Franz Schreker The Complete Songs for voice and piano
Available at CHANNEL CLASSICS RECORDS

Franz Schreker (1878-1934) 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. An artist poised between the intoxicating late Romanticism of fin-de-siècle 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, he was forced into retirement by Hitler’s racial decrees. In 1934, 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.

In 1922 Hans Reisiger published a two-volume collection of works by Walt Whitman, including a superbly sensitive translation of Leaves of Grass. Schreker set two of its texts as Zwei Lyrische Gesänge in 1923, the orchestration followed a few years later under the title Vom ewigen Leben. Schreker’s Whitman settings are among the masterpieces of the twentieth-century song literature. In the breadth and scope of these songs Schreker significantly transforms the inherited terrain of the German Lied and in the transformation does fitting homage to that wealth of that inheritance.