American and Austrian Ruins in Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp

This chapter shows that Erich Korngold's compositional process and materials reflected a particular traumatic mode of modernism—the ruin. Here, recognizable fragments from the past recall an uncomfortable or contested history of decay and destruction. Ruinous art forms betrayed the “temporal and spatial doubts that modernity always harbored about itself.” While some manifest as a material fascination with destruction and demise, others constitute an aesthetic that enables the audience to think about the historicity of our condition and even experience hope. Korngold noted that his preference lay with the latter. But Korngold's Symphony in F-sharp, Op. 40 (1947–52), in its quiet references to earlier repertories whose musical lives were deeply entangled in the modern historical moment, signaled its own disturbing relevance to the ruins of the time—whether the crumbling facades of Korngold's beloved Vienna or his experience in America as an exile in a state of fracture and suspension.