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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a highly celebrated Jewish composer, considered to be one of the founders of Hollywood film music. He is best known for his Academy Award®–winning compositions for the great film scores of Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), starring Errol Flynn.

He was born in Brünn, Moravia, present-day Czech Republic. His father, Dr. Julius Korngold, was one of the most influential music critics in Vienna and worked for a daily news publication, Neue Freie Presse. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the most famous child prodigies of all time. The book The Last Prodigy was written about him and chronicled his early years in imperial Vienna; his career as a composer of film, operas, symphonies; and his World War II escape from the Nazis. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943.

As a child prodigy, his talent was noticed by many other musicians who encouraged and recognized his gift. At the age of nine, he was sent to study with Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory. He came to the notice of Gustav Mahler who declared him a genius and recommended that he study with Alexander von Zemlinsky. While training under Zemlinsky, he wrote a pantomime, Der Schneemann, which premiered in Vienna in 1910 and led to him to becoming known as a musical genius.

He continued to compose and was noticed and admired by Richard Strauss, Paul Wittgenstein, Johann Strauss II, Max Reinhardt, and Giacomo Puccini. In 1924, he married Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal.

In 1934, Erich Wolfgang Korngold moved to the United States to work. He was to arrange and conduct Felix Mendelssohn’s music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While in Hollywood, he signed a lucrative contract with Warner Brothers, one of the most generous ever offered a composer in Hollywood during that time.

He worked in Hollywood for over 14 years, scoring 17 films—16 of them for Warner Bros. His final film score was for the German film Magic Fire (1954). In 1957, he suffered a cerebral thrombosis and died on November 29 at the age of sixty.

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