Franz Schmidt (composer)
Unable to procure a teaching position for Schoenberg at the academy, Schmidt rehearsed his students in a performance of Pierrot Lunaire, Op.
Also a brilliant pianist, in 1914 Schmidt took up a professorship in piano at the Vienna Conservatory, which had been recently renamed Imperial Academy of Music and the Performing Arts.
As teacher of piano, cello and counterpoint and composition at the academy, Schmidt trained numerous instrumentalists, conductors, and composers who later achieved fame.
His first wife, Karoline Perssin (c. 1880–1943), was confined in the Vienna mental hospital Am Steinhof in 1919, and three years after his death was murdered under the Nazi euthanasia program.
Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after this, and achieved an artistic revival and resolution in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as "Requiem for my Daughter") and, especially, in his oratorio The Book with Seven Seals.
His second marriage in 1923, to a successful young piano student Margarethe Jirasek (1891–1964), for the first time brought some desperately needed stability into the private life of the artist, who was plagued by many serious health problems.
In the last year of his life Austria was brought into the German Reich by the Anschluss, and Schmidt was feted by the Nazi authorities as the greatest living composer of the so-called Ostmark.
His works are monumental in form and firmly tonal in language, though quite often innovative in their designs and clearly open to some of the new developments in musical syntax initiated by Mahler and Schoenberg.
Although Schmidt's organ works may resemble others of the era in terms of length, complexity, and difficulty, they are forward-looking in being conceived for the smaller, clearer, classical-style instruments of the Orgelbewegung, which he advocated.
No really adequate recording has been made of Schmidt's second and last opera Fredigundis, of which there has been but one "unauthorized" release in the early 1980s on the Voce label of an Austrian Radio broadcast of a 1979 Vienna performance under the direction of Ernst Märzendorfer.
Aside from numerous "royal fanfares" (Fredigundis held the French throne in the sixth century) the score contains some fine examples of Schmidt's transitional style between his earlier and later manner.
In many respects, Schmidt seldom ventured so far from traditional tonality again, and his third and final period (in the last decade-and-a-half of his life) was generally one of (at least partial) retrenchment, consolidation and the integration of the style of his opulently scored and melodious early compositions (the First Symphony, "Notre Dame") with elements of the overt experimentation seen in "Fredigundis", combined with an economy of utterance born of artistic maturity.
His choice of subject was prophetic: with hindsight the work appears to foretell, in the most powerful terms, the disasters that were shortly to be visited upon Europe in the Second World War.
He was one of relatively few composers to write an oratorio fully on the subject of the Book of Revelation (earlier works include Georg Philipp Telemann: Der Tag des Gerichts, Schneider: Das Weltgericht, Louis Spohr: Die letzten Dinge, Joachim Raff: Weltende, and Ralph Vaughan Williams: Sancta Civitas).
