Look back in anguish

Despite Korngold's denials, there is much to suggest that his Symphony in F sharp is a grim depiction of the dark days of Nazism, argues Jessica Duchen

- Jessica Duchen

A shout, heavily accented: ‘First movement!’ Erich Wolfgang Korngold begins to play his own Symphony in F sharp on what must once have been a piano. Soon the sounds are making my study walls shake – or maybe it’s just me that’s shaking, because the volcano of history itself seems present in this musical roar of pain.

Last year I received an email from the record producer Richard Guérin. He was about to release a double CD of Korngold’s Symphony: a live concert performance from 1997 by the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana conducted by John Mauceri, alongside a piano recording by the composer himself, which had been preserved in the archive kept in the garage of his grandson Leslie Korngold, and which Mauceri had consulted before tackling the work. Neither recording has been previously released. At last, here they are.

Mauceri had first contacted the Korngold family in the early 1990s while preparing to record the Symphonic Serenade, hoping that something useful might be lurking in the archive that Leslie had inherited. Leslie subsequently spent months in the studio with the music historian and archivist Lance Bowling, transferring his collection of lacquer records onto DAT. ‘During those sessions, we found a recording of my grandfather playing the Symphonic Serenade, which I shared with John. It became one of the tools he used to prepare for that recording,’ Leslie says. ‘A year or two later, he called me again, wondering if I had anything that would help with the Symphony.’ Leslie checked his database – and found that he did.

Leslie and Mauceri both suggest that the composer’s recording was intended as a tempo guide for conductors, but that it seems far more besides. First, Korngold was an extraordinary pianist: ‘You can hear effects in this that can’t be realised with an orchestra,’ Mauceri says. But other clues to the Symphony’s nature are present: notably, the