Acoustic Space, Modern Interiority, and Korngold’s Cities

Abstract

This chapter considers Erich Korngold's multifaceted creative engagement with the delineation of distinctive acoustic spaces. It describes an “Age of Noise” in Vienna, within a modernizing environment which would influence a young Korngold. Indeed, Korngold lived his whole life in modern urban environments. His aesthetic output, and indeed, the listening experience of his audiences who lived and heard within those same spaces, have been shaped in many ways by the conditions of twentieth-century metropolitan life in all its acoustic complexity. This facet of Korngold's world, the inevitable resonance of sonic modernity within the spaces of modern identity, compounds the critical challenge to both the composer's own ostensible naïveté and his music's apparent political neutrality.