Notes for an Interview

Abstract

This chapter contains a transcript of a conversation between Erich Korngold and an unidentified person. It opens with suspension points and is studded with them throughout, alternating with fragments of text that range in length from complete sentences to just four or five German words. Nowhere is the interviewer named or is the slightest hint at a location provided. Indeed, it is not even clear if the interview ever took place at all, or if the document records instead an imagined exchange between Korngold and an ideal interlocutor, perhaps in a kind of typed rehearsal for a conversation he anticipated upon his return to Austria. (Even his parenthetical notes indicating where recorded examples are to be played relay indecision, sometimes followed by one or even two question marks.) For all of its ambiguity, however, this document is invaluable, for it records what are probably Korngold's most extensive surviving statements on the concert and operatic music composed by his contemporaries, and of the sounds of avant-garde modernism, with which his own music was widely contrasted.