Franz Schmidt (December 22, 1874 – February 11, 1939) was an Austrian composer, cellist and pianist.
Contents |
Schmidt was born in Pressburg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (this is now Bratislava, Slovakia). His earliest teacher was his mother, an accomplished pianist, who gave him a systematic instruction in the keyboard works of J. S. Bach. He received a thorough foundation in theory from brother Felizian Moczik, the outstanding organist at the Franciscan church in Pressburg.[1] He studied piano briefly with Theodor Leschetizky, with whom he clashed. He moved to Vienna with his family in 1888, and studied at the Vienna Conservatory (composition with Robert Fuchs, cello with Ferdinand Hellmesberger and theory (the counterpoint class) with Anton Bruckner), graduating "with excellence" in 1896.
He beat 13 other applicants in obtaining a post as cellist with the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra, with whom he played, often under Mahler, until 1914. Mahler habitually had all the cello solos played by Schmidt, even though Friedrich Buxbaum was actually the principal cellist. Schmidt was also in demand as a chamber musician, playing in the string quartet led by Arnold Schoenberg’s close friend Oskar Adler, who also became Schmidt’s doctor: Schmidt and Schoenberg maintained cordial relations despite their vast differences in style. In 1914 he took up a professorship (in piano) at the Vienna Conservatory, which had been recently renamed to Imperial Academy of Music and the Performing Arts. In 1925 he became Director of the Academy, and from 1927 to 1931 Rector.
As teacher for piano, cello, counterpoint and composition at the Academy he trained numerous musicians, conductors and composers who later became famous. Among his best-known students are above all the pianist Friedrich Wührer and Alfred Rosé (son of Arnold Rosé, the legendary founder of the Rosé Quartet, Konzertmeister of the Vienna Philharmonic and brother-in-law of Gustav Mahler). Among the composers should be mentioned Theodor Berger, Marcel Rubin and Alfred Uhl. He received many tokens of the high esteem in which he was held, above all the Franz-Josef Order, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Vienna. [2]
Schmidt's private life was in stark contrast to the success of his distinguished professional career, and was overshadowed by tragedy. His first wife was, from 1919, confined in the Vienna mental hospital Am Steinhof, and three years after his death was murdered under the Nazi euthanasia laws. His daughter Emma died completely unexpectedly after the birth of her first child. Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after this, but achieved an artistic revival and resolution in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as "Requiem for my Daughter") and, especially, in his oratorio. His second marriage, to a successful young piano student, for the first time brought some desperately-needed stability into the private life of the artist, who was plagued by many serious health problems.[3]
Schmidt's worsening health forced his retirement from the Academy in early 1937. In the last year of his life Austria was brought into the German Reich by the Anschluss, and Schmidt was fêted by the Nazi authorities as the greatest living composer of the so-called Ostmark. He was given a commission to write a cantata entitled "The German Resurrection" which, after 1945, was taken by many as a reason to brand him as having been tainted by Nazi sympathy. However, Schmidt left this composition unfinished, and in summer and autumn 1938, a few months before his death, set it aside to devote himself to two other commissioned works for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein (brother of the philosopher Ludwig), for whom he had often composed: the Clarinet Quintet in A major and the solo Toccata in D minor. (Wittgenstein, being a Christian of Jewish descent, had been banned from public performance after the Anschluss and escaped to the U.S. in 1938.) Schmidt died on 11 February 1939.[4]
As a composer, Schmidt was slow to develop, but his reputation, at least in Austria, saw a steady growth from the late 1890s until his death in 1939. In his music, Schmidt continued to develop the Viennese classic-romantic traditions he inherited from Schubert, Brahms and his own master, Bruckner. He also takes forward the exotic ‘gypsy’ style of Liszt and Brahms. His works are monumental in form and firmly tonal in language, though quite often innovative in their designs and clearly open to some of the new developments in musical syntax initiated by Mahler and Schoenberg. Although Schmidt did not write a lot of chamber music, what he did write, in the opinion of such critics as Wilhelm Altmann, was important and of high quality. Although Schmidt's organ works may resemble others of the era in terms of length, complexity, and difficulty, they are forward-looking in being conceived for the smaller, clearer, classical-style instruments of the Orgelbewegung, which he advocated. Schmidt worked mainly in large forms, including four symphonies (1899, 1913, 1928 and 1933) and two operas: Notre Dame (1904-6) and Fredigundis (1916-21). A CD recording of Notre Dame has been available for many years, starring Dame Gwyneth Jones and James King.
However no really adequate recording has been made of the far more interesting Fredigundis, for which there was but one "unauthorized" release in the early 1980s on the Voce Label of an Austrian Radio broadcast of a 1979 Vienna performance under the direction of Ernst Märzendorfer. In it, among numerous "royal fanfares," (Fredigundis held the French throne in the 8th Century) are some of Schmidt's most wonderful and glorious pages.[5]
The New Grove states flatly that Fredigundis was a failure as Opera, but that is more likely attributable to the fact that Queen Fredigundis herself was anything but a "lovely lady," making the title character of Berg's Lulu seem like a princess in comparison. By the time Act III rolls around, things are pretty dismal and dark, and Schmidt is by this time harmonically on the threshold of Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln. Despite some possible faults with the libretto, this is musically a wonderful opera which deserves a modern and fair hearing. It is unfortunate that Marzendorfer's 1979 performance wasn't better recorded, because the performance-- offstage choruses and brass fanfares and all-- was (albeit with savage edits) veritably stupendous.
See article The book with seven seals
(oratorio)
Schmidt's crowning achievement was the oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln
(1935-37), a setting of passages from the Book of
Revelation. His choice of subject was prophetic: with hindsight
the work appears to foretell, in the most powerful terms, the
disasters that were shortly to be visited upon Europe in the Second
World War. Here his invention rises to a sustained pitch of genius.
A narrative upon the text of the oratorio was provided by the
composer.[6]
Schmidt's oratorio stands in the Austro-German tradition stretching back to the time of Bach and Handel. He was the first to write an oratorio fully on the subject of the Book of Revelation (as opposed to a Last Judgement in a Requiem like that of Verdi). Far from glorifying its subject, it is a mystical contemplation, a horrified warning, and a prayer for salvation. The premiere was held in Vienna on 15 June 1938, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Oswald Kabasta: the soloists were Rudolf Gerlach (John), Erika Rokyta, Enid Szantho, Anton Dermota, Josef von Manowarda and with Franz Schütz at the organ.
This work provided the only actual model for the fictional oratorio Apocalypsis cum Figuris described by Thomas Mann in his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus. Mann invests his fictional oratorio and its composer with the demonic conflicts in German society leading to the catastrophe of the Nazi ideology and the Second World War. That was indeed the context in which Schmidt's oratorio appeared, but his private character and artistic motivations (as distinct from the society in which they existed) are not to be construed, in reality or in sum, through the lens of Mann's literary formula, which was assembled from a very wide array of Germanic themes and personalities.
Schmidt is generally, if erroneously, regarded as a conservative composer (such labels rest upon yet-to-be-resolved aesthetic/stylistic arguments), but the rhythmic subtlety and harmonic complexity of much of his music belie this. His music is modern without being modernist, combining a reverence for the great Austro-German lineage of composers with very personal innovations in harmony and orchestration (showing an awareness of the output of composers such as Debussy and Ravel, whose piano music he was known greatly to admire, along with a knowledge of more recent composers in his own German-speaking realm, such as Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, etc.). The considerable technical accomplishment of his music ought to compel respect, but he seems to have fallen between two stools: his works are too complex for the conservatively-minded, yet too obviously traditional for the avant-garde (they are also notoriously difficult to perform). Since the 1970s his music has enjoyed a modest revival which looks set to continue as it is rediscovered and re-evaluated.
Schmidt's premiere of Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln was made much of by the Nazis (who had annexed Austria shortly before in the Anschluss), and Schmidt was seen (according to a report by Georg Tintner) to give the Nazi salute. His conductor Kabasta was apparently an enthusiastic Nazi who, being prohibited from conducting in 1946 during de-nazification, committed suicide. These facts long placed Schmidt's posthumous reputation under a cloud. His lifelong friend and colleague Oskar Adler, who fled the Nazis in 1938, wrote afterwards that Schmidt was never a Nazi and never anti-semitic but was extremely naïve about politics. Hans Keller gave similar endorsement. Regarding Schmidt's political naivety, Michael Steinberg, in his magisterial book, The Symphony, tells of Schmidt's recommending Variations on a Hebrew Theme by his student Israel Brandmann to a musical group associated with the proto-Nazi German National Party. Most of Schmidt's principal musical friends were Jews, and they benefited from his generosity.
Schmidt's last work, the cantata "German Resurrection," was composed to a Nazi text. As one of the most famous living Austrian composers, Schmidt was well-known to Hitler and received this commission after the Anschluss. He left it partially completed, to be completed later by Robert Wagner. Already seriously ill, Schmidt worked instead on other compositions such as a piano quintet. His failure to complete the cantata may be a further indication that he was not committed to the Nazi cause.
Operas
Oratorium
Cantata
Symphonies
Piano Concerti
Various Orchestral Works
Chamber music
Music for Trumpets
Music for Organ and Trumpet
Piano music
Organ works
   | Franz Schmidt String Quartet No.1 sound-bites and information about the work - Sheet Music & Books A to G |
| | Franz Schmidt String Quartet No.1 sound-bites and information about the work - Franz Schmidt String Quartet No.1 in A Major |
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
