Franz Schreker

Austria classical composer

• Born: March 23, 1878
• Birthplace: Monaco
• Died: March 21, 1934
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

A successful opera composer, Schreker broke new ground by exploring Freudian subject matter with a richly sensuous musical language. A celebrated teacher, he made the Berlin Musikhochschule a conservatory of international renown.

The Life

Franz August Julius Schreker (SHREH-kur) was the oldest of four surviving children born to a Jewish father, Ignaz Schrecker, a noted portrait photographer, and a Catholic mother, Eleonore von Clossmann, a member of the minor aristocracy. The family settled in Linz in 1881, but it moved to Vienna after Ignaz’s death in 1888. Schreker graduated from the Vienna Conservatory in 1900, and that year he changed the spelling of his surname.

Schreker’s compositional breakthrough came with the pantomime The Birthday of the Infanta, commissioned for the 1908 Kunstschau (art exhibition) organized by Gustav Klimt and his circle. However, it was the Frankfurt premiere of his opera The Distant Chiming in 1912 that established his international fame. That same year he was appointed to the Vienna Academy (the renamed Vienna Conservatory), where he became renowned as one of the leading composition teachers of his generation (his students include Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, and Berthold Goldschmidt). Schreker was also a noted conductor, and with his Philharmonic Chorus, founded in 1907, he led many notable premieres, including Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (1913).

The premieres of two operas, The Stigmatized in 1918 and The Treasure Digger in 1920, catapulted Schreker to the front ranks of contemporary composers. In 1920 he was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule (High School for Music), which he helped transform into Europe’s leading conservatory (his appointments included Artur Schnabel, Emanuel Feuermann, and Paul Hindemith). Schreker’s greatest triumphs came during the early 1920’s (at which time his wife, Maria Binder, whom he married in 1909, became a leading interpreter of his music). In the course of the decade, however, musical tastes changed and two later operas, Irrelohe and Der singende Teufel, had little success.

In June, 1932, under political pressure, Schreker resigned his post at the Musikhochschule, and in October, 1932, the premiere of his opera Der Schmied von Gent was marred by Nazi demonstrations. Soon after Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in January, 1933, Jews were purged from public office, and Schreker was dismissed from his position at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. In December, 1933, in the midst of planning his emigration, Schreker suffered a stroke, and he died on March 21, 1934.

The Music

During his studies with Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory, Schreker absorbed lessons from both Johannes Brahms, the classroom model, and Richard Wagner, an extracurricular passion. However, his distinctive idiom, which emphasizes structures built upon the juxtaposition of varied textures and harmonies, is more akin to techniques found in the music of Franz Schubert and Anton Bruckner. Schreker’s propensity for abrupt chordal and modal shifts evolved into a harmonic language of mixed and even bitonal sonorities, and he exhibits a fascination with color and timbre. Such qualities suggest an affinity with contemporary French music, with which, however, Schreker had little contact. Schreker’s vocal writing is characterized by pliant expressivity, flexible rhythm, and sensitivity to declamatory nuance. His later compositions, influenced by his work in recording, film, and broadcasting, are more angular and acerbic, and they frequently employ strict contrapuntal forms.

The Distant Chiming. In this seminal work, begun around 1904 and completed in 1910, a composer abandons the girl he loves to search for a distant sound he hears, only to realize, too late, that it was her presence that inspired the sound. The opera’s mixture of realist, Symbolist, and Expressionist elements (the libretto, as in all subsequent operas, is by the composer) is mirrored in a radical plurality of musical styles and aesthetic sensibilities that call to mind the collage techniques of Charles Ives and a scenic dramaturgy that anticipates innovations to come in cinema. The Distant Chiming had a major influence upon Alban Berg, who prepared the opera’s piano vocal score.

The Stigmatized. This libretto, originally written for the composer Alexander Zemlinsky in 1911, is set in Renaissance Italy. A hunchbacked nobleman, Alviano Salvago, seeks to deed an artificial paradise, the island Elysium, to the people of Genoa, but the sensual passions unleashed by the island’s allure prove fatal for the woman Alviano loves, the painter Carlotta Nardi, and drive him into madness. Many consider this dark, brooding opera, composed between 1913 and 1915, to be Schreker’s masterpiece. Its overture is the epitome of Schreker’s dazzling command of orchestral color and sonority.

Chamber Symphony. Premiered in 1917, this work offers many parallels to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony of 1907, including a four-movements-in-one structure. Scored for twenty-three solo instruments, Schreker’s work is a transparent distillation of his preoccupation with timbre.

The Treasure. Schreker’s most successful opera, written between 1915 and 1919, is set in a timeless Middle Ages. A young minstrel, Elis, whose magic lute leads him to hidden treasure, sets about finding the queen’s stolen jewels (which impart youth and beauty) only to discover that it is Els, the mysterious woman he loves, who instigated the theft. This is Schreker’s most lyrical and tonally centered opera, with a supremely balanced and translucent orchestral texture.

Christophorus: Oder, Die Vision einer Oper. Written between 1925 and 1929, the opera tells the story of a young composer’s attempt to write a modern opera about St. Christopher; only through failure does he learn the true moral of the legend. At once a satire of contemporary fashion and a profound meditation on the creative process, this opera is one of most innovative works of the 1920’s. Its layered dramaturgy, reminiscent of contemporary Expressionist films in which vision and reality are entwined, is reflected in a diaphanous score juxtaposing at its extremes modal stasis and anguished atonality, lyric cantilena, and spoken dialogue. Political pressure forced cancellation of the scheduled premiere in 1933, and the work was not heard until 1978.

Musical Legacy

Schreker’s operas (championed by the powerful critic Paul Bekker, who likened them to those of Wagner) were attacked by conservatives for their sexual subject matter and sensual “un-German” musical style. Dogmatic modernists, on the other hand, dismissed Schreker as a naive late Romantic.

The revival of Schreker’s operas, which began in the 1970’s, has restored his reputation as a pioneer of modernism. Today he is regarded as an important transitional figure whose stylistic pluralism, extensions of tonality, experiments with timbre, and innovative dramaturgy opened paths to some of the most advanced music of the second half of the twentieth century, including the works of Witold Lutosławski and György Ligeti. Moreover, Schreker’s music has significantly broadened our understanding of Viennese musical modernism, and it has revealed the artificiality of the divide between tonality and atonality.

Principal Works

ballet (music and libretto): Der Geburtstag der Infantin, 1908 (The Birthday of the Infanta; based on Oscar Wilde’s novella).

operas (music and libretto): Der ferne Klang, 1912 (The Distant Chiming); Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, 1913 (The Music Box and the Princess; revised as Das Spielwerk, 1915); Die Gezeichneten, 1918 (The Stigmatized); Der Schatzgräber, 1920 (The Treasure Digger); Irrelohe, 1920; Der singende Teufel, 1928; Der Schmied von Gent, 1932 (based on a folk take by Charles de Coster); Christophorus: Oder, Die Vision einer Oper, 1978.

orchestral works: Intermezzo, 1900; Scherzo, 1900; Romantische Suite, Op. 14, 1903; Festwalzer und Walzerintermezzo, 1908; Valse lente, 1908; Vorspiel zu einem Drama, 1913 (Prelude to Drama); Chamber Symphony, 1917 (for twenty-three instruments); Kleine Suite für Kammerorchester, 1928 (Short Suite for Chamber Orchestra); Vier kleine Stücke für grosse Orchester, 1930 (Four Short Pieces for a Large Orchestra).

songs:Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1894 (The Youth’s Magic Horn; based on children’s folktales); Des Meeres und der liebe Wellen, 1894 (The Sea and the Sweet Waves; based on the writings of Richard Weitbrecht); Die Rosen und der Flieder, 1894 (The Roses and Lilacs; based on the writings of Otto Gruppe); Zwei Lieder auf den Tod eines Kindes, Op. 5, 1898 (Two Songs on a Child’s Death; based on Mia Holm’s poem Mutterliedern [Mother’s Love]; contains O Glocken, böse Glocken [O Bells, Evil Bells] and Dass er ganz ein Engel werde [He Becomes an Angel]); Fünf Lieder Op. 3, 1900 (based on the poetry of Paul Heyse; contains In alten Tagen [In Olden Days] and Es kommen Blätter [Leaves Are Coming]); Fünf Lieder Op. 4, 1900; Fünf Gesänge, 1922.

Bibliography

Haas, Michael, and Christopher Hailey, eds. Franz Schreker: Granzgänge/Grenzklänge (Franz Schreker: Border Crossings/Musical Frontiers). Vienna: Jewish Museum Vienna, 2004. An exhibition catalog with English- and German-language essays on Schreker’s life and works as well as two compact discs of excerpts from his operas.

Hailey, Christopher. Franz Schreker (1878-1934): A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The first major biography places Schreker within the cultural context of Vienna and Berlin. Contains an extensive bibliography and works list.