here. Let’s play this music. Let’s record this music. Let’s bring it back.
Sanford Baran: Tell us about how this acetate recording of Korngold himself playing a piano version of his F Sharp major symphony was discovered after decades.
John Maucheri: Yeah. So in 1991, I became music director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. So I tried to piece together some kind of sense of repertory. I said blithely that the Hollywood Bowl orchestra would play music written in Los Angeles because I knew that the Los Angeles Philharmonic never played this music. They never played. And now I’m not talking just about movie music, but I’m talking about Sheinberg and Stravinsky. They did not play. And even though they were living there, so I said, we’re gonna play music written in Los Angeles. As far as the Korngolds I said we have to, program Korngold because there had only been one concert in the 1930s in which Eric Korngold conducted, and that was it. So I programmed Robinhood or some music and invited the Korngold family, and we had, I think 14 members of the Korngold family, his eldest son, his younger son had passed away, but his eldest son was there, and wife. And then we had the last grandson from the other son, the son of George Korngold, and children, grandchildren. There’s a picture in this album of me standing there with them and it’s so dear looking at those little children’s faces. They’re so proud of having great grandpa’s music played at the Hollywood Bowl. Now at the same time, as I said to you that a musique series has started and I’m asked to do a Korngold album, and one of the pieces that is suggested to me is a symphonic serenade that Korngold wrote in Los Angeles after the war. It is a little symphony. It’s not the F Sharp Symphony, which he wrote after that. But this is a four movement work for strings. Leslie Les Korngold, who is George’s son, says to me, I think we have a recording of my grandfather playing it on the piano. And he did that as a guide for Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was going to conduct its premier. So I got a copy of it from Leslie, and I used it as a model for my recording of it in Berlin. So I started playing Korngold and I was doing a concert in I guess 1994 with the North German Radio Orchestra in Hanover, Germany. I called Leslie and I said, Leslie, I know this is crazy, but do you happen to have a recording of your grandfather playing the symphony, the F Symphony in F Sharp? And he said no, John, I’ve already gone through all this stuff and cataloged it, and I’m sorry, but I’ll look around now. All this stuff, these recordings were in his garage. And a few days later he called me up and he said, you’re not gonna believe this, but I, on the top shelf there was a box that didn’t have any marking on it. And I got on the ladder, I pulled it down. And therein were these acetates that said symphony movement, 1, 2, 3, 4. And I couldn’t believe that. And so that starts the journey that leads to the release that we’re talking about, the Korngold Symphony. Leslie makes this recording available to me, which as far as we know, no one had ever heard, he did it, but his younger son, George had, gotten a studio and put his father at a piano. And there’s Eric Korngold, who was a great pianist doing each of the movements playing them on the piano and, banging away and something happened, because I heard him play this, and it took the notes on the page to a whole other level of passion, rage, excitement in almost impossible to describe in words. And that’s when I came to the conclusion that the symphony was not just a symphony in F Sharp, but it was a symphony that was definitely about something. And it was too crazy, too wild, too elevated and yet depressed and all those things. And listening to Korngold play it where half the time he couldn’t play it. He was a great pianist, but something about this music was so beyond even his fingers when he gets to the second movement, which he didn’t record, he didn’t record all of that because of the repeats. But he can’t play it. He plays it so fast that the sense of panic in the music is transferred into the way he played it. So when I conducted the symphony for the first time in Hanover and I said to the orchestra, have you ever played Korngold before? And this is an orchestra of Germans, and they’d never played a note of his music. And I said have you ever heard of him? And there was not a single musician who’d ever heard his name, which again goes back to what the Nazis managed and what the survivors of World War II managed. So now I’m standing in front of an orchestra and. And there’s violas playing and a second trumpet and a harp. And the immensity of this epic symphony now is in front of me, not a recording, not it’s happening with people, Germans, who are playing this music for the first time in Germany. He wrote it in the 1950s. It’s now the 1990s. They are learning their own history in front of me while I’m experiencing this thing, this immense thing. And that’s when I came to the conclusion that it was a portrait of World War II. It stands as a monument to the central tragedy of the 20th century. Now, here’s the part that I think is interesting perhaps for your listeners. When I told Ernst Korngold, who is Eric Korngold’s elder son, who was very much alive at that time, my theory that the symphony was about World War II, he said, no, John, no, you’re absolutely wrong. My father insisted that the symphony was not about anything. I said, Ernst, I respect you. How could I not respect you? They were, they’ve been so supportive, that family of my performances and how I performed Papa’s music. But, he said, I know my father went out of his way to say, this is not about anything. So Ernst and Helen, his wife, came to Boston. The last time, just before his death, Ernst heard his father’s symphony. And he was clearly profoundly shaken by the performance of the Boston Symphony. And as I said, the first time they’d ever played it. And he went back to Portland where he and his wife lived. And he called me and he said, John, I just remembered that my father referred to the second theme in the first movement as the theme of reconciliation. So I now realize that you’re right ’cause he would not have named these themes if the symphony was not about something. So because the recording of his father playing it had begun my journey into what is this music about? And then that’s not a trivial question, because Sanford, Mahler had said that every symphony has a program. Whether the composer admits it or not, every symphony has a program, whether that’s Beethoven or Brahms or himself. And by the way, the whole issue of movie music gets into that because this music is telling a story. It is long form, dramatic symphonic music. So that’s when my performances of the symphony, because I’m the only living conductor in history who heard the composer play it.
Sanford Baran: Korngold insisted his symphony was pure music, not programmatic. Why do you think he took that stance?
John Maucheri: By the time he was writing this, he had been accused by writing for Hollywood, even before he ever went there. And by this point, Hollywood is being used as a pejorative. And I think because his father, who was a great music critic, always wanted Erich to be a serious composer and didn’t like the fact that Korngold liked apparatus. He adapted Deflator Mouse. He loved music, all kinds of music. So there was a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and he knew that he was gonna be accused of writing a movie score. In the symphony. So I believe he said that so that people would play this symphony and not say he’s writing another movie score. And that way he could get away with that because no one was writing program symphonies in the 1950s. Shastakovich would never tell you he was doing that, but we all know he was doing that. Prokofiev, we know he was doing that. His last symphony is one of those masterpieces, both guys last symphonies, both Prokofiev’s last Symphony and Shastakovich are program symphonies. There’s no question about that. So that’s the answer to your question. I think he was just trying to protect himself and hope that people would play his music.
Sanford Baran: Leonard Bernstein was a mentor of yours. Tell us about when you played a recording of the Korngold F Sharp Symphony for Lenny.
John Maucheri: Okay, so this is near the end of Lenny’s life in the 1980s, but this was a rare moment where it was just the two of us in the house in Fairfield. So I brought the one recording of the symphony that existed, which was produced by George Korngold of Wilhelm Kempff conducting an orchestra in Munich. And that’s the only recording of the symphony that existed. Until, our own time. And after dinner, we were sitting in the living room and I said, I brought a recording. I’d like to play it for you. Would that be okay? He said, sure. So we put the album on his record player and I played the first movement and he went, wow, that’s really interesting. I said, do you wanna hear it? He said, yeah. So we played the scherzo and I said, do you still want to go? He said yeah. So I played the third movement and he was totally in awe of that. Went to the piano, replicated the chord progression at the beginning he said, okay, let’s hear the last movement. So he played the last movement and he went, I think it should have ended with the third movement. Because he didn’t get what Korngold was about. And in retrospect, I realized this was where Lenny was in his late part of his life. The sadness of this is Mahler’s ninth, this is the sense of end of life. I don’t know how aware he was of how sick he was at that time. He might’ve known, I wouldn’t have, near the end of his life, he had so many things going on. And of course like everybody, you choose whether you’re gonna tell the public these stories or just carry on. I believe because Lenny would not have wanted a happy ending at that point in his life. He wouldn’t have, and I wouldn’t have understood to say wait a minute. The melody of that last movement is that second melody from the first movement now turned into positive action. And don’t you notice that the warning comes just before the end where the adagio comes back? And Korngold is saying, be careful. We’re rebuilding the world, but this is always gonna be there. This sense of destroying stuff, antisemitism, violence, anarchy, it’s always there. And he tells you that just before the end, it’s as if to say Hitler did not invent this. He’s just the most recent example of this. But I couldn’t say that to him. And I thought that it says more about Leonard Bernstein than about the symphony. And it certainly says a lot about Erich Korngold.
Sanford Baran: Many of the themes Korngold addressed seem eerily relevant today.
John Maucheri: I’m sitting here in my studio here, and we’ve lived here in Chelsea for almost 50 years. So a lot of people have been in this room. A lot of people have been in this room, famous people, not so famous people, students, whatever. One of the people who was in this room was a man by the name of Hans Svalich. Hans was the principal orchestrator on Broadway along with Robert Russell Bennett. Hans orchestrated for George Gershwin or for Cole Porter. He’s certainly Rogers and Hart. He’s the guy who created the Sound of Broadway. We’re talking about the Sound of Hollywood, and he was born in Vienna. He sang in the Vienna Boys Choir under Gustav Mahler. So Hans is talking to me and he remembers the last time he saw Mahler conduct, and it was Mahler’s last production at the State Opera. He said, there’s no boys choir in it, but we were used as props. We all stood there as if we were Greek statues. We had toga on and we had rice powder on our hands and on our faces. And we stood there staring at Mahler for the first act. And he said to me, and Mahler cried. From the first note to the last note of the first act in the dress rehearsal. And I said why was that? And he said, ’cause they were kicking him out, he said, and then when we went into the dressing room to get out of our costumes, the chorus master for the boys choir came to the room and said, On stage boys that goddamn Jew wants to rehearse. And at that point, this is 1909 1910. Hans, Little Hans looked at me and this gnarled finger. He said to me, so don’t think Hitler invented it. I’ll never forget hearing that, just saying it in this room where Hans said that it gives me goosebumps just imitating Hans. So this is what Korngold is saying at the end of that symphony, when the clarinet comes back just before the end, he’s saying it’s just. It is not something that was invented by Hitler. And you’re right to say it says a lot about today. So it’s a warning, and I think that one of the great functions of art is to be a warning, right? It can be uplifting, it can be this, it can be that. It can make us happy, but a warning is one of the things that music especially can do.
Sanford Baran: John, thank you for this lively and enlightening conversation. Your insights into Korngold’s F Sharp Symphony have highlighted its depth and historical significance. And congratulations on the recent release of the album, the Korngold Symphony
John Maucheri: Sanford, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much and all my best to everyone in Boulder and in Denver and all you people in the beautiful way out West beautiful New America. Thank you so much for this time.
Sanford Baran: This is Sanford Baron for KGNU.
