Franz Schreker News
Austrian composer
Commemorations 2024 (Death: Franz Schreker)
- opera, classical music
- Austria
- composer, music teacher, university teacher, writer
streaming
Last update
2024-03-19
Refresh
2024-02-05 15:57:39
Alban Berg, Part I, Early Years, 2024
[…] of them, published as his op. 1. That was a big departure, as before joining Schoenberg all he could write were songs. We should note that the pre-WWI years in Vienna were a period of tremendous cultural development; despite the overall antisemitism of the Austrian society, many of the leading figures were Jewish, and sexuality was explored deeply for the first time. In music, it was Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Egon Wellesz, Ernst Toch, and of course, Webern and Berg, with many younger composers to follow. Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig were important novelists and playwrights (Frank Wedekind, their German contemporary, was the source for Berg’s opera Lulu). The painter Gustav Klimt was Berg’s friend, and so was the architect Adolf Loos. And we shouldn’t forget Sigmund Freud, who was not just a psychoanalyst famous around Vienna but a […]
2023-12-04 15:01:32
Ernst Toch and more, 2023
This Week in Classical Music: December 4, 2023. Ernst Toch and more. Erns Toch, the Jewish-Austrian composer, was born on December 7th of 1887 in Leopoldstadt, a poor, mostly Jewish area in Vienna. Toch was one of a group of Austrian and German composers whose lives were upended by the rise of Nazism (Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Karl Weigl, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gál, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Berthold Goldschmidt, all Jewish, mostly forgotten except of course for Schoenberg, all talented if to a different degree, had their lives broken in 1933). One thing we find interesting is the ease with which they moved from Austria to Germany. These were two very different empires, one, declining, ruled by the peace-seeking Emperor Franz Joseph from Vienna, another – very much on the ascent, economically, politically and militarily, ruled by the arrogant and insecure Keiser Wilhelm II. But musicians thought nothing of moving from […]
2022-05-04 10:11:06
Deutsche Oper’s production showed that the work deserves more attention
2022-03-28 13:58:09
Haydn and more, 2022
[…] we’ll go on a limb and say that some of Haydn’s piano sonatas are better than any ever written by Mozart. You can judge for yourself: here’s his sonata in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI:52, written in 1794, performed by Alfred Brendel. And here is the same sonata but in Glenn Gould’s rather idiosyncratic interpretation. It runs about 5 minutes faster than Brendel’s; you can also hear Gould singing. Last week we missed anniversaries of Franz Schreker, who in the first quarter of the 20th century was, together with Richard Strauss, the most popular opera composer in the German-speaking world (Schreker was born on March 23rd of 1878). Another famous German-speaking opera composer, of a very different ear, Johann Adolph Hasse, was baptized on March 25th of 1699 (we don’t know his exact birthday). In the mid-18th century, Hasse’s opera seria were widely admired not only by the public but also […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): S...