Franz Schreker – Chamber Symphony (1916)

I don’t get this piece.  I mean, I hear the recurring material, I understand that it’s basically Mahler exaggerated to the point of absurdity, plus maybe a little Debussy — but it doesn’t make dramatic sense to me.  There’s always something new happening, but there’s no sense of intense forward motion as there is in that other famous Viennese chamber symphony, Schoenberg’s (1906).  Ideas appear and then are gone;  climaxes come out of nowhere and dissolve back into inchoate texture-goo.  There are some beautiful timbres, particularly the eerie flute-harp-celesta-harmonium-piano-strings texture that opens the piece and the oboe-and-harmonium canon in the scherzo sections — but after a while my ear gets worn out by the constant novelty.  I can’t orient myself harmonically at all;  it’s like listening to a speaker who constantly goes off on tangents and only rarely remembers to return tothe original point.   I like the concept of a stream-of-consciousness piece — hell, I’ve written some myself — but when the overarching structure is barely audible, the style is lush, late-Romantic and constantly boiling over, and the piece is 25 minutes long, the end result is that after a while I get lost and also start feeling a little queasy.  Actually, I had the same reaction last time I tried to listen to Mahler’s Sixth (1904):  it was just too much of a roller coaster for my taste.  Let me put it this way:  I don’t know all the Mahler symphonies, but of the ones I do, my favorite by a long shot is the Fourth (1901).  Late Romanticism has never come naturally to me, and I tend to like it best with a heavy dose of classicism (Brahms) or modernism (early Schoenberg) mixed in.

I’m going to give this another couple of listens to see if things start to click, though.