Although he was only twenty-two when he wrote this brilliant overture for a very full late-Romantic orchestra, Korngold (one of history's great child prodigies) already had a decade of concert and operatic successes. This work, however, was a rare mis-fire. It was too harmonically bold and it exhibited, for Korngold, a rare miscalculation of form, being too full of ideas for Korngold's usual structural clarity. The ideas themselves are exceptionally forceful and vigorous, and the development section has an intriguing division between a strange, mystical first part and a lively and intense second part. When Korngold reaches the recapitulation he makes his main formal mistake; he drastically curtails it and presents his main ideas in drastically altered form, more or less cutting the listener adrift.

The work disappeared from concert stages after its pre-arranged first series of performances. Fourteen years later, toiling in Hollywood to produce a score for a film called The Adventures of Robin Hood, while consumed with worry over Hitler's evident plans to annex his native Austria, Korngold found himself creatively blocked. At the worst moment, he remembered this overture and used it as a treasture trove of ideas, using almost all its themes in that great Errol Flynn adventure film.

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