From KERA:
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a music prodigy, born in Austria. His 1930s and 40s film scores made him famous. He won an Oscar for “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” with Errol Flynn, and garnered two additional nominations. But years earlier, as a child, he began writing extraordinary classical music, says UNT Music Professor Timothy Jackson.
“Well I would say that Korngold was the greatest prodigy of them all. There was nobody on his level at his age that I can really compare him to.”
Jackson compares Korngold to Mozart and Mendelssohn, the world’s greatest classical music prodigies. Jackson says Korngold still stood apart. Born in 1897, he wrote this short, one-act comic opera, “The Ring of Polykrates,” when he was 17.
