Conference Agenda

Since the 1970s, film screenings, performances, and scholarly attention have garnered new insights into the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. That attention hinges on the description of extant sources. This paper outlines Korngold materials in global locations key to the ongoing metadata and editorial work for the Korngold Werkverzeichnis. Drawing from these materials’ existing description and organization, I demonstrate how cataloging and archival processes have shaped the project’s metadata and thereby guided editorial decisions.

Prominent Korngold materials exist in the Library of Congress (LoC), Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Austrian National Library (ÖNB). With several related materials, the LoC’s Korngold collection is the largest, comprising over 9,000 items, with project-oriented series of holograph and copyist music manuscripts, sketches, libretti, and non-music series of correspondence, financial papers, and photographs. The Humboldt archive, however, organizes known performances and recordings chronologically, with photocopies of materials from other collections that in some cases are no longer extant. Dozens of items at the Austrian National Library are cataloged individually, while Warner Bros. offers no publicly available inventory. Using examples from LoC collections, I demonstrate how archival description falls short of noting crucial details: recurring musical themes across film and concert works, absent materials, foliation, paste-overs, or layers of annotations/marginalia. Catalog records similarly lack the specificity required for editorial work. By demonstrating the necessity to cross-reference materials both within collections at the LoC and across separate repositories, I demonstrate the necessity for new metadata structures in the Werkverzeichnis.

The editing of film music raises methodological questions that differ fundamentally from those of concert-music philology: what constitutes the object of edition, and how can a critical framework account for the collaborative, multimedia, and version-rich nature of film-music production? Using Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) as a case study, this paper outlines the editorial principles and metadata considerations developed for Series C: Film Music within the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Edition.

Korngold’s process reflects the studio system’s distributed authorship. His short score, highly detailed and marked with extensive instrumentation indications, is preserved in the Library of Congress. Additional materials include sketches and cue sheets. The (piano) conductor score, a clean copy prepared immediately after each short-score section, survives in several exemplars across archives in California and Mainz. The orchestrated full score by Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer and Milan Roder, together with the instrumental parts and Korngold’s conducting annotations preserved in the Warner Bros. Archives at USC, adds further layers to this constellation of sources and their associated metadata.

To navigate this complexity, the edition adopts a hybrid, multi-text approach reliant on equally multifaceted metadata schemas. In print, short score and full score are presented synoptically, enabling direct comparison between Korngold’s compositional layer and its orchestral realisation. Digitally, MEI encoding, synchronized audiovisual alignment, and concordance navigation link the notated music with sketches, cue sheets, and the film. Robin Hood thus offers a model for developing editorial strategies that respond to the specific conditions of film-music production.

For nearly 150 years, catalogues of works have been indispensable tools for foundational research on composers. Catalogues such as the Köchel-Verzeichnis (KV), the Bach Werke Verzeichnis (BWV), the Deutsch Schubert catalogue, and Hoboken’s Haydn catalogue have established standards for the purpose, structure, and presentation of scholarly work catalogues. Despite the availability of many such catalogues there is only limited systematic theoretical reflection on what a works catalogue must accomplish, which practical challenges arise in its compilation, and which conceptual solutions have proven effective. This gap applies equally to analogue and digital catalogues.

As part of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Complete Works edition, a work and source catalogue is being developed alongside the critical editions. Korngold’s oeuvre spans diverse genres: chamber music (including string quartets, songs, and piano sonatas), orchestral works (concertos, a symphony, symphonic overtures), and film music for more than nineteen Hollywood productions. Film music in particular poses novel editorial and cataloguing challenges (for example, multiple versions, fragmented and collaborative sources, cue sheets, and synchronization data). Because no scholarly Korngold catalogue yet exists, the catalogue is being conceived as born digital. This affords an opportunity to reconceptualize the data model and to develop specific solutions for capturing, linking, and presenting film music sources and their metadata, with implications for the methodology of both analogue and digital works catalogues more broadly.