Sonic Spectacle in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Score to Max Reinhardt’s <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> (1935)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Max Reinhardt’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dozens of stage productions, beginning in 1905, culminating in a 1935 film) were notable for their privileging of the forest realm over Athens. Although much has been written about the spectacular visual effects that brought about this bias in the film, little attention has been paid to the role of music, since the film does not have an original score. Erich Wolfgang Korngold arranged its score from Mendelssohn’s incidental music as well as various other works by the composer. Most discussions of Korngold’s work on the film emphasize his fidelity to Mendelssohn. However, attempting to following the soundtrack with Mendelssohn’s scores reveals few direct quotations. Like the sleight of hand of a magician, Korngold creates the illusion that one is hearing Mendelssohn unadulterated, yet, a Mendelssohn one has never heard before. Instead of merely selecting bolts of music of the requisite lengths, he wove together his own fabric from an array of musical-thematic threads, all the while adorning it with glamorous modern accoutrements all his own. This chapter shows how Korngold brought skills he acquired on the operatic stage to his glamorization of Mendelssohn, and how the sonic spectacle he created contributed to the foregrounding of the forest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".