Hans Robert Korngold

Hans Robert Korngold (born July 25, 1892 in Brno , † May 17, 1965 in Schwaz ) was an Austrian band leader , drummer , bank clerk , businessman , private clerk and driver .

Life

Early years

Hans Robert Korngold was born as the first son of the music critic , pianist and lawyer Julius Korngold and his wife Josefine, née Witrofsky. The second son, Erich Wolfgang , was born five years later.

In 1901 the family moved from Brno to Vienna , where in 1902 the father found a position as a music critic for the " Neue Freie Presse ".

For Hans Robert, the birth of his younger brother Erich Wolfgang was to determine his life. The preference for the talented brother, who at the age of eleven had already composed the music for a pantomime ballet and was thus considered a child prodigy in Vienna, triggered a restless life in the older brother in search of recognition and love. Between 1921 and 1938, Korngold changed his residence in Vienna 23 times, was married four times and worked at least five professions. The dominance of his younger brother, who was celebrated as “little Mozart” and also admired by himself, as well as the lack of support for his own, undoubtedly existing musical talent, led to the fact that Hans Robert's career was comparatively modest and that his father completed it in exile in 1945 and posthumously when the memoir published by The Korngolds in Vienna was not even worth a footnote.

After graduating from high school and doing an apprenticeship and working as a bank clerk on September 21, 1912, Korngold volunteered as a train soldier with the replacement depot cadre of the k. u. k. Traindivision No. 2, but already retired on December 12, 1912 "as currently unfit from the common army", a classification that also exempted him from military service for the First World War .

In 1915 Korngold received the Viennese homeland law . In the same year, his marriage to Stella Korngold, nee. Singer, who had turned to his brother's childhood friend, the writer Paul Elbogen .

The municipal department 8 of the municipality of Vienna ( Vienna City and State Archives ) shows that Korngold's previous occupations were bank officials , merchants and private officials in 1923 and, since the first address mentioned there, also the second wife, Leopoldine (Bella) Korngold, née Zohner-Filippi, who he married on February 5, 1920. The archive records a temporary residence in Altaussee and activities in Montevideo for 1924 and activities in Romania for 1925/1926 . There are police reports from Berlin and Semmering from 1928 , which could already be related to the new profession as drummer and band leader, because continuous musical activity can only be proven from this year on.

Years as a musician

In the 1920s he must have received a musical education and worked as a drummer and conductor. In any case, from July 5, 1928, he appeared in the Wiener Kammerspiele in the revue “ Jetzt oder nie ” with his orchestra as “ HR Korngold's Minstrel Jazz Band ”. The revue was also a great success for the Jewish artists in this production. The composition and libretto came from Ludwig Hirschfeld , Karl Farkas edited and directed the libretto, the conductor was Egon Neumann and Fritz Strehlen and Trude Brionne were singing actors . All of them people who, like Korngold himself, had to escape into exile ten years later.

The jazz band Hanns Robert Korngold (Hanns now with the double "n") played in Viennese establishments and cafés from July 9, 1928 and was broadcast live from there by RAVAG between 1928 and 1933 . The repertoire included current entertainment and dance music, operetta potpourris and hits by Paul Abraham , Ralph Benatzky , Robert Stolz and Oscar Straus . Classics from Johann Strauss and tangos were also on the program. A specialty of the band was playing American jazz songs from original sheet music.

On January 25, 1930, on the occasion of the festival performance for the 40th anniversary of the artist's uncle, the cabaret artist Eduard Kornau , one of the rare artistic family reunions took place: Together with Erich Wolfgang Korngold as pianist and conductor, Korngold's jazz band performed with the Burgtheater actresses, sister-in-law Helene von Sonnenthal and cousin Elisabeth Kallina , in the theater in der Josefstadt .

In the summer of 1931 Korngold stayed at the Grandhotel de l'Europe in Salzburg because of an engagement and from 1932 the band also performed under the name of Hanns Robert Korngold's Six Rhythmicans . The last RAVAG broadcast of January 29, 1933 is also recorded under this name, because the entertainment program at RAVAG was changed very early in favor of folk music and against bands with American jazz music as a result of the incipient Austrian fascism .

Nevertheless, Korngold and his Hanns Robert Korngold Scala Orchestra experienced the high point of his career on September 15, 1933, when he accompanied the Fritzi Massary success " A woman who knows what she wants " in the newly opened Vienna Scala Theater . In addition to Fritzi Massary, his work in this production was linked to artists who soon fell victim to Nazi persecution, such as the composer Oscar Straus, the librettist Alfred Grünwald and the singing actors Hans Behal and Ellen Schwanneke . The conductor Ernst Hauke and the singing actors Ludwig Donath and Paul Henreid also fled for political reasons, and the director and director of the Scala Theater, Rudolf Beer , later committed suicide after he was abused by the Vienna Gestapo .

In the at least nine years of its existence from 1928 to 1936, Korngold's various band formations also included Jewish ensemble members and guests who later went into exile or were deported and murdered. The last appearance of Korngold's jazz band was in 1936 in the Gerngross department store in Vienna, owned by the entrepreneur Robert Gerngross, who was murdered in 1942 in Izbica , Poland .

After the death of his second wife Bella in 1931, the civil marriage with the non-Jew Therese (Thea) Korngold, née Lacina, followed in 1932 . Korngold himself had officially given up his membership of the Jewish religious community on March 2, 1928.

End of musical activity and exile

For Korngold, the period between autumn 1934 and the Anschluss of Austria was shaped by the dramatically developing political events in Austria and the resulting realistic view of the professional future. Korngold and his wife made a living from managing the two properties of his brother, who worked sporadically in the USA, and also had to look after their old parents.

Hans Robert and Thea Korngold divorced for tactical reasons after the annexation of Austria, but fled to Switzerland in September 1938. Thea returned briefly to Vienna, but then stayed in Davos from 1942 and later in Zurich . In 1939, despite the intervention of the librettist Hans Müller, who lived in Einigen , Korngold was expelled from the Swiss Aliens Police for lack of funds and fled to Milan . On March 8, 1940, he left Europe on board the Manhattan from Genoa for the USA and Hollywood . An affidavit from his uncle Egon Witrofsky enabled him to enter the USA.

Despite his brother Erich Wolfgang Korngold's good connections to the film industry, it was not possible to resume musical activities in exile. Korngold had to make ends meet with odd jobs, worked mostly as a driver and occasionally received financial support from his family, who had also emigrated in the meantime. Even in exile, attempts to improve the family relationship that had been broken for years were unsuccessful. The Anglicising of his name in John Robert , i.e. the voluntary renunciation of the famous family name, as well as a marriage with June, which entered into in 1945 and divorced again in 1946, turned out to be additional burdens. Only when Korngold took care of his widowed mother Josefine did the stressful family life relax.

From 1956 to 1959, Korngold fought for a one-off compensation from the Austrian "Fund for Assistance to Politically Persecuted People Who Have Their Residence and Permanent Residence Abroad". This compensation and a pension 1959/1960 awarded the pension insurance institution of employees allowed him a modest life in old age and visiting the lost homeland as seriously ill.

Hans Robert Korngold died on May 17, 1965 in the Schwaz district hospital in Tyrol as John Robert of cancer and heart failure and was found three days later in the local cemetery with the wrong name, Robert John, in a poor grave with a simple wooden cross and erroneously as "Roman .kath. "buried.

Web links

• The Korngold family in the Oesterreichischen Musiklexikon ONLINE , accessed on June 1, 2016

Remarks

1. ↑ “You cast too big a shadow. […] ”, He wrote to his brother Erich Wolfgang Korngold on July 1, 1940
2. ↑ “Of the 8,000 Austrian musicians, 700 are still employed, including the theater orchestra. [...] Anti-Semitism is noticeably increasing. Shouts of Heil Hitler, for example when Göring visited here, are tolerated as a matter of course, ”he wrote to his brother on November 20, 1936.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eduard Hanslick, Korngold 1991, p. 118
2. ↑ Military land register sheets, cardboard 1367, ÖStA KorngoldHR
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Hans Robert Korngold in the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg