Child Prodigy: Erich Wolfgang’s Years of Childhood (Signed and Inscribed)

First edition.  80pp, with portrait plate frontispiece.  Grey cloth-covered boards with brown lettering and spine.  Signed and inscribed to Herman by the Erich Wolgang Korngold. Small 8vo.  Cloth just a little rounded at corners and spine ends.  Upper text block edge dust darkened.  Bookplate of Dr Hermann Ullrich on front pastedown.  Hint of browning to pages and the very occasional spot in gutters.  Very slightly shaken. In its original matte dust wrapper, rubbed, lightly bumped and toned at edges, shelf worn, with a short closed tear at spine end and small chap along upper rear edge.  

Never published in the original German, his is Julius Korngold’s biography of the early years of his son, the Austrian composer, pianist and conductor, Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  Inscribed by Erich to ‘Hermann’, like Dr Hermann Ullrich, the Austrian lawyer, composer and music critic whose bookplate appears on the front paste down.  Erich, from a musical family, was a child prodigy, a sensation in Austria at an early age and writing popular sonatas and short operas as a teenager.  The family left Europe in the facing of rising Nazism for the United States, where Erich became one of the most successful and influential composers of film music in Hollywood, winning to Oscars – for Anthony Adverse in 1936 and The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938.