Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Schreker: Die Gezeichneten

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was associated with the Viennese school of late Romanticism. He was a colleague of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Early in his composing career Schreker wrote songs, setting some of the same poems that Mahler drew upon in his own Des Knaben Wunderhorn. On Sunday, June 14, 2009 I broadcast a Bridge CD of Schreker's Lieder,including the cycle of six songs called the Mutterlieder ("Songs of A Mother," 1897), which are reminiscent of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.

Later in his career Schreker wrote operas. Die Gezeichneten ("The Stigmatized," 1918) established his reputation as the pre-eminent opera composer of his generation in Central Europe. "The Stigmatized" is the tragedy of an ugly, misshapen man who is deceived by those around him. Schreker came up with the story and wrote his own German language libretto. The scene is sixteenth-century Genoa, and the central character, the hunchbacked nobleman Alviano Salvago, has some of the traits of Shakespeare's Othello and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. LA Opera revived Die Gezeichneten in 2010. "The Stigmatized" was recorded live in performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, with James Conlon conducting the LA Opera Orchestra and Chorus. Tenor Robert Brubaker portrays Alviano. Bridge Records released Die Gezeichneten on three compact discs in 2013.