“Vom ewigen Leben” for Solo Voice (soprano) and full orchestra Score - Franz Schreker
Bladmuziek
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Franz Schreker
(b. Monaco, 23 March 1878 – d. Berlin, 21 March 1934)
“Vom ewigen Leben”
for solo voice (soprano) and full orchestra
Scoring:
2 fl, 2 ob, eh, 2 cl (A), tsax (C), asax (Eb), ssax (Bb), bcl (Bb), 2 bn, 4 hn
2 tpt, 3 tbn, timp, perc, harf, cel, harm, strs
Duration:
ca. 18 mins.
Preface
Franz Schreker is one of those twentieth-century composers who acquired a reputation for groundbreaking musical innovations only to have their works forgotten today, with few exceptions. One reason for the discrepancy between his former renown and today’s muted interest lies in his novel musical language, which many listeners find difficult to fathom. Another was the ostracism of his music during the Third Reich, when several of his works were banned from performance.
Schreker’s oeuvre is made up largely of vocal music and a few orchestral pieces. The main focus of his creativity fell on his ten operas, many of which were staged to great acclaim. But he also had a mastery of orchestral and chamber music, as can be seen in his wide-ranging lieder. Besides many choral works, he also wrote songs, not only for voice with piano accompaniment, but frequently in the larger symphonic form of voice with orchestra. This observation suggests that he was concerned not only with the features specific to vocal and instrumental music, but with the combination of both modes of expression.
Schreker was the son of a photographer employed at various European courts. His father, though of Jewish ancestry, converted to the Protestant faith in 1876. After his death, young Franz grew up in straitened circumstances, but was able to give full reign to his musical gifts. He began by playing the organ in Döbling, after which he studied the violin at Vienna Conservatory from 1892. Between 1897 and 1900 he also received lessons in composition from Robert Fuchs. In this early phase of his career he composed several choral pieces, songs, and a violin sonata. In 1906 he launched his career as a choral conductor at the Vienna Volksoper; two years later he founded a Philharmonic Chorus that became a major pillar of Vienna’s musical life. In 1908 he appeared before the public with his composition Der Geburtstag der Infantin, a “dance-pantomime” based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. The huge success of his opera Der ferne Klang (1912) brought him genuine fame, and hardly one year later he was appointed professor of composition at Vienna Conservatory. By 1932 he had written many other operas with which he achieved considerable acclaim. In 1920 he accepted a position as head of the Berlin Musikhochschule. Among the teachers he hired were Artur Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, and Paul Hindemith. With the rise of the Nazi régime he was forced to leave his Berlin position in 1932. By this time many of his operas had been dropped from the repertoire or withdrawn shortly before their performance. Soon thereafter he was dismissed from all his teaching posts. He died of a stroke in 1934.
Schreker stands alongside Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, and Alexander Zemlinsky as a leading figure of Viennese modernism. His operas, for which he wrote the librettos mostly himself, are distinguished for their successful combination of words, drama, and music. The artistic ideal he pursued in his operas was psychological theater, where the compositional fabric retraces streams of consciousness and constantly varies the leitmotifs. Yet unlike Schoenberg, with whom he was often compared after the première of Der ferne Klang,
his music shows no signs of atonality or twelve-tone technique. Instead, it employs free tonality and a distinctive sound as means to the end of dramatic and psychological expression. Many of his works reveal the technique of musical montage, proceeding from simple beginnings and acquiring additional musical accretions.
In 1923 Schreker composed Two Lyric Songs to poems by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), using the German translation by Hans Reisiger (1884-1968). Whitman, one of the greatest lyric poets of the nineteenth century, is considered the founder of modern American poetry. The two poems that inspired Schreker to his composition are taken from his magnum opus Leaves of Grass, a collection that began with twelve poems in 1855 and was steadily expanded over the ensuing decades. The ninth edition, published in 1892, contains four-hundred poems. Whitman made use of a language drawn not only from Shakespeare and Homer but from Oriental literature and philosophy. His lyric poetry is noteworthy for a close affinity to the common man and a special emphasis on depictions of nature. Schreker was not the only composer to be inspired by Whitman’s poetry: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony (1903-09) and Hindemith’s When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d (1946) both derive from Whitman poems.
The first version of Two Lyric Songs was written for soprano and piano in 1923. Four years later Schreker decided to expand the setting for soprano and orchestra. The orchestral version was premièred in Leipzig in
1929.
Productdetail
Componist(en):
Uitgever('s):
Uitgavenummer:
1590
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ISBN:
Volgnummer:
934173
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