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Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang in US Concert Premiere

Apr. 05, 2007

On April 15 the American Symphony Orchestra gives the American premiere of Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang in a concert performance of the opera. Ninety-five years have passed since the work’s Oper Frankfurt premiere in 1912, an absence spanning a surprisingly long time, according to American Symphony Orchestra Music Director Leon Botstein. He comments:

“When the American Symphony Orchestra decided some years ago to present a concert performance of Der ferne Klang…neither I, nor the staff, nor the board of directors were aware that this performance would be not only the first performance in the United States, but in the western hemisphere.”

Der ferne Klang, which translates to “The Distant Sound,” is the story of a composer, Fritz, who leaves a woman’s love in favor of chasing an elusive distant sound. Given the premise, the psychological and complementary musical palettes from which Schreker draws are vast. Christopher Hailey describes it as “a love story of tragic deferral and a paradoxical meditation upon the vanities of l’art pour l’art…It is also the story of Grete, about her exploitation by a grasping world and her retreat into an inner world of dreams… two tales of neurosis, delusion, and hysteria.”

Despite initial success and subsequent successful productions in Europe, Der ferne Klang nonetheless never made it to the United States. As is too often the case in music, the reasons for its absence likely have less to do with the actual substance of the work than with myriad external factors.

As Botstein points out, Schreker was considered by contemporaries to be an heir to Wagner, owing to his facility with dramatic music and his progressive musical innovation. A chief difference between Schreker and Wagner, and the stature of their subsequent legacies, however, is that Schreker, born sufficiently later than Wagner, and of partial Jewish descent, fit snuggly into the crude categorizations applicable to what the Nazis came to classify as “Entartete Musik” (“Degenerate Music”). Such a designation led to interruptions of performances of his works and an eventual forced resignation from all his posts in September 1933. In December 1933, Schreker had a stroke and died the following year in March.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the subsequent lack of performances of Der ferne Klang in this hemisphere may be attributed in part to the fact that Schreker never suffered directly from World War II or the holocaust, as he died before either started. Botstein explains:

“Since Schreker died well before the war and never had the chance to emigrate, he was not among those survivors who at least had the opportunity to restart their careers after 1945. He was also not a direct victim of the war or Holocaust, and although identified by others as Jewish, he remained a Catholic his entire life, and therefore his cause never seemed unique nor lent itself to a sympathetic, posthumous revival.”

After a long wait, Der ferne Klang will finally be realized on the concert stage in the Western Hemisphere, as the American Symphony Orchestra performs it April 15 at Avery Fisher Hall in New York.

Franz Schreker
Der ferne Klang (1910)
opera in three acts
3.3.3.3 – 4.3.3.1 – 2timp.3perc.glock.2hp.cel – str; behind the scene: Venetian music (fl.cl.2hn.timp.tamb.hp.3mand.2guit.str quintet); on the stage: Gipsy music (cl.cimb.str quintet), behind the scene: pf
Duration: 140’

For further information on the life and works of Franz Schreker, please visit www.universaledition.com.

For more details about the American Symphony Orchestra's concert performance of Der ferne Klang, please visit www.americansymphony.org.

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