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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was an Austrian composer and conductor, who left Europe in the mid-1930s and later adopted US nationality. A child prodigy, he became one of the most important and influential composers in Hollywood history. He was a noted pianist and composer of classical music, along with music for Hollywood films, and the first composer of international stature to write Hollywood scores. When he was 11, his ballet Der Schneemann became a sensation in Vienna; his Second Piano Sonata, which he wrote at age 13, was played throughout Europe by Artur Schnabel. His one-act operas Violanta and Der Ring des Polykrates were premiered in Munich in 1916, conducted by Bruno Walter. At 23, his opera Die tote Stadt premiered in Hamburg and Cologne. In 1921 he conducted the Hamburg Opera. During the 1920s he re-orchestrated, re-arranged and nearly re-composed several operettas by Johann Strauss II. By 1931 he was a professor of music at the Vienna State Academy. At the request of motion picture director Max Reinhardt, and due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Korngold moved to Hollywood in 1934 to write music for films. His first was Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_W...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)
