Whereas the two previous CDs in this series show the stylistic pluralism in the works of one of the most interesting pupils from Schreker's Viennese composition class – Felix Petyrek: Piano Music 1915–1928 (vol.1, EDA 17) – and the extremely antithetical natures of three piano sonatas written nearly simultaneously in Schreker's Berlin composition class (vol.2, EDA 19), the present CD documents Schreker's "official" teaching, starting in 1912 at the Vienna Music Academy up to 1933, when National-Socialist racial fanaticism put a fateful end to his activities as composition teacher at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Beginning in 1932, Schreker saw himself the target of campaigns to degrade and deprive him of his rights, which were emotionally devastating for the man and musician who had been expressly summoned from Vienna to be the director of the Berlin Musikhochschule (College of Music). In December 1933 Schreker suffered a severe stroke that led to his death just two days before his fifty-sixth birthday, on 21 March 1934.

At the same time, for Schreker's pupils of Jewish descent, who had comprised a substantial portion of his Viennese and Berlin composition classes, the political situation in Germany meant an abrupt interruption of their successfully commenced careers, whose continuation in exile under altered economic, social, and artistic conditions was often possible only with the greatest difficulty. Wilhelm Grosz, one of Schreker's first pupils from his time in Vienna, as well as Berthold Goldschmidt, Schreker's pupil in Berlin, represent on this CD all those composers who were ostracized as "Jewish" and whose works, like those of their teacher, sank into oblivion for decades. After persecution by the National-Socialists and the subsequent decades of aesthetic exclusion as a result of a progressive dogma substantially influenced by Adorno  – which in Berthold Goldschmidt's opinion was an even more devastating experience – the 1980s finally brought a liberalization that also made possible the start of unprejudiced research into exiled musicians and their music. Thus Schreker's pupils Max Brand, Wilhelm Grosz, Karol Rathaus, and Ignace Strasfogel again gradually became known, at least to musicologists. Several performances and CD productions marked the incipient rediscovery, not that that could actually overcome the break in reception caused by the lost decades that had gone before. Only Berthold Goldschmidt, as the only survivor of the composer generation that was forced into exile, had the privilege of celebrating a virtually triumphal comeback, while still in the best of health and with revived creative power, in the 1990s.

For most of Schreker's non-Jewish pupils, too, the decades after the Second World War did not bring an unbroken, effortless continuation of that which had been possible before 1933. On the present CD, Zdenka Ticharich and Vladas Jakubėnas represent those composers of eastern European origin whose careers and reception were decisively overshadowed by the establishment of totalitarian regimes in their home countries. Zdenka Ticharich – in the 1920s and 30s a widely traveled pianist with unusual programs of the newest and most modern piano music, who was associated with renowned conductors and composers in musical collaborations, and, in addition, was portrayed by prominent artists of the most diverse schools – was increasingly forgotten not only in her home town, Budapest, during the course of the postwar decades; artistic and personal isolation marked the later years of a musician who, as her country's most important female composer, was practically ignored. The traces of her earlier activities fell into oblivion just as fast as the works of Vladas Jakubėnas in Europe, which he left while fleeing the invasion of Lithuania by the Red Army. From his arrival in Chicago in 1949 to his death in 1976, Jakubėnas developed a wide variety of musical activities that were largely connected with the cultural life of the exile Lithuanian community there. In Jakubėnas' home country, which he was never to see again, his name disappeared from the meanwhile sovietized musical life. In Europe the situation was extremely unfavorable for the reception of a composer from a small, newly eradicated Baltic state, whose music was far removed from the progress-obsessed dogmatisms of the postwar decades.

With their rather conservative, unpretentious stance, with their professed solidarity also to non-professional musicians as important recipients of their works, composers such as Alexander Ecklebe and Kurt Fiebig – who remained in Germany during the Nazi dictatorship, without placing their oeuvre in the service of the criminal regime – appeared almost anachronistic in a time that, after 1950, indulged in extremely complicated structures far removed from any effort toward comprehensibility as the ideal of a new, intellectualized music. With their turning away from a self-sufficing "l'art pour l'art", Ecklebe as well as Fiebig stand for an aesthetic trend that came into being around 1930, above all in the circle around Hindemith, after exploring the most diverse new musical forms of expression during the "Golden Twenties". Fiebig emphasized on the one hand his particular affinity for the music of Hindemith on various occasions; on the other hand, all his life he retained a feeling of esteem for and gratitude to his teacher Schreker, who had entrusted him with the preparation of the piano score of his last opera Der Schmied von Gent (The Smith of Ghent).

Franz Schreker as teacher: It is not yet possible to form a definitive, entirely clear picture from all the heterogeneous compositional paths that his pupils followed. Nearly all of his pupils testified to Schreker's liberalism in questions of aesthetics, his great tolerance toward individual stylistic positions even if they were completely contrary to his own. At the time of his greatest successes, Schreker was easily able to pave his pupils  way to the public; thanks to Schreker's influence their works were published by his Viennese publisher, Universal Edition: On this CD, Wilhelm Grosz and Berthold Goldschmidt stand for all the composers who thanks to Schreker's patronage enjoyed the benefit of being published by the then leading publishing house in the field of modern music. For the youngest generation of Schreker's pupils – documented here by Jakubėnas', Fiebig and Ecklebe – this sort of groundwork was not in the offing after Universal Edition's rejection in 1929 of Schreker's opera Christophorus resulted in a serious clouding of the long-standing editorial cooperation.

Like a sounding chronicle, the piano works presented here, which were written between 1920 and 1971, illuminate on the one hand the stylistic pluralism that particularly distinguished Schreker's composition class, and on the other hand, the development, during the course of Schreker's twenty-one years of "official" teaching activities, of three generations of pupils characterized by differing aesthetic premises. If the works of Wilhelm Grosz, like those of his fellow students in Vienna Felix Petyrek and Karol Rathaus, are still rooted in the late Romantic period, then with Berthold Goldschmidt, Zdenka Ticharich, and Jerzy Fitelberg a new, decidedly anti-Romantic and progress-oriented generation entered the scene in Berlin of the early and middle 1920s. Around 1930, yet another tendency could be seen to emerge in Schreker's class  – the period of the radical joy of experimentation appears to have blown over; achievements of the preceding years are integrated, in more moderate forms, as it were, into a more easily comprehensible musical language.

If the title of Wilhelm Grosz' Symphonic Variations op. 9 already calls to mind two important Romantic piano works – César Franck's work of the same name for piano and orchestra, and Robert Schumann's Symphonic Etudes for piano – Grosz fulfills the requirements of the designation "symphonic" by means of orchestrally conceived, yet genuinely pianistically realized piano writing that oscillates between opulent tonal splendor and filigree playfulness. Also strikingly symphonic is the formal disposition of the monumental half-hour-long work with which Grosz, in 1920, created a rather nostalgically colored cosmos of the most varied characters, a cosmos in which exoticisms and jazz influences are integrated in the most natural manner as a mirror of contemporary fashion trends. Thus it is easy to discern a four-movement overall structure that is based on the model of the Classical-Romantic symphony: first movement (theme – variation VI); second, slow movement (variation IX – variation XI, with preceding intermezzo section variations VII – VIII); third movement "Scherzo" (variation XII, variation XIII, variation XIIa); and fourth movement, Finale (variation XV, with preceding slow introduction variation XIV).

For the listener, the huge through-composed variation work conveys this large structure above all by means of surprising key changes that simultaneously announce new stylistic colors. Variation VII brings for the first time a shift from the main key of C-sharp Minor to D Minor – in a subtly modified self-quotation from the Trübes Lied (Gloomy Song), the first of the Five Poems from the Japanese Spring op. 3 (after Hans Bethge), Grosz transforms the solemn-powerful theme into a new scenery with a scent of East-Asian exoticism which is unapproachable and aimlessly circling around itself, so to speak. With the beginning of the actual slow movement (variation IX) the key changes to F Minor, whereby the exotic color remains dominant until it is superseded in variation X by a funeral march of great dynamic tension. Like an implosion, a tripartite "Scherzo" in F-sharp Minor (A B A') emerges in variation XII, whose sonorous magic in the trio-like variation XIII again evokes a reminiscence of Grosz' own Japanese Songs op. 3 – this time of the third song Das Mädchen auf der Brücke (The Girl on the Bridge). A slow transition and introduction section  – variation XIV preceding the Finale – takes recourse, in the sense of a large formal symmetry, to the D Minor of variation VII and leads into the heavily fissured Finale (variation XV), which for the first time is again anchored in the main key of C-sharp Minor. In contrast to the unity of the theme, the Finale proves itself very unstable in all its extremely different internal segments. It appears as if the nostalgic splendor of the theme finally breaks apart here in the reflection of a new epoch that is unmistakably to be heard in the brusque alternation of the at times grotesque episodes. In an unexpectedly interpolated waltz, Grosz pays homage equally to the city of his birth, Vienna, as well as to the idiom that was to increasingly influence his works in the years that followed: jazz. Thus many jazz-inspired harmonies reveal the "other" side of the musician Wilhelm Grosz, who with admirable matter-of-factness tread his own individual path between "serious" and "light" genres already in this early work.

As a brilliant pianist, Grosz knew all the subtleties of agogic flexibility and tonal differentiation that distinguish his own phonograph recordings, which are fascinating, expressive sound documents even from the distance of three-quarters of a century. In the Symphonic Variations op. 9, Grosz very precisely stipulated these minute nuances, the at times seemingly improvisational spontaneity of interpretation almost pedantically in countless multi-faceted verbal performance instructions. With this fixing of all performance-relevant parameters, Grosz presents himself as a thoroughly modern composer, as a master of the practice, who playfully, so to speak, has at his command the musical achievements of tradition as well as the newest stylistic forms of expression.

Grosz presented his Symphonic Variations, which had been premiered in Mannheim in 1921, at the first "Donaueschingen Chamber Music Performances for the Promotion of Contemporary Music" in the summer of that same year.

During his studies in Berlin, Berthold Goldschmidt met the Hungarian composer and pianist Zdenka Ticharich, who was enrolled in Schreker's composition class from October 1923 to July 1925. "An outstanding pianist and a very nice colleague... she was a very beautiful woman, and very stimulating in conversation," so characterized Berthold Goldschmidt, on 21 March 1995 in Giessen, the dedicatee of his Capriccio op. 11. On the same occasion, Goldschmidt told of the genesis of the tripartite (A B A') piece, which was composed in 1927: "She asked if I could write a short piece for her that she could play if needed as an encore in a concert, if it should ever come to an encore.... While writing this piece I kept it in mind that she was a very witty and capricious Hungarian, and this trait, I think, is reflected in the small piece." Indeed: Goldschmidt's Capriccio proves to be a pianistically effective character piece marked by distinctive, at times even grotesque-stumbling rhythms, a musical portrait of the dedicatee, as it were, in witty alternation between Hungarianisms and jazzy off-beats. Is this miniature, marked Allegro giocoso, with its F-Minor main section in 2/4 time, possibly supposed to be a parody of Schubert's Moment musical op. 94 no. 3, which is in the same key and meter? In the songlike middle section, Goldschmidt sketches a nearly opera-like scenario that seems like an anticipation of Stella's large aria ("Du bist wieder gesund, Geliebter!" / "You are healthy again, my beloved!") in the second act of Goldschmidt's opera Der gewaltige Hahnrei (The Magnificent Cuckold) (1929–30) – a similarity that Goldschmidt himself confirmed in a conversation with the author in 1993. With a wink of the eye, Goldschmidt's Capriccio dissolves into thin air like a ghost, and with weightless elegance after vehement, sudden interruptions sharpened by dissonances.

Zdenka Ticharich gave the premiere performance of Goldschmidt's Capriccio op. 11 in Vienna on 27 October 1928, together with that of her own Suite, which was composed that same year. Berthold Goldschmidt was able to attend neither Zdenka Ticharich's piano recital, nor her first Budapest performance of both works on 5 December 1928. Thus, sixty-seven years later, he followed the rediscovery of the Suite with great interest, indeed even with admiration for the work of his former fellow student. "I didn t know this piece!... I was completely overwhelmed by the virtuosity and originality of this piece," commented Berthold Goldschmidt on 21 March 1995 in Giessen on the occasion of his first encounter with the Praeludium from Zdenka Ticharich's Suite at a recital given by the author. It is hardly surprising that Berthold Goldschmidt thought highly of Zdenka Ticharich's piano writing – crystal-clear in its linear transparency, and harmonically quite sharply pointed – since it displays substantial similarities to Goldschmidt's own piano works. Noteworthy in Zdenka Ticharich's Suite is her individual reflection upon impulses that she, as a passionate performer of the newest French piano music of the time, received from her intensive occupation with the works of Debussy and Ravel, as well as with compositions by the "Groupe des Six". Traces of this occupation permeate all four movements, each with its own character and rhythmic conciseness being developed from the melodic-harmonic polarity of the two opening measures of the Praeludium (c–d flat–e flat/d–f–a). Thus the toccata-like Praeludium seems like a continuation of Debussy's Etudes; the melancholy waltz interpolation in the Scherzo-Valse sublimates in its aloofness, as it were, the archaism of many of Satie's dance movements. In its extreme reduction to two, at times to only a single voice, the Notturno moves on the verge of falling silent – Zdenka Ticharich sketches here an uncompromising contrast to the Romantic piano nocturne with its tonal refinement culminating in rich embellishments, and as a result shows in a witty, indeed radical manner the old-fashionedness of the meanwhile anachronistic genre. Like a grotesque-bizarre mirror of the late 1920s, the Finale sets off a virtuoso fireworks of extremely quickly changing colors that gives an idea of exactly those traits that Berthold Goldschmidt attributes musically to Ticharich in his Capriccio op. 11: "...that she was a very witty and capricious Hungarian." In her Suite, Zdenka Ticharich achieves within the smallest space a compositionally as well as pianistically fascinating synthesis of French, Hungarian, and, not least, also German – namely Berlin – influences, which she was able to fuse together by means of her strong artistic personality into her very own language. Zdenka Ticharich must have attached particular importance to her Suite – in any case, she chose to play this work at her American debut on 11 March 1929 in New York.

The contrast between Zdenka Ticharich's Suite and the nearly contemporaneous Two Tone-Pictures op. 2 (1926/27), by Vladas Jakubėnas could hardly be greater. The tonal magic of these miniatures, which largely stem from the spirit of the late-Romantic period, reflects on the one hand Jakubėnas' propinquity to the Russian piano aesthetics as it found expression in the works of early Scriabin as well as in Rachmaninoff and Dobrowen – Jakubėnas  studied in Riga until 1928 with Jāzeps Vītols, a pupil of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. On the other hand, the Legend, the second of the two pieces, gives in its oscillating harmonies and specific melodic structures an idea of the affinity to Schreker's works of the second decade of the twentieth century. "I heard many of your works already a number of years ago, and I always dreamed of being able to attend your master class. And the closer acquaintance with your operas has strengthened my conviction that your works are a lonely, shining spiritual island in the sea of postwar materialism. I do not consider it possible today for a musician who wants to be a musician not to regard your art with the greatest of interest and love."  – so wrote Jakubėnas on 9 March 1929 to Franz Schreker, in whose composition class he was enrolled from October 1928 to July 1932. The lasting influence made on Jakubėnas by the four years of study with Schreker in Berlin can be clearly seen by a comparison of the Rhapsody no. 1, written in 1936 in Kaunas, with the Tone-Pictures op. 2 of nearly ten years earlier: Besides the crystallization of a Lithuanian idiom, which was to remain decisive for Jakubėnas' works, it is above all the sharpened, often modally colored harmonies as well as the at times archaistic linearity that are the characteristic features of Jakubėnas' mature style. His Rhapsody no. 1, laid out in tripartite form (A B A'), reflects, as does the Rhapsody no. 2 of 1940, the newly won national identity of a musician whose homeland achieved political independence only in 1918. Yet, the young country of Lithuania was crushed already in 1944 under the occupation of the Red Army – Jakubėnas fled at first to Germany, until he could emigrate to Chicago in the autumn of 1949.

Kurt Fiebig's Prelude and Fugue for harpsichord or piano, as the edition published ca. 1949 by the Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle (Saale) is titled, reveals in the polyphonically strictly conceived Prelude distinct Baroque tendencies that are countered in the toccata-like Fugue by a grotesque-playful character. The humorous character of the Fugue as a contrast to a rather serious, solemnly striding Prelude is entirely typical of the preferences in Schreker's class – Ignace Strasfogel also liked to write fugal movements on erratic, witty themes and in this way to offset the traditional strictness of polyphonic composition by means of capricious-bizarre gestures and characteristics (cf. Strasfogel's Scherzo no. 1 for piano, the third movement of the Second Piano Sonata, the first movement of the First String Quartet, and the Preludio fugato). For Kurt Fiebig, the committed Protestant church musician, whose contrapuntal mastery is documented above all in his St. Mark's Passion, this pianistically brilliant Fugue may have been an enjoyable change from his everyday duties as choirmaster and organist. According to Angelika Fiebig-Dreyer, Hamburg, the executor of her father-in-law's musical estate, the premiere of the Prelude and Fugue was given by Carl Bittner on 13 March 1936 in the Haus der Deutschen Presse (House of the German Press) in Berlin.

With his Metamorphoses on a Theme by Franz Schreker, Alexander Ecklebe created in 1971 – at a time in which the music of his teacher had fallen almost completely into oblivion – a moving testimony of his close kinship to Schreker. As the theme of this variation work, which in the spirit of the Romantic tradition culminates in a fugue, Ecklebe selected the archaistic opening of Schreker's opera Der singende Teufel (The Singing Devil) with its evocation, as it were, of the world of the sixteenth century. It is certainly not a coincidence that Ecklebe, who studied with Schreker in 1929–30 and subsequently worked as Karl Kraus' piano accompanist, based his elegic-colored Metamorphoses on material that, removed from its own time, appears to belong to an epoch long past – material that is additionally reminiscent of a stage work by Schreker that after its premiere on 10 December 1928 hardly entered public consciousness.

Old-fashionedness in old-fashioned reflection: One has to have courage – and certainly also that independence from fashionable stylistic trends that distinguished most of Schreker's pupils – to reflect in 1971 upon the work of a doubly ostracized artist in a largely modal-tonal language. Already in the first variation, Ecklebe transforms Schre­ker's strictly polyphonic theme into slowly shimmering, oscillating tonal surfaces that in turn are reminiscent of Schreker's style during the second decade of the twentieth century, namely of the prelude to the Gezeichneten (The Branded) and the beginning of the Chamber Symphony. In Ecklebe's Metamorphoses, contrapuntal-transparent passages find themselves in constant alternation with episodes that evolve from an almost improvisational, genuinely pianistically felt harmonic progression.

Like most of Ecklebe's compositions, this homage to Schreker also remained unpublished. For the present recording, we had at our disposal a private printing of the manuscript, with hand-written emendations by Ecklebe, from the collection of his friend, the Upper-Silesian painter and poet Norbert Dolezich.

Special thanks are due to Thomas Gayda, who during my annual summer visits to Kleinwalsertal acquainted me, by means of numerous shellac discs, with pianist Wilhelm Grosz' uncommonly differentiated, highly virtuoso interpretations of his own works. Likewise, Angelika Fiebig-Dreyer conveyed to me in conversations and with many unpublished documents detailed insight into the life and work of her father-in-law Kurt Fiebig. Biographical sketches of and bibliographic references to the composers presented on this CD can be found in the documentary volume Franz Schrekers Schüler in Berlin, edited by Dietmar Schenk, Markus Böggemann, and Rainer Cadenbach, Schriften aus dem Archiv der Universität der Künste Berlin, vol. 8 (Berlin, 2005).

I dedicate this CD to Barbara Busch as a token of our common commitment for Berthold Goldschmidt, in memory of moving moments inseparably linked to Zdenka Ticharich's Suite, as a euphonious continuation of our unforgettably beautiful summer days in the homeland of Vladas Jakubėnas – and in grateful joy over the birth of Manuel, the youngest member of our family.

Kolja Lessing

Würzburg, February–April 2005