Schreker, Franz

Franz Schreker – Prelude to a Drama for Large Orchestra (1913)

(b. Monaco, 23 March 1878 – d. Berlin, 21 March 1934)

Preface

Franz Schreker’s Vorspiel zu einem Drama was composed in 1913 and published in full score the following year by Universal Edition, Vienna. The “drama” in question was Schreker’s new opera project, Die Gezeichneten (1913-15), and the Vorspiel represents an expanded concert version of what would later become the overture to that opera. It received its première on 8 February 1914 in Vienna, with Felix Weingartner conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. There is even some possibility that the Vorspiel was prepared at Weingartner’s behest, as the great conductor had long been asking for new material from Schreker’s pen. The response of the Viennese critics was lukewarm to hostile, but reflected not so much the value of the music as the local politics that racked the Viennese musical world at the time. An arrangement for piano four-hands was prepared by Schreker’s student, Harry Loewy-Hartmann. Further performances were given in 1916 and 1917 by the orchestra of the Dresden Court Opera under Hermann Kutzschbach, but though they served as a good advertisement for Schreker’s work as a whole (especially Der ferne Klang, which was mounted in Dresden a short while later), they failed to establish the Vorspiel in the concert repertoire.

With the stunningly successful première of Die Gezeichneten in Frankfurt on 25 April 1918, interest in the Vorspiel was rekindled. In 1920-21 it was conducted in Boston in Pierre Monteux and in Chicago by Frederick Stock, and two highly successful performances were given in Moscow and Leningrad under Schreker’s baton in 1924. With the advent of Zeitoper and Neue Sachlichkeit, however, Schreker’s music gradually fell out of favor during the later 1920s, and his early death in 1934, combined with the advent of the Nazi’s anti-modernist and anti-Semitic cultural policies, put an unjustified temporary end to the reception of his music. In the post-war years only Ferdinand Leitner, who knew Schreker in Berlin, is known to have included the Vorspiel in his concert programs.

Things changed dramatically beginning in the 1980s with the resurgence of interest in Vienna’s early modernists (Zemlinsky, Schreker, Korngold, Wellesz, Franz Schmidt), and today Vorspiel zu einem Drama can be heard in excellent recordings by Michael Gielen with the Southwest German RSO Baden-Baden (1991), Gerd Albrecht with the Bundesjugendorchester (1991), James Conlon with the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne (1997), Vassily Sinaisky with the BBC Philharmonic (1999), and again Michael Gielen with the Berlin RSO (2007). The present study score is a faithful reproduction of the original edition issued by Universal in 1914.

The Vorspiel zu einem Drama, like the overture on which it is based, introduces listeners to the main characters and the musical material of Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (“The Stigmatized”), a lurid erotic drama set in the Italian renaissance with certain parallels to the life of Gesualdo da Venosa. Schreker himself wrote the libretto at the request of his Viennese composer-friend Alexander Zemlinsky, who, for obvious personal reasons, wanted to write an opera whose main character was marred by physical ugliness. In the end, Schreker was so satisfied with the result that he decided to set the libretto to music himself (Zemlinsky kindly consented and later went on to write an opera on a similar theme, Der Zwerg.) The plot involves a contorted romantic triangle between a hunchback Genoese aristocrat Count Alviano Salvago, a libertine Count Tamare, and the beautiful but frail Carlotta, a gifted painter. In the end Alviano murders Tamare to protect the girl from harm, only to find himself remorselessly rejected by her in turn. All three of these tragic “stigmatized” figures are musically depicted in the Vorspiel.

Bradford Robinson, 2011

For performance material please ask the publisher Universal Edition, Vienna. Reprint of a copy from the Musikbibliothek der Münchner Stadtbibliothek, Munich.