The life of the highly successful Austrian composer (who began his career as one of the most astonishing child prodigies of musical history) was literally saved by Hollywood, which was where he and most of his family were located when the Nazis rolled into Austria in 1938. He first came to the film capital in 1934 to do a project for Warner Bros. The studio loved his sweeping, late Romantic style. So he was frequently called back to work on major projects. He was working on The Adventures of Robin Hood when Austria fell; their presence in Hollywood no doubt save the Jewish Korngold family from the Nazi death camps.

This romantic and dramatic score is actually a single-movement, thirteen-minute piece for cello and orchestra written to be played in a film called Deception, about a love triangle between a cellist, a composer, and the cellist's student, played by Bette Davis. Davis's character shoots the cellist and so gets to play the premiere of the concerto. Korngold wrote a complete and coherent piece of music, knowing that only portions of it could be depicted in the film. Desiring to revive his "serious" composing career, he arranged to have the complete piece published as this concerto.

The mood of the piece is stormy and dramatic, befitting its use as the object of murder in the movie. The opening theme is turbulent, uneasily shifting from C major to minor. The second theme is highly lyrical. After a cadenza for the cello the lyrical theme becomes the basis for an extended slow section which serves the purpose of a slow movement. The recapitulation section serves as the final fast movement, including an extended development of the first theme. Another virtuoso cadenza leads into a final, grand statement of the lyrical second theme.

© All Music Guide