The Austrian composer Franz Schreker was the last of the big-scale Romantics, along with his younger compatriot Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Both had great success with grand Straussian operas in the years around the First World War.

Schreker’s opera Der Ferne Klang (1903-09) made him famous, but in the 1930s he suffered under the rise of Nazism because of his Jewish background. With the advent of the Second Viennese School, headed by Arnold Schoenberg, Schreker’s music suddenly became passé overnight. (Schreker had conducted the premiere of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder but would not adopt his friend’s radical harmonic theories.) 

Side-lined, he died of a stroke at 56 in 1934 – the same year in which Korngold moved to Hollywood to establish a career scoring movies.

As well as nine operas, Schreker wrote notable orchestral music, and songs with orchestral accompaniment. This release from Christoph Eschenbach and the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra covers much of that repertoire, with only one piece taken from an opera: the atmospheric Nachtstücke interlude from Act III of