‘Franz Schreker, Bricoleur’

Description

Schreker’s operas are often dismissed as studies in brilliant orchestration with little harmonic structure or innovation, in line with their decadent plots that conjure fairytale worlds inhabited by kings and queens, magical instruments and tragic artist-lovers. This paper proposes a reconsideration of Schreker by examining his technique of harmonic “bricolage” in his most successful opera, Der Schatzgräber (1915-18).

Adorno was famously ambivalent about Schreker, criticizing his lack of “controlling energy.” (Adorno, 1992, p.142) However, Adorno’s complaint may well have been at odds with Schreker’s conception of harmonic narrative, which employed kaleidoscopic arrays of pitch structures. The paper introduces a reading of Claude Levi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage from The Savage Mind as a tool to explore Schreker’s dazzlingly confusing multiplicity of late tonal worlds. (Levi-Strauss, 1966) According to Levi-Strauss, the bricoleur uses “whatever is at hand” in order to make sense of a world of possibility where the available material dominates any project.

Like Rimsky-Korsakov, Schreker employs novel pitch collections to portray the fairytale aspects of Der Schatzgräber. However, pitch-collections are not exclusive to passages or characters, and Schreker’s reservoir of scale-types and sources of harmonic material – part of the bricoleur’s unrestrained fund of musical ideas – are blended as the need arises throughout the entire opera. He nonetheless uses these individual resources to build an integrated whole in which generalized narrative associations activate certain scale types. The paper will introduce associations such as: pentatonicism with humanity; whole-tone scales with fairy-tale castles; hexatonics with crowns; octatonics with lutes and gallows. These features are woven together in the diatonic-chromatic fabric of the opera.

The paper concludes with a consideration of the opera’s central character of the King’s Fool as the grand bricoleur of and within the opera, seizing opportunities as they arise with whatever (musical) tools are at his disposal. Not only is this mirrored in the thematic structure of the work, but it reveals Schreker himself as composer-bricoleur.

Period	7 Mar 2024
Held at	Society for Music Analysis Zoom Colloquium