Art & Creativity Quote by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Korngold is quietly picking a fight with the cultural snobs of his day: the people who treated “serious” music as a cathedral art and film scoring as paid labor with delusions of grandeur. When he says “Music is music whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema,” he’s not offering a bland truism. He’s asserting a single standard of artistic legitimacy across venues that early 20th-century gatekeepers kept rigorously separated.

The word “rostrum” does work here. It signals the concert hall and its priesthood of critics, patrons, and institutions that policed status. By placing it alongside “stage” and “cinema,” Korngold collapses a hierarchy: opera and symphonic music don’t automatically become “higher” because the audience is wearing formalwear. The subtext is defensive but proud: if a melody moves you in a dark theater, it doesn’t become less real because it’s tethered to images.

Context sharpens the line into something almost autobiographical. Korngold arrived in Hollywood already celebrated in Vienna, then helped invent the lush, symphonic language of Golden Age film scores. The move made him famous and suspect at once. Film composers were seen as craftsmen, not auteurs. His quote is a refusal to accept that downgrade - and a warning about how easily taste becomes a proxy for class and credential.

There’s also a modern, almost medium-agnostic ethos hiding in it: music’s identity isn’t determined by its platform but by its craft and emotional force. Korngold is asking listeners to judge with their ears, not their social training.