The Name You Trust for Classical Music

Read reviews, listen to the music, and purchase the CD SCHREKER : Overture / Preludes

Customer Service Toll Free 866.489.4152

Flash 9 required. Click to download.

Narrow your search
with our Music Browser

Classical Music

        Ballet
        Chamber Music
        Choral
        Concertos
        Film Music
        Folk Legends
        Instrumental
        Musicals
        Opera / Operetta
        Orchestral
        Vocal

Jazz

Jazz Contemporary
Jazz Icons

New Age

Wind Band

World

        Ballad
        Bhuddist
        Chinese Music
        Classical (World)
        Early Music (World)
        Folk
        Gamelan
        Gypsy
        Hindustani
        Jazz (World)
        Klezmer
        Sufi
        Vocal (World)
        World

Special Offers:

Free MP3 Downloads

A Special Offer for Valentines

Catalogs

Internship Opportunities

Celebrating Black History

Masters of American Music

53rd Annual Grammy� Award Winners

Clearance

Penguin Guide

200 Essential Recordings

Recently Released

Upcoming Releases

SACD

DVD

        Ballet DVD
        Classical Concert
        Classical Documentary
        Dance Documentary
        Opera DVD

Audio Books

        Anthologies / Collections
        Arts
        Biographies
        Children's Classics
        Classic Fiction
        Great Epics and Tales
        History
        Junior Classic Fiction
        Junior History
        Literature
        Music Biographies
        Music Education
        Non-Fiction
        Philosophy
        Plays - Others
        Plays - Shakespeare
        Poetry
        Religion
        Samplers
        Sports
        Wine Guide

NaxosDirect Podcasts

Video Librarian Reviews

Labels

Naxos Label

        Naxos American Classics
        Naxos Best Of...
        Naxos Box Sets
        Naxos Cinema Classics
        Naxos Classics
        Naxos DVD
        Naxos DVD-Audio
        Naxos International
        Naxos Jazz
        Naxos Limited Edition
        Naxos Milken Archives
        Naxos Night Music
        Naxos Opera
        Naxos Orchestral
        Naxos Special Release
        Naxos Wind Band Classics
        Naxos World

Composers

Conductors

Ensembles

Orchestras

Choirs

Artists

Instruments

Producers

SCHREKER : Overture / Preludes

Home

Classical Music

Orchestral

View large image

Total playing time: 00:51:39

$9.99 (CD)

This item is currently out of stock.

Link to this CD Link to this page

Franz Schreker (1878-1934) Prelude to Die Gezeichneten Prelude to Das Spielwerk. Symphonic Interlude from Act 3 of Der Schatzgraber Symphonic Overture...

Read more about this recording

Franz Schreker (1878-1934)

Prelude to Die Gezeichneten

Prelude to Das Spielwerk.

Symphonic Interlude from Act 3 of Der Schatzgraber

Symphonic Overture Ekkehard, Op. 12

Fantastic Overture

There is no doubt that Franz Schreker has been seriously underestimated as a composer and this posthumous neglect may be attributed in good part to the misfortunes of his later career at a period when National Socialism was becoming increasingly important in Germany. Schreker's career and his subsequent reputation were equally victims of Hitler.

Son of the Court Photographer, Schreker was born in Monaco in 1878 and travelled widely during his childhood. In 1892 he became a student at the Conservatory in Vienna, where he was taught composition by Robert Fuchs, and even as a student achieved some success. His Love Song for string orchestra and harp was played in London in 1896 by the orchestra of the Budapest Opera, and there were other works in these years, capped, in the year in which he completed his studies, 1900, by his graduation composition, a setting of Psalm CXVI for three-part female chorus, organ and orchestra, which was well received at its first performance in Vienna by the Conservatory Orchestra.

A year later, in April 1920, Schreker's first opera, Die Flammen, was performed privately, with the composer at the piano, and in the same year he completed his Symphonic Overture, Ekkehard, Opus 12, based on Viktor von Scheffel's remarkable evocation of life in South Germany in the tenth century, a classic of nineteenth century German literature.

Schreker's first major success was with Der Geburtstag der Infantin, a ballet written for Grete Wiesenthal and based on the influential story by Oscar Wilde, The Birthday of the Infanta, a tale that was to appeal to other composers in Vienna. This was followed by the opera Der ferne Klang, performed in Frankfurt am Main in 1912 with sufficient success to bring the composer a position on the staff of the Vienna Music Academy. There were to be further successes in the opera-house, although Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, welcomed in Frankfurt, provoked a scandal in Vienna at the Court Opera in 1913. Originally consisting of a Prologue and two acts, the work was revised in 1916 as a one-act "Mysterium", and so performed in Munich after the war.

Die Gezeichneten, Schreker's next opera, to his own text, like its immediate predecessor, was completed in 1914 and given its first performance at Frankfurt three years later. It was followed by the four-act opera Der Schatzgraber, which again had its first performance in Frankfurt under Ludwig Rottenberg.

In 1920 Schreker was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule, a position he held until 1932, when growing anti-semitic pressure led to his resignation. His forced resignation from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933 brought a heart-attack and death. The final years of what had been a career of some distinction were marred by demonstrations against his work. His opera Christophorus was cancelled in 1931 as a result of pressure from the National Socialists and there were demonstrations in the following year at performances of his last opera, Der Schmied von Gent at the German Opera in Berlin.

Of Schreker's operas Der ferne Klang remains the best known, while the composer's own favourite was Das Spielwerk, as the revised version of Die Prinzessin und das Spielwerk

became known. This latter, ill-received in Vienna, is set in the Middle Ages and centres on an imagined instrument, a carillon of bells, created by the old master-craftsman Florian. The land is ruled by a wicked princess, and Master Florian's wife and son have fallen into her power. The sound of bells, misused by the princess for her wild orgies, has lost its purity, but their music is restored for the moment with the appearance of a wandering flute-player, whom Master Florian entertains in his house. The original opera ended in tragedy with the destruction of the bells and Master Florian's house. The revised version, however, replaced this ending with one of greater serenity.

The first version of Die Prinzessin und das Spielwerk opened with a prologue in which four men were seen making a bier on which to carry a dead man, performing their task by torch-light. The men are to re-appear later in the opera, bearing the body of Master Florian's son. In the ghostly scene of the prologue they disappear with their burden into the dark, while the slow Overture begins, music that leads, when the curtain rises, to a scene that shows, in the background, the castle, with the ancient house of Master Florian in the foreground.

Die Gezeichneten, a title that defies adequate translation "The Marked Ones", perhaps, or "The Doomed", owes its origin to a request by the composer Zemlinsky for a libretto dealing with the tragedy of an ugly man. Schreker wrote the libretto, which he used himself, contrasting his mis-shapen hero with the beauty of Renaissance Genoa. The story concerns the rivalry of the crippled nobleman Alviano Salvago and the practised seducer Count Andrea Vitelozzo Tamare for the love of Carlotta Nardi, the daughter of the Podest� of Genoa, Lodovico Nardi. The conflict ends in tragedy, enacted in an underground grotto, scene of the orgies in which the young men and girls of Genoa indulge. The Prelude to Die Gezeichneten, which opens calmly, makes use of thematic material representing Alviano and Carlotta and the music associated with the dissolute Vitelozzo.

Der Schatzgraber, "The Treasure-seeker", owed much of its success to its medieval setting and the use that Schreker made once again of German fairy-tale symbolism, in a story that he may have come across in the work of Heine. The opera opens with a Prologue in which the King announces the loss of the Queen's jewels. The fool advises that the Singer should be summoned, whose lute-playing will surely find what has been lost: for its counsel the Fool demands the reward of a wife, the very idea of which provokes him to a dance of joy.

The symphonic interlude from Act III is a night scene as the moon disappears and all is darkness. Dawn approaches and Els, the supposed daughter of the inn-keeper, lays before the feet of the Singer, beloved Elis, the Queen's jewels that have come into her possession, telling him to take them to the Queen. Although it seems that all might end happily, the fourth act brings its own tragedy, with Els accused of witchcraft and only saved from burning by the intervention of the Fool, who claims her as his bride. Elis, now old, comes, in his wandering, on the Fool's dwelling in the mountains and sings of Elis and Els, Prince and Princess, and how from the storm of life the treasure of good fortune may be saved. His song is of a land of fantasy, while the Fool is left to pronounce a closing Amen.

Viktor von Scheffel's novel Ekkehard, a romance of the tenth century, written in 1857, was one of the most widely read German novels of the late nineteenth century. Scheffel, by training a lawyer and by inclination a painter and poet, left his position in the legal service of Baden in 1853 to devote himself to literature. The following year he published his narrative poem Der Trompeter von Saeckingen

and three years later his historical romance Ekkehard, based on the conflated lives of two of the monks of the monastery of St. Gall, Ekkehard I and his nephew Ekkehard II.

Scheffel's Ekkehard, depicted in the Klangstil of Schreker's symphonic overture, is a young monk chosen to teach Latin to the Duchess Hadwig of Swabia. Love grows between the two, something of which Ekkehard is unaware until he exercises his martial prowess in battle against the Huns. He attempts to embrace the Duchess, who rejects him, and is imprisoned, later to escape and conquer his passion in solitude as a hermit. He subsequently returns to become Chancellor to the Emperor. The music follows something of this progress, from the monastic medievalism of the opening chords through battle to its serener conclusion.

Schreker's Fantastic Overture was written in 1903. The work demonstrates again the composer's ability in handling the orchestra in music that carries no overt extra-musical programme in its title but seems, nevertheless, to follow a narrative course.

Edgar Seipenbusch

Edgar Seipenbusch was born at Velbert in Germany in 1936. He started playing the violin at the age of six and took up the piano four years later. He studied violin, piano, composition and chamber music at the Cologne High School for Music and became first violinist of the Cologne University String Sextet which made a number of concert tours in Europe. He became second concert master of the Rhenish Chamber Orchestra in 1958, and its leader two years later.

Since 1962 Seipenbusch has worked with all the great Viennese orchestras in a wide range of activities. He was in charge of opera and operetta at St. Polten and has made a large number of recordings with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Between 1967 and 1972 he directed opera in Graz as well as guest conducting frequently in both Kiel and Frankfurt. In 1972 he became director of the opera at Innsbruck and has since worked on many TV productions with ORF and in Germany. He has been guest conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra on many occasions over the past two decades.

Disc 1

Ekkehard, Op. 12

(more info)

Performed by: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Franz Schreker
Conducted by: Edgar Seipenbusch Vassily Sinaisky

Symphonic Overture Ekkehard, Op. 12 - 12:15

Phantastische Ouverture, Op. 15

(more info)

Performed by: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Franz Schreker
Conducted by: Edgar Seipenbusch Vassily Sinaisky

Fantastic Overture - 10:44

Der Schatzgraber

(more info)

Performed by: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Franz Schreker
Conducted by: Edgar Seipenbusch Vassily Sinaisky

Interlude From Der Schatzgraber (Act 3) - 13:09

Die Gezeichneten

(more info)

Performed by: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden
Composed by: Franz Schreker
Conducted by: Edgar Seipenbusch Michael Gielen Vassily Sinaisky

Prelude To Die Gezeichneten - 9:40

Das Spielwerk

(more info)

Performed by: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Franz Schreker
Conducted by: Edgar Seipenbusch Vassily Sinaisky

Prelude To Das Spielwerk - 5:51

Reviews

Be the first to review this title

FREE SHIPPING on orders
of 5 items or more!

Earn Naxos Rewards Points by opening an account and buying your favorite music today! Create your account here.

See all of our great site features here.

Flash 9 required. Click to download.

Composer(s):
Schreker, Franz

Conductor(s):
Seipenbusch, Edgar

Orchestra(s):
Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra

Label: Marco Polo
UPC: 730099239226
Item Number: 8220392