Some time ago I titled an article about Hanns Sommer “The son of the photographer”. As I explained back then, it was a bit of a liberty, because I was referring to Sommer’s stepfather, the Voigtländer lens and camera maker. And since I allowed myself that liberty then, I can’t use the same title for this article about Franz Schreker, who really was the photographer’s son. His father was Ignaz Franz Schrecker, who around 1860 opened his first photography studio in Budapest; later he would open several more in different European cities, and he built a career as a portrait photographer that led him to photograph Emperor Franz Joseph I, his son Rudolf, and –much more interestingly– Franz Liszt.
The photographer’s eldest son, Maximilian, continued the business, while the younger one, Franz, born in 1878, devoted himself to music. And he did so with considerable relevance; if we focus on his work as a composer, we can get an idea of his fame with just one fact: during the Weimar Republic, Franz Schreker was the most frequently performed living composer after Richard Strauss. He was also the founder and conductor of the Philharmonischer Chor in Vienna, which premiered, for example, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 and Schönberg’s Gurrelieder, and he also directed what we now know as the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
But after the Weimar Republic came Nazism, and Schreker was of Jewish origin, so he was dismissed as director of the conservatory and his works were banned. For better or worse, he died of a heart attack in 1934 and was spared having to endure everything that was still to come. His music did not begin to be rediscovered until the late twentieth century, and today he is a more or less familiar composer among enthusiasts of the “new” repertoire, thanks to operas such as Der ferne Klang or Die Gezeichneten.
But what about the Lieder? Did he write any? Of course he did, which is why I’m dedicating these lines to him. He didn’t write many, only forty-five, but they are very much worth listening to. Most of them were composed (and published) during his student years, that is, up to 1900, and in the early years of the century they were performed and sold with great success. Afterwards he wrote only about a dozen more, up to 1923, when he composed his last ones (with poems by Walt Whitman, a poet rarely found in the German repertoire).
This week I’m sharing with you Unendliche Liebe [Endless Love], the first of the Fünf Lieder, op. 5, which he composed when he was twenty or twenty-one. The song is based on a poem by Aleksei Tolstoy published in 1858, which originally has five stanzas. Schreker set only the first and the last to music, in an anonymous German translation. From what I’ve been able to gather from Tolstoy’s verses, it seems that the poetic voice addresses his beloved, who appears to be jealous because he has other interests. Not other women, but perhaps (and this is only my interpretation) the need to travel and see the world. And in this sense, the poem would be a farewell before a journey.
Musically, the song belongs to the late-Romantic style, with broad melodies and an elaborate accompaniment. Schreker’s operas –for which he often wrote the librettos himself– are said to be characterised by a fine psychological depiction of the characters, and in this song we can sense that he possessed this gift from a very young age. The first stanza can be interpreted, following the idea of farewell, as the man’s explanation of his need to leave, despite the love he feels for her, while in the second the music seems to try to console her before declaring his eternal love.
I hope this song, performed here by Anke Vondung and Christoph Berner, encourages you to continue exploring the music of Franz Schreker.
Ich sehe Tränen im Aug' Dir glänzen,
O härm' Dich nicht, Du bist mein höchstes Gut.
Denn meine Liebe kennt keine Grenzen,
umschließt den Erdball wie des Weltmeers Flut.
O härm' Dich nicht, bald wird Dein Kleinmut schwinden,
Du bist mein höchtstes Gut!
Denn in der Ew'gen Himmelsliebe Bahn
muß alle ird'sche Liebe münden,
wie alle Ströme in den Ozean.
Please follow this link if you need an English translation
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