Korngold- Works for Violin and Piano

The sweet pain of homesickness and the will to hang on to the irretrievable past this is not only the central motif of Erich Wolfgang Korngold s opera The Dead City, but the central theme in the composer s life. The sextet stems from 1914/15, just after the completion of Violanta. The premiere was given in 1917 by an ensemble directed by Arnold Rosé, the famous concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. While Korngold draws on the traditional classical basis of the buoyant last dance in the final, he forms a continuously rising, dissonance-saturated tension over ten minutes, spontaneously evoking comparison to passages of the Schönberg sextet Verklärte Nacht ( Transfigured Night ) (1899).