I normally react disagreeably whenever recording companies issue vocal music without texts or translations. Franz Schreker’s Vom ewigen Leben (“Eternal Life”), however, is such a major discovery and is here performed so superbly that I can’t bring myself to be too severe. You will need the words, though: Schreker responds to them with such sensitivity that it would be frustrating to listen to these exquisite sounds without knowing what prompted them. Fortunately they are not hard to find. They are German translations of two passages from Walt Whitman, respectively the lines beginning “Roots and leaves themselves alone” (the 12th poem in Calamus) and the sixth section (“A child said, ‘What is the grass?’”) of the Song of Myself. Four lines from the latter (the ones about “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff”) are sensibly omitted. Together they make a beautiful and very moving short cantata on the cycle of nature and the endlessness of life. Schreker’s ample lyricism and rich orchestral palette are both here modified towards a more sober beauty and subtly sensitive word-setting. It is a ravishingly lovely score, finely sung and superbly played.
The three Preludes to Irrelohe are richly romantic, more sumptuously scored than Vom ewigen Leben, with big, striking gestures and melodic writing of warm expressiveness. The Four Little Pieces are much odder, but decidedly intriguing. They were originally written as mood pieces which Schreker hoped (vainly) might be used as film music. They are of interest because they show how conscious of his musical environment this late romantic was: the first of them is as lyrical as one would expect from him, but it is a lyricism that is at least aware of Schoenberg, while the strongly rhythmic second piece sounds like a gesture towards Prokofiev. The earnest third movement and the memorably gracious middle section of the fourth are more recognizable Schreker.
And so, with a vengeance, is the vast and pile-driving Vorspiel, 24 minutes long, which appears to have been drafted as the overture to Schreker’s last, unfinished opera Memnon, but in its present form seems to incorporate the opera’s final scene as well. It is richly eventful, stuffed with resourcefully developed themes and huge climaxes, one or two of which verge on the pompous or the cinematic. But the tranquil, rather Straussian epilogue is very fine, and a performance as wholehearted as this one, an enthusiastic but sensitive and watchful conductor leading a fine orchestra that clearly relishes the almost impossible richness and abundance of this music, makes even the Vorspiel’s excesses easy to enjoy. Vom ewigen Leben, though, stands out as a work of major importance and the three Preludes to Irrelohe will tempt many listeners towards that and Schreker’s other operas. Urgently recommended.MEO