The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Michael Curtiz's sumptuous adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's play Elizabeth the Queen, is a movie of unparalleled pageantry. The film, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, is aptly complemented by Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score, which skillfully matches the minutiae of onscreen action to apposite musical motifs and demonstrates a singular melodic and emotive sense. These features are particularly evident in the film's famous mirror-smashing and hawking party scenes; for the latter, Korngold provided what is essentially a horn concerto in miniature.

The composer himself played the piano for the film recording, adapting the instrument (by means of thumbtacks) to sound more like an Elizabethan spinet—predating by several decades similar techniques used by composers like John Cage and George Crumb. As the score sweeps through history with fanfares, heroic marches, and courtly dances, Korngold adapts twentieth-century musical practices to the world of the Tudors rather than the reverse. In so doing, he not only demonstrates an acute understanding of the uses of music in film—principally, to enhance or emphasize narrative and visual elements—but also underscores the timeless nature of the film's major theme of love. Some of the material Korngold wrote for the film reappears in his Cello Concerto (1946), and the main love theme also appears in glowingly rich form in the Symphony in F sharp (1950). Korngold also wrote the song Alt Englisch Lied for this film, but it was not used in the score; in typically musically thrifty fashion, he incorporated it into the Five Lieder, Op. 38 (1947).



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