Franz Schreker

[john_boyer]

Oh dear - why do Schreker and Korngold seem particularly prone to the 'excessive' school of stage production?

Hard to believe, but this was only the second staging of a Schreker opera in the western hemisphere, having been beat by only a short time by Los Angeles Opera's production of "Die Gezeichneten" in April.

As I said, it was not one of those nonsensical productions where the staging is completely at odds with the music and story.  Quite the contrary, it stuck to the period.  The director clearly did is homework, but I think he was too eager to show the results of that homework.  Having learned of the world of Expressionist drama and painting that Schreker lived in, he was too willing to try to incorporate this into every scene.

The first act begins with Fritz, the composer-protagonist, dragging the props for the opening scene on stage using a sort of oxen yoke.  "Good grief," I thought, "we're laying on the Symbolist imagery rather thick, aren't we?  This is the symbolic burden of domesticity that our young artist wishes to escape."  Happily, things settle down to a more naturalistic vein, and indeed the costuming and sets were mostly naturalistic throughout.

The director, however, could never quite get away from wanting to link the production to a style of theatre that it now very dated.  German Expressionism still reads well, but to see it staged is another matter.  So, in the following scene when the Grete's father and his drunken friends arrive, many of the friend are disabled and disfigured soldiers, amputees who hobble about on crutches or drag themselves on little carts.  Their faces are covered in grotesque, mask-like make up.  In short, they are living characters from a George Grosz painting.  It's a nice link to the Vienna avant-garde of 1912, but it doesn't play well on a modern stage.  It was just a bit over the top.

In the wandering scene from the second half of the first act, Grete's musing are rather cleverly transferred to a silent movie house.  We face the audience, which is dimly seen behind a scrim on which the movie is projected, which we can see in reverse.  It's a clever scene, and the movie the Grete is seeing clearly parallels the very story of the opera we are watching.  Unfortunately, we begin paying more attention to the movie than to Grete's comments about her feelings.  This would have been fine had this little story-within-a-story ended when it ought to have.  Instead, during the whole scene where Grete meets the procuress, we are still in the movie house, now seeing a newsreel of First World War images.  Now instead of highlighting the drama, the scrim is pure distraction.  (One of my Vermont friends complained of the anachronism of the 1912 story versus the 1914-18 newsreels, but the director in his notes said that he had set the beginning of the story in 1919 to allow for this.  This is legitimate, since it's still within the correct historical period.)

The second act was a sort of Expressionist nightmare version of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza, a clever take on a flapper era pleasure palace.  Like the first act, it almost worked but was sabotaged by the over-the-top lighting, which left the audience blinded.  Yamina Maamar, though, was a sight for sore eyes.

The third act, as I mentioned, was the most subdued and most emotionally affecting.

But what do I know?  The production has already gotten good reviews from the AP wire and the Boston Globe, so perhaps others came away with the desire to see more Schreker:

AP

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j15TfK5AAlnSkrZ3WKU95DEla7AgD9HA5CCO1

Globe

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2010/08/02/schrekers_distant_sound_still_resonates/

[albion]

Many thanks for the detailed description. It sounds as though a lot of thought had gone into the staging, but it had been executed perhaps with a bit too much enthusiasm. I would dearly love to have seen both the LA Gezeichneten and the Bard Der ferne Klang, together with the 2004 Vienna Volksoper Irrelohe, the 2010 Zurich Der ferne Klang and the Chemnitz Der Schmied von Gent! They all sound as though they at least attempted interesting, atmospheric and fundamentally workable stagings - I am really surprised that none of them seem to have been siezed on by the DVD companies, especially as Schreker is (deservedly) undergoing something of a resurgence in Europe and the US.

But what do I know? ... perhaps others came away with the desire to see more Schreker

I hope the experience hasn't put you off this wonderful composer. Each of Schreker's operas is very individual  - I would recommend persisting and exploring (and hoping for better and better productions). In the meantime I would certainly recommend getting to know his music on disc.

[JimL]

From what I understand, our L.A. Opera Ring des Nibelungen production lost money, due more to the costuming and staging by Achim Freyer than anything else.  Even the singers themselves abhorred it.  When will these Eurotrash producers and directors learn that if we go to see the Ring we want to see some damn Wagner not a flingin' paper-mache Lion King costume show, fer cryin' out loud?

[john_boyer]

I hope the experience hasn't put you off this wonderful composer. Each of Schreker's operas is very individual  - I would recommend persisting and exploring (and hoping for better and better productions). In the meantime I would certainly recommend getting to know his music on disc.

Good grief, no!  I own two recordings of "Der Ferne Klang", as well as "Irrelohe", "Schatzgraber", "Gezeichneten", and "Christophorous".

Meanwhile, more raves, this time from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/arts/music/03klang.html

and the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704702304575403743629857722.html?KEYWORDS=HEIDI+WALESON

Has Schreker conquered America?

[edurban]

Wow, reviews to die for!  Maybe I should have gone, but I chose another unsung, Donizetti's Maria di Rohan at Caramoor.  And Bard's theatre has a/c while poor Maria was outside on a sweltering 97 degree evening...

Let's hope the Schreker revival continues...

David

[JimL]

Are there any concertante works in his orchestral output?

[eschiss1]

Are there any concertante works in his orchestral output?

I'm fairly sure not...

[albion]

Good grief, no!  I own two recordings of "Der Ferne Klang", as well as "Irrelohe", "Schatzgraber", "Gezeichneten", and "Christophorous".

Has Schreker conquered America?

Sorry, I misinterpreted "perhaps others came away" as meaning that you didn't - and, to compound the error, I didn't remember that you'd already stated earlier in your post that you had recordings!

I would strongly recommend the CPO set of Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, which is very powerfully performed by the Kiel company (again, the production shots in the booklet look very tantalising). I started listening again last night to Christophorus and was amazed anew at the profundity and assurance of Schreker's stylistic development during the 1920s.

I would also encourage anybody interested in Schreker to hunt out the following discs of his orchestral and vocal music:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schreker-Symphony-No-1-Franz/dp/B000026D1Z/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1280816406&sr=8-22

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schreker-Orchestral-Works-Franz/dp/B000001SXM/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1280816480&sr=1-14

The early symphony is cast in the Brahms and Bruckner idiom, but is quite lovely (unfortunately the final movement is lost). Other highlights on these discs are the gripping melodrama Das Weib des Intaphernes (a sort of precursor to Sophie's Choice) and the beautiful Whitman settings which make up Vom ewigen Leben.

Let's hope that Schreker is taken up with enthusiasm in the US. It's a very big market!

[albion]

Schreker's Irrelohe is due to be performed in Bonn during November and December 2010 - does anybody know if this is a revival of the 2004 Vienna Volksoper production or an entirely new staging?

[albion]

Apparently, it is going to be a new production of Irrelohe at the end of the year in Bonn.

Earlier in this thread, Alan asked for the three 'top' Schreker operas/ recordings - just a few further thoughts.

I would have to say that Die Gezeichneten (in the uncut Decca recording) has to top the list - I think that this is quite simply Schreker's masterpiece. It is also the finest recording which any Schreker opera has ever received.

If a decent enough commercial recording existed, my next vote would go to Der Schatzgraber. Unfortunately the Capriccio set (Hamburg, 1989) is savagely cut and badly afflicted by Gabriele Schnaut's fearsome wobble. I've just ordered from the US an off-air recording of the 1968 ORF performance and will report back on the quality.

In view of the much-publicised recent premiere in the US, next must be Der ferne Klang in the 1989 Marco Polo/ Naxos recording. This is uncut, unlike the rival Capriccio version (which also features the redoubtable Ms Schnaut). I'm currently also exploring various off-air recordings of this seminal piece from 1955-2006.

A very strong recommendation must go to Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin on CPO. The Kiel performance is really quite splendid (their best effort out of the three operas recorded). Listening to it again this last week I was tremendously impressed, more so than I recall previously.

Der Schmied von Gent is due out soon from CPO and may well (as they say) rocket up the charts. What we badly need is a first-rate uncut recording of Schatzgraber.

[Pengelli]

Two questions,since you're obviously very enthusiastic about this composer. Do you think Schreker is a major opera composer? Do you think any of his opera's are on a par with Richard Strauss? Just out of interest that's all. I know that some commentator's seem to think that his music hasn't the same psychological insight. What  do you think? His 'star' certainly seems to be rising,again.

[albion]

Do you think Schreker is a major opera composer? Do you think any of his opera's are on a par with Richard Strauss?

The answer to the first questions is unhesitatingly 'yes'. This is of course an entirely individual response to Schreker's music and as such cannot easily be elucidated, but I would consider his trilogy of greatest successes (Der ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten and Der Schatzgraber) to be fully worthy of international acclaim. My personal view is that these works are inspirationally and technically of the highest musical and dramatic standard.

Instead of a detailed direct comparison with Strauss (a proposition which I don't think is realistically possible), it might be helpful to colour in some of the historical background to these two great composers and perhaps that will tell us something about why Richard Strauss is generally (but certainly not universally) acknowledged as a major operatic composer whilst Schreker is little more than a footnote in operatic history. I think that our knowledge and perception of Schreker has been fundamentally fractured by historical misfortune. For much of the twenieth-century he was unknown outside him homeland, a situation not unlike that of Janacek who only found international renown through the advocacy of the late Charles Mackerras. To quote Christopher Hailey,

Franz Schreker was among that cultural wreckage deemed irrelevant to the post-war order of business. He and his music had played virtually no role in musical life anywhere in the world since the early thirties, and his greatest triumphs lay still further in the past. Because he had not survived the war, indeed had died before the nightmare of National Socialism had really begun, he seemed to belong more wholly to another, now foreign age.

To compare Schreker's career with that of Strauss is very instructive. Strauss was already established as a leading international figure by 1900 - as conductor and composer of innovative orchestral works. His conducting career took him all over the world, thus introducing him to foreign audiences. As an operatic composer, his works were similarly taken up internationally - in Britain, he was lucky to find an ardent champion in Thomas Beecham. His years of startling operatic innovation (with Salome and Elektra) occurred before 1914. Of course the First World War put a virtual embargo on his music and by the time conflict was over he was largely seen as passe, but nevertheless by the 1920s Strauss was very much an institutional figure both in Germany and abroad - his 60th birthday in 1924 was widely celebrated. Strauss was also fortunate to outlive another world war and become even more of an institutional figure.

Schreker, on the other hand, was largely unknown even in Austro-Germany until the premiere of Der ferne Klang in 1912. He had not conducted internationally in the previous decade and had very little in his composition portfolio. The coming of war in 1914 meant the cancellation of productions of Der ferne Klang not only in Germany (Leipzig, Munich and Frankfurt) but also in Breslau, Prague and Paris. Thereafter his career was almost exclusively confined to Germany and Austria. Even in the years of his greatest success, 1920-1923, there were no foreign productions. Instead of travelling abroad conducting his music, Schreker taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule. By the time his style was perceived as passe (basically after the 1924 production of Irrelohe) Schreker had built up no audience outside the German or Austrian opera houses. He was a composer of large, complex, expensive-to-mount operas - and little else. Schreker never became a treasured institution in Austria or Germany - caught up in the increasingly vocal anti-semitism of the 1920s his operas were criticised as unsuitable for a nation in recovery: in 1921 a savage and widely-publicised attack by Alfred Heuss of the Zeitschrift fur Musik saw the contemporary success of Schreker as dependant not on the quality of his music, but upon the sharp practices of his publisher (Universal Edition) and the power of Paul Bekker, Germany's leading music critic and champion of Schreker. To quote Heuss

It is out of the spirit of this system - and certainly not out of 'visions of sound' - that the main figures of Schreker's operas are born: whores, murderesses, people sick with perverse sensuality, 'branded souls' of the most varied kind; these are the sorts that are inflicted upon the German people in dozens of performances. The German people are sure to make a wonderful recovery with this art which the Schreker press forces upon them as the pinnacle of modern opera.

This view of Schreker's work was not uncommon in Germany. His work was deemed 'corrupting'  and he was seen as fair game for grossly insulting personal attacks. When he died in 1934 Germany saw him as very much a part of the discredited Weimar Republic and therefore something to be rejected. Even his publisher bowed to the prevailing pressure and published an obituary which negated his achievement:

There was no way that Schreker's unreal phantasmagorias could have endured in the face of real compositional evolution. It was his fate that in an age of Impressionism he became mired all too one-sidedly in the peripheral region of timbral phenomena.

State-inspired anti-semitism also played its part. Such was the growing apprehension about the situation in Germany that many of the composer's friends had already left Berlin when he died, and those that remained were too afraid to attend his funeral. Nevertheless, his widow received condolences from such figures as Anton Webern:

It is so comforting for me that only recently, on my 50th birthday, I received from Franz Schreker a sign of friendship that gave me great joy: his picture with extremely kind words of dedication. It will be preserved in hallowed memory in my heart, as will all the beautiful things of the past that I assiciate with Franz Schreker; and above all his immortal works.

It is difficult to think of another composer (except perhaps Shostakovich) whose career was so blatantly shaped by overwhelmingly powerful external political events. Schreker lived through one of the most turbulent times in Austro-German history as gilded imperialism gave way (through cataclysm) to liberal but unstable Republic which in turn gave way to cultural philistinism and state terror. As with Strauss, the technical virtuosity of his music demands the highest standards of performance - unlike Strauss, his works have very rarely been that fortunate in the recording studio. When these standards are met (as in the Decca Die Gezeichneten and the two Chandos Sinaisky discs) I think that Schreker's music undoubtedly has the most extraordinary power to move and amaze us.

[ahinton]

Albion - your post here is most interesting and welcome; I think that you have illustrated the differences between the reputations of Strauss and Schre(c)ker - and the reasons for them - very convincingly.

One could perhaps consider the fate of Schre(c)ker's near contemporary (in terms of both birth and death years) and fellow Austrian Jew Zemlinsky, whose work fared little better for many years and arguably for not dissimilar reasons. That said, where would you place their younger contemporary and compatriot Berg, whose death occurred between theirs, in terms of international recognition? Also, Schönberg who, like Schre(c)ker and Zemlinsky, was born in the decade after Strauss and who outlived Strauss by a couple of years, gained some international recognition through his work as a conductor (albeit not on the scale that Strauss did), but the reputation of his work still suffered for many years (though admittedly not as badly as did Schre(c)ker's), even if that might in part have been as a consequence of the "bogey-man" image that lived on in the minds of some people until many years afte his death and indeed still lives on to some extent today, despite our vastly greater familiarity with his work as a whole; relocating to America, as did his younger compatriot Korngold but none of the other composers mentioned here, seems ultimately to have done him few favours.

[albion]

where would you place their younger contemporary and compatriot Berg, whose death occurred between theirs, in terms of international recognition? Also, Schönberg who, like Schre(c)ker and Zemlinsky, was born in the decade after Strauss and who outlived Strauss by a couple of years

Alas, my knowledge of the Second Viennese School is very limited, not helped by the fact that my musical sympathies lie more with the post-fin-de-siecle opulence of Korngold, Strauss, Schreker and Zemlinsky. I wouldn't really consider myself in any way qualified to assess Berg, Schoenberg or Webern either individually or by contemporary comparison although I certainly enjoy some of their (mostly earlier) works. Perhaps other members with greater knowledge of these composers can offer a critique!

[ahinton]

where would you place their younger contemporary and compatriot Berg, whose death occurred between theirs, in terms of international recognition? Also, Schönberg who, like Schre(c)ker and Zemlinsky, was born in the decade after Strauss and who outlived Strauss by a couple of years

Alas, my knowledge of the Second Viennese School is very limited, not helped by the fact that my musical sympathies lie more with the post-fin-de-siecle opulence of Korngold, Strauss, Schreker and Zemlinsky. I wouldn't really consider myself in any way qualified to assess Berg, Schoenberg or Webern either individually or by contemporary comparison although I certainly enjoy some of their (mostly earlier) works. Perhaps other members with greater knowledge of these composers can offer a critique!

I was thinking in the present context in terms of your ideas about their reputations and the fate of their work rather than of the music itself!