Style, Structure and Taste: Three Aspects of the Problem of Franz Schreker

Extract

A combination of critical fashion and political barbarism swept Schreker and his music from the stage of European culture at a particularly unfortunate time. The poor receptions of both Irrelohe in 1924 and Der singende Teufel in 1928 prepared the way for the Nazis' diagnosis of ‘degeneracy’ and subsequent ousting of the part-Jewish composer from his directorship of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1931. His enforced retirement from the Prussian Academy of Arts at the end of 1933 was the final blow, and he died after a stroke, shocked and disillusioned, in the following year. The problems now besetting the reinstatement in the annals of twentieth-century music of what was once a household name in Germany, are not entirely dependent upon the ironies of fashion - and historical misfortune, however. For Schreker, the associate of Schoenberg in Vienna during the first decade of the century, had achieved something that ran counter to the most cherished unspoken dogma of twentieth-century artistic radicalism. He had become popular. He had built a bridge between radical innovation and popular taste.