The movie cost more than $2 million to make and was the first color film to utilize the three-strip Technicolor process. It is listed no. 13 on the Rotten Tomatoes list of best films by critics and won three Academy Awards: Best Art Direction; Best Film Editing; and Best Original Score. The score by composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold is also number 11 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years of Film Score list. The beautiful Marion and Robin Love Theme has become a concert favorite.

Korngold was a child prodigy, born in a Jewish home in what is now the Czech Republic. At age 11 he composed a ballet, The Snowman, which became a sensation when performed at the Vienna Court Opera. He wrote his first orchestral score at 14 and completed an opera at the age of 23.

In 1934 he was asked by Max Reinhardt to come to Hollywood to adapt Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream incidental music for Reinhardt’s film version of the play, and returned from Austria to compose a score for The Adventures of Robin Hood. Korngold later said that accepting the commission saved his life, since the condition of Jews in Austria had become perilous. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese; Hitler made us Jewish.”

Though Korngold found much success in Hollywood, he stopped writing film scores in 1946 and devoted the remainder of his life to writing concert music, several pieces of which have become favorites of orchestras around the world.

In addition to The Adventures of Robin Hood, scores by the composer nominated for the 100 Greatest Film Score list include Deception, Kings Row, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Sea Hawk.

In 2013 Korngold’s Symphony in F# Major was given its first Proms performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London.