These days his name is often met with blank stares, but Schreker’s sumptuously scored operas once earned him a reputation in the houses of German-speaking Europe that rivaled that of Richard Strauss. The 1912 premiere of his opera “Der Ferne Klang’’ was hailed as a historic event and as the most significant opera since Wagner’s “Parsifal.’’ He repeated the success with subsequent works.
But even during his lifetime, Schreker couldn’t keep up with the mercurial fashions of the Weimar Republic. He was also one-half too Jewish for the Nazis, and was forced from his academic teaching posts, his music banned. He was 55 when he died of a stroke in 1934. His complex and lavish stage works slipped still further into oblivion as the musical avant-garde embraced the more puritanical strains of modernism pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples.
But the case of Schreker may not yet be closed. In recent years, as the myths of musical progress that tended to limit our views of the past became themselves part of the history books, Schreker’s operas have begun returning to Central European opera houses. And here on Friday night, the curtain went up on the first US staging of his early masterwork, “Der Ferne Klang’’ or “The Distant Sound.’’
Suddenly, there it was, not distant at all. The composer’s vision — a potent cocktail of gritty realism, surging expressionism, gauzy symbolism, and late-Romantic opulence — came roaring off the stage, with all the pent-up energy of the years. Listeners at the intermissions could be heard remarking on the fierce drama and strangely alluring beauty of the score.
In a way, “Der Ferne Klang’’ was the beginning of it all. Schreker’s progress as a conductor and composer in Vienna had been fitful, but the work’s 1912 Frankfurt premiere was an instant sensation. Schreker wrote the libretto himself, drawing from his own youthful wanderings. Its story tells of a young composer named Fritz who abandons his fiancee, Grete, to embark on a quest for an elusive shimmering music he hears in his head but cannot quite grasp.
