In the three-part series “Franz Schreker’s master classes in Vienna and Berlin,” pianist, violinist, and tireless treasure hunter Kolja Lessing takes an in-depth look at...

In the three-part series “Franz Schreker’s master classes in Vienna and Berlin,” pianist, violinist, and tireless treasure hunter Kolja Lessing takes an in-depth look at the outstanding and multifaceted talents who emanated from the talent factory of Franz Schreker – the German-speaking world’s most important composition teacher of the 1910s and ’20s, alongside Busoni and Schoenberg. In 1912, the year of the spectacular world premiere of his opera Der Ferne Klang in Frankfurt, Schreker became the successor to his mentor Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Academy of Music. He soon gained recognition as an authority on progressive pedagogy. His circle of students in Vienna included such figures as Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, Artur Rodziński, Joseph Rosenstock, Felix Petyrek, Karol Rathaus, Wilhelm Grosz, and Max Brand. In 1920, at the pinnacle of his fame, Schreker was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule. Along with him went Krenek and Hába, followed by the likes of Wunderkind Ignace Strasfogel, Berthold Goldschmidt, Jerzy Fitelberg, and many others, as well as – rather exceptional for the time – the female students Grete von Zieritz and Zdenka Ticharich. Wilhelm Grosz, one of the earliest and most gifted students from Schreker’s time in Vienna, and Berthold Goldschmidt, Schreker’s student in Berlin, represent the large group of Schreker’s pupils of Jewish origins who were proscribed as “degenerate” during the Third Reich. Both emigrated to England. Zdenka Ticharich and Vladas Jakubėnas, on the other hand, represent the typical fate of Eastern European composers whose careers were overshadowed by the establishment of totalitarian systems in their homelands. Ecklebe and Fiebig remained in Germany during the Nazi dictatorship but without allowing their oeuvres to be used to serve the criminal regime. Avoiding a self-sufficing “art for art’s sake” attitude, they stand for an aesthetic movement that primarily arose from Hindemith’s milieu around 1930 (after the most disparate new forms of musical expression had been explored in the “Golden Twenties”).