Gustav Mahler called him a genius as a child, he performed for Emperor Franz Joseph before his teens, and today his musical DNA is heard in Star Wars. This episode traces Erich Wolfgang Korngold from his 1897 birth in Brno and upbringing in Vienna under his father Julius, the city’s most influential critic, through four-hand piano at age five, the cantata Gold played for Mahler in 1906, the ballet The Snowman at 11, and the European success of his opera The Dead City.

The episode follows Max Reinhardt bringing him to Hollywood in 1934 to adapt Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his initial refusal of Captain Blood until he saw Errol Flynn’s footage, and the three-week deadline to write over an hour of symphonic music. It covers the 1938 annexation of Austria while he was scoring The Adventures of Robin Hood, his Oscars for Anthony Adverse and Robin Hood, his operas-without-singing philosophy, and his 1947 retirement from film to reclaim a classical legacy that post-war critics dismissed as too Hollywood.

• Why Mahler and Richard Strauss advised against sending him to a conservatory
• How Wagnerian leitmotifs gave audiences a subconscious emotional map of characters and stakes
• Improvising at the piano while a projectionist looped scenes, then dictating sketches to orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer
• The Viennese waltz connection he found for Juarez and the harmonica fog of The Sea Wolf
• The 1972 Sea Hawk album produced by his son George that sparked a revival and influenced John Williams