“Overture” and “Ship in the Night” from Captain Blood (1935) – composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold; performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Charles Gerhardt
Born to a Jewish family in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a piano prodigy who won the acclaim of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Korngold’s early musical career – in which he later picked up composition at fourteen years old – was firmly in the classical music scene until the 1930s, when he was to adapt some of Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Warner Bros.’ adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Approving of his work in that film, Warners then asked Korngold if he could compose an original score for a swashbuckler movie starring newcomer Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Korngold declined at first, but then he watched the film. Entranced by the splendor of the production and the chemistry between the leads, he set to work. With some light musical influences from Franz Liszt and structural influences from Richard Wagner (namely, leitmotifs), his score is a heroic work of several leitmotifs that would become the cornerstone of Hollywood film scoring for decades to come.
Captain Blood was nominated for five Academy Awards, although three of those nominations came from write-in votes (a practice no longer possible under Academy rules in final voting). It received nominations in Best Sound and Best Picture, with write-in nominations for Screenplay (Casey Robinson), Director (Michael Curtiz), and Score (Leo F. Forbstein; in the first four years of Original Score’s existence from 1934-1937, the studio’s music department head received the nomination and not the composer).
