Biography
The Austrian composer Emil von Reznicek reached his eighties while remaining responsive to shifting musical currents. Only World War II interrupted his professional trajectory, even as his body of work encompassed Wagnerian late Romanticism, neoclassicism, and pieces shaped by jazz. Aside from the opera Donna Diana (1894), he remained largely overlooked, though his music has undergone limited revivals during the twenty-first century.
Emil Nikolaus Joseph, Freiherr von Reznicek came into the world on May 4, 1860, in Vienna, bearing noble Czech and Romanian ancestry. His grandfather, a military trumpeter, maintained ties with both Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner. Reznicek pursued musical studies first in Graz and subsequently in Leipzig under Carl Reinecke. He completed an apprenticeship conducting at assorted German theaters before relocating to Prague in 1887, where he directed a military band and began the first of fourteen operas; Donna Diana, the fourth, proved his most successful stage work. In 1902 he took up residence in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg and remained there for the rest of his life. His output included five symphonies, tone poems that formed a trilogy—Schlemihl (1912), Der Sieger (1913), and the lost Frieden (Eine Vision) of 1914—incidental music such as the set for Strindberg’s A Dream Play along with further stage pieces, six string quartets and additional chamber music, piano works, songs that reflected certain leftist sympathies, choral compositions, and miscellaneous other scores. Early pieces showed strong Wagnerian influence, yet later ones explored contemporary idioms ranging from bitonality to jazz. The Karneval-Suite im alten Stil (1932) adopted a neo-Baroque manner. Performances faced official discouragement, and authorities confiscated and destroyed several unpublished manuscripts. Seeking protection, he aligned himself with the circle around Richard Strauss, an association that later tarnished his reputation when postwar accusations labeled him a Nazi sympathizer. Reznicek died in Berlin on August 2, 1945.
Emil Nikolaus Joseph, Freiherr von Reznicek came into the world on May 4, 1860, in Vienna, bearing noble Czech and Romanian ancestry. His grandfather, a military trumpeter, maintained ties with both Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner. Reznicek pursued musical studies first in Graz and subsequently in Leipzig under Carl Reinecke. He completed an apprenticeship conducting at assorted German theaters before relocating to Prague in 1887, where he directed a military band and began the first of fourteen operas; Donna Diana, the fourth, proved his most successful stage work. In 1902 he took up residence in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg and remained there for the rest of his life. His output included five symphonies, tone poems that formed a trilogy—Schlemihl (1912), Der Sieger (1913), and the lost Frieden (Eine Vision) of 1914—incidental music such as the set for Strindberg’s A Dream Play along with further stage pieces, six string quartets and additional chamber music, piano works, songs that reflected certain leftist sympathies, choral compositions, and miscellaneous other scores. Early pieces showed strong Wagnerian influence, yet later ones explored contemporary idioms ranging from bitonality to jazz. The Karneval-Suite im alten Stil (1932) adopted a neo-Baroque manner. Performances faced official discouragement, and authorities confiscated and destroyed several unpublished manuscripts. Seeking protection, he aligned himself with the circle around Richard Strauss, an association that later tarnished his reputation when postwar accusations labeled him a Nazi sympathizer. Reznicek died in Berlin on August 2, 1945.
Albums
