Franz Schreker, 1878–1934: A Cultural Biography

by Christopher Hailey

Franz Schreker was the most frequently performed opera composer of his generation. His controversial works dominated the central European repertory in the years after the First World War and exercised a major influence on such younger contemporaries as Alban Berg, Kurt Weill, and Ernst Krenek. Forced into retirement by Hitler's racial decrees in 1933, the composer, his music banned, died a broken man. Thereafter Schreker became a forgotten chapter in the history of new music.
Schreker's music is only now beginning to enjoy a revival. This first major biography not only introduces the reader to this important repertory, but sets the composer's life and works in the context of his turbulent times. Franz Schreker is a dramatic narrative of an artist poised between the intoxicating late Romanticism of fin-de-siecle Vienna and the sober "New Objectivity" of Weimar Berlin, between a precipitous rise to fame and an equally sudden fall from favor in which aesthetic fashion and political intrigue played their parts. Above all, the Schreker phenomenon can provide a key to understanding the evolution of musical thought during the problematic years before and after the First World War.

453 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1993