Franz Schreker
Franz Schreker was an Austrian and German composer. Born in Monaco on March 23, 1878, he was the son of court photographer Ignaz Schreker and Eleonora von Clossmann, whose family came from Styria. After his father’s death in 1888, his mother settled in Vienna. Schreker entered the Vienna Conservatory in 1892, first studying violin with Siegmund Bachrich and Arnold Rosé before moving to Robert Fuchs’s composition class. He graduated in 1900.
In 1901, his Intermezzo for strings won a composition competition in Vienna. From 1907 to 1920, he led the Philharmonic Choir, which took part in several important premieres. Schreker conducted the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder in 1913. His opera Der ferne Klang, premiered in Frankfurt am Main in 1912, established his reputation. From that year, he also taught composition at the Vienna Academy of Music. Between 1920 and 1932, he directed the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and taught composition there; from 1932 to 1933, he led a master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts.
During the 1920s, Schreker was regarded as one of Germany’s leading opera composers after Richard Wagner, and his operas were staged more often than Richard Strauss’s. His music combined a Romantic style with Expressionist elements, including sharp, disorienting chords that interrupted the melodic harmonic flow. Apart from two operas, he wrote the librettos for all his major works. His operas include Die Gezeichneten, Der Schatzgräber, Irrelohe, Der singende Teufel, and Der Schmied von Gent. The characters and texts in his works also reflect his interest in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Schreker was married to soprano Maria “Mitzi” Binder. He died in Berlin on March 21, 1934, after a stroke followed by a heart attack. A revival of his music began in the late 1970s, and his operas have since been staged in cities including Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Kiel, and Chemnitz.