Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late

In 1954, the Oscar-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold staged a European homecoming with a new operetta. How this came to pass — and how his planned comeback failed to materialize — is even more convoluted than the piece’s farcical plot. Korngold, a wunderkind and Jewish refugee from Vienna, first came to Hollywood to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until then Korngold, a piano pro…