Franz Schreker

Franz Schreker’s hyper-Romantic, sensually voluptuous music, manifested most hypnotically in the mesmerisingly beautiful Chamber Symphony (1917) and the erotically charged opera Die Gezeichneten (The Branded, 1920), can be justifiably described as the aural equivalent of Art Nouveau. Though one of the most important 20th-century Austrian opera composers, and initially enormously popular with German audiences, Schreker fell completely out of favour owing to an ill-fated combination of changing tastes and being banned by the Nazis. Born in Monaco in 1878, Schreker eventually moved to Vienna where he studied violin and composition. His operatic breakthrough came in 1910 with the hugely successful premiere in Frankfurt of Die ferne Klang (The Distant Sound) for which, like the rest of his operas, he wrote his own libretto. Another landmark was his establishment of the Vienna Philharmonic Chorus with whom he conducted the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder in 1913. Having secured an excellent reputation as a composition teacher, he settled in Berlin in 1920 on being appointed director of the Hochschule für Musik. Unfortunately, he was forced to resign his post following the advent of the Nazis in 1933, and died the following year.