Franz Schreker

Franz Schreker

Composer

1878 — 1934
A child of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at its most outgoing, Franz Schreker became one of the world's leading opera composers in the first decades of the 20th century, before seeing his career brutally halted by the rise of Nazism. Born in Monaco to Catholic and Jewish Austrian parents, Schreker trained in Vienna, and moved in the progressive artistic circles around Gustav Mahler. He won attention with his prize-winning Intermezzo for strings (1902) and made a reputation as a skilled choral conductor before scoring his first operatic hit in 1912 with Der ferne Klang – followed (to even greater acclaim) by Die Gezeichneten (1918) and Der Schatzgräber (1920). The Chamber Symphony (1916) had a similar impact, distilling Schreker's ardent, sumptuously coloured late Romantic style into an atmospheric score for just 24 players. By the mid-1920s he was a composition professor in Berlin (his students included Ernst Krenek and Alois Hába) and the most-performed living opera composer after Richard Strauss, but his later operas Irrelohe (1924) and Der singende Teufel (1928) were less popular and his last, Der Schmied von Gent (1932) was savagely attacked by the rising Nazi party. Schreker died in March 1934 after suffering a stroke. Since the 1990s, a renewed interest in music suppressed by the Nazis has seen his work revived, recorded, and reclaiming its rightful place in major opera houses.